In the 1920s, due to the newfound accessibility of cars, long-distance driving became an option for Americans looking to travel. Suddenly, more people were careening down long highways, bored, with nothing to do but look out the window, and entrepreneurs got to work, building roadside structures constructed in fantastical shapes: restaurants that looked like hats, water towers shaped like teacups, souvenir shops inside of a dinosaur’s belly, and more. There’s a surreality to elongated car travel—punch-drunk exhaustion lends itself to odd visions, and it feels perfectly natural to say why yes, of course, let’s stop and eat inside of this goose.

There are roadside attractions that fall into the category of “The World’s Largest”: the world’s largest chair, duck, teapot, ball of stamps, ball of twine, etc. A friend recently sent me a photo of herself with my personal favorite roadside attraction: The Biggest Pistachio, located in Alamogordo, New Mexico. “Found you on the road,” she wrote, “a big nut.”

Other roadside attractions fall in the paranormal or illusory vein—the famed Mystery Spot near Santa Cruz, California, a tilted house fit for a witch. And then there are the sci-fi curiosities, like The Thing? along I-10 in Arizona—marked by what appears to be upwards of 200 billboards running from Tucson to El Paso, beckoning you into a small museum to see a small, dusty, supposedly extra terrestrial body.

The Marfa Lights Viewing Center is distinct in that it doesn’t fit cleanly into the usual roadside attraction categories; it is neither the “world’s largest” or a paranormal Thing-like spectacle. Unlike the other photogenic roadside stops you’ll find on your way to Marfa—a lone Prada store set against the vast desert or the large painted wooden cutouts of actors from the movie _Giant—_the Marfa Lights Viewing Center is entirely unassuming. Marked by a standard highway sign, the center is so simple, low-slung, and earthy, that you could drive right past it if you’re not paying attention. It’s a raised structure rendered in shades of tan, and is surrounded by short red-rock walls, blending into the desert. 

From the road, the center’s most prominent feature is a small cylindrical building—about the size of a castle turret—dotted with a neat row of square windows. These are the bathrooms. The actual lights viewing area consists of a deck shaded by slatted roofing, with a few sets of tourist binoculars on tall metal poles, trained on the landscape beyond, called Mitchell Flat—an expanse of dry, brushy grasses, branches, tumbleweeds, discarded Dairy Queen cups and plants that look like they don’t want to be touched. 

Standing on the deck feels like being at the edge of an empty picture frame, or on a stage upon which a show might be performed—or might not be, depending on your luck. The center is a waiting room for those hoping for an appointment with strange and illusive Marfa lights, which makes it more like an open-air church than a traditional roadside attraction.  

The Marfa Lights go by many names: mystery lights, strange lights, weird lights, ghost lights, or, for the cynics among us, “car lights.” According to those who’ve seen the lights, they’re roughly the size of basketballs, appearing in shades of white, blue, yellow, and sometimes red, hovering, merging, twinkling, splitting, flickering, floating, or skittering across Mitchell Flat in the dark.

According to the Texas State Historical Association, the lights were first spotted in 1883, long before there were headlights out in West Texas. A young cowhand named Robert Reed Ellison saw a faraway flicker of light while he was driving cattle between Marfa and the neighboring town of Alpine. He thought it may have been an Apache campfire in the distance. He spoke about this with other settlers, and it turned out many of them had spotted the distant shimmer too, but when they had investigated, there was no campsite to be found. 

There are other myths that lean more towards the supernatural: the lights are the spirits of Apache warriors killed by white settlers, delivered back to their beloved land in the afterlife. Or, in line with other Southwestern tales of atomic testing, the lights might be remnants of laser fusion weapons experiments gone awry—tests which knocked holes into space. They say the holes attract the lost—people who have disappeared in the area are thought to have fallen through them into some liminal zone, floating forever in another dimension.

For a while, the monument to the Marfa Lights was just a plaque on the side of the road, a viewing “area” where guests could stop and gaze out at Mitchell Flat and decide what was real or not. It was an eighth grade class that first suggested the creation of a viewing center. At the Marfa Museum, on East San Antonio, they have the original documents printed in big font on computer paper, worn thin and kept in a big blue bin with a host of newspaper clippings and blueprints from the Texas Department of Transportation. A giant laminated poster made by the class reads, “The M in Marfa stands for mystery.”

“Our conceptual plan for the center would blend into the native rangeland and not take away from the landscape,” the students wrote to the congressman overseeing the project. “It is not our intention to distract in any way from our Marfa highlands.” 

The center, as such, has been absorbed into the ecosystem of this region. It’s weathered in the way that many West Texas things are—sunbleached, dry, and dusty—but somehow largely unchanged, eternally sturdy, as much a regular fixture as the mountains out in the distance. The fluorescent bathroom lights are always on. The binoculars never weather. Even a laminated poster, clinging to a wall, remains the same amount of faded and crimped every time I see it. In its austere design philosophy, the Marfa Lights Viewing Center understands something about the desert and the road itself—what might look like “nothing,” is, in fact, something.

In the early aughts, a group of students came out to the center with traffic volume-monitoring equipment, video cameras, binoculars, and chase cars to solve the mystery of the lights. After extensive testing, the students determined the lights were just the headlights of faraway vehicles. Despite that tangible proof, most people seem to disagree—they think the lights are an atmospheric disturbance_, Fata Morgana_, orbs of gas and moonbeams. Others think they’re supernatural—ghosts or UFO communications from the beyond. Ultimately, no one can say exactly what they are, just that they are_._ 

“Have you seen the Marfa Lights?” asked Paul. I was 21 when I first came out to Marfa, Texas; I didn’t know who I was but I knew I liked Paul, a ranch hand who laid irrigation pipe and herded cattle. He was sweet with the cows, cooing and clicking, guiding them almost messianically, with large callused hands and a low whistle. He was the romantic ideal of the Texas Man, fit with a giant grin, crinkled eyes, and dirty hands. He looked like a charity calendar for a local fire department, and to me, a person who’d tumbled out of a liberal arts college of delicate waif boys, paramours with dark circles and rubber band limbs, Paul looked like what I’ll forever deem a Real Man, even though he was just a few years older than me. 

Marfa sits at an altitude of 4,685 feet. It’s physically brighter where we are, so close to the sun that every inch of land is illuminated to its ends. We don’t have any movie theaters here, no box-like clubs or bars, no dark spaces where you can go to reliably disappear. Head to any restaurant in town and you’re sure to run into someone you know at the next table. My morbid joke is that walking into a bar in Marfa is like walking into your own funeral— you’ll see everyone you’ve ever known in your entire life, and it feels like they’re all there to see you. The viewing center, a notorious tourist spot, is perhaps the most private place in town.

At the Marfa Lights Viewing Center, Paul held my hand. The center was empty other than a lone traveler asleep on a bench, backlit by the fluorescent light streaming from the bathroom. We walked out onto the deck. I looked through the binoculars. 

“Anything?” he asked. 

“Nothing,” I said. The metal was cool against my palms. He placed his hands on mine, and spun me around. He was my first kiss at the Marfa Lights Viewing Center.

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My mom grew up in Brooklyn and remembers the first time she saw the West. She recalls the landscape of California as the film strips from the 70s depict it: high contrast, grainy, warm, and otherworldly. Tanned people in tan places, hip bones jutting out of bikinis, sharp and honed like sheathed knives. Back in her neighborhood, everyone was pale and nature was an occasion. Here, the people were just outside, living, and they looked better for it. She says it felt like Mars. 

When I was younger, she kept a stack of national park books on her bedside table. She’d flip through them before going to bed, as if trying to train her dreams. When I’d go to say goodnight, I’d usually find her in the middle of a new place, eyes on a waterfall or an unfathomable tree, but the most well-worn pages in her books were the craggy dry places: Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Zion, and the Grand Canyon. 

We became a road trip family, due to the dual benefits of cost and accessibility. My mom spearheaded every trip, my dad and my brother and I singing show tunes in the car, an annoying chorus of hanger-ons, trilling as she whipped out the map to make sure we’d turned onto the right road. Thanks to her, I developed an early love of the desert—Joshua Tree with its defiant bulky life forms spiking out of the earth; Death Valley, its warning of a name, and drives which took us to miles of crystalline salt flats and up along the ridges of muted pastel peaks. You learn quickly that your voice abstracts to nothing, that sound itself is some kind of weird construct, and that wind will break you apart. 

The town of Marfa in Far West Texas is beautiful like that. I moved here for a reporting job at the local radio station, a job for which I drive miles to talk to people on wide stretches of land about their lives and desires, package them into sound waves, and send those transmissions into some unspecified beyond. 

One afternoon, I found myself at the center of a 20,000 acre ranch, having driven hours through the starkness of the Big Bend to get there. Microphone in hand, I stood in a clearing with two strangers, gazing upon rows of hay bales, quiet, muted green, and still in the shadow of a nearby hill. 

I was there to report on a crop of luxury ranch short-term rentals—gigantic, historic houses in the middle of nowhere, rented out to guests for upwards of $4,000 a night. The story pitch went something like this: in the midst of a great Western drought, where the land gives us less and less, ranchers can’t rely on their cattle operations alone. The dream of ranching out in Far West Texas, so-called “mythic Texas” where the land is untouched, has died. These true cowboys have to diversify their portfolio, and in doing so, some have turned to selling a fantasy version of their own lives—renting out their homes to visitors, giving tours of their lands, providing hunting expeditions, etc. as they continue backbreaking cattle operations on the other side of the property. 

The owner of the company hadn’t understood the pitch. And I guess I hadn’t understood the company. I ended up on a rich man’s ranch with a small hay bale operation used primarily as a tax write-off. The hay yield was laughable. The question of whether or not that was the story, or if there even was a story, was answered immediately: no.

I stood in that field with the two ranch managers, one who acted as a kind of concierge and groundskeeper, toting a heavily-ornamented Stanley thermos everywhere she went, and the other was her husband, who was in charge of the hay. Ironically, they’d come to West Texas to raise cattle. They’d both gone to school for it, chased the dream for a couple of years, then found themselves working in hospitality instead, albeit a strange version of it. The ranch was hardly a bustling hotel. It was an off day, and no one but us and the gardeners were on the property. We hopped in the truck to go see the hay—gigantic spools at the base of a hill, buried within the spill of the ranch’s acreage. From our tucked-away position, you couldn’t even hear the roar of the mower eating away at the main house lawn. 

“What’s it like to work in a place this quiet?” I asked. “Does it ever feel lonely?” 

“I don’t even think about it anymore,” he said. “But I guess I feel lucky. To be around this much beauty.”

I asked them if they still wanted to raise cattle. They told me that they still hang onto the dream. 

The man pointed over the hill. “We could run cattle up there. I could see it happening.” 

In the best of times, loneliness can breed aspirational thinking. Or maybe those are just hallucinations, I don’t know. Set against a cloudless West Texas sky, it makes sense that life could be beautiful, even when you don’t get what you want. These desires are Marfa Lights in their own way—flickering visions that may or may not exist.

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In some tales, the Marfa Lights are an active presence: the orbs follow people at night; they dance around cattle; they chase cars down the highway, frightening drivers. 

Joe Bunton, a former Sheriff, once said he considered the Marfa Ghost Lights to be his best friends. A Mrs. W.T. Giddens once told a reporter about an experience her father had in the early 1900s. He was caught in a blizzard when the lights appeared, and he was sure he was going to die. The lights spoke to him and told him he was going in the wrong direction. They told him he would die if he did not follow them, Giddens recounted. With his last bit of strength, he followed the lights into a small cave and was sheltered with enough warmth to live through the night. 

“I’ve seen the Marfa Lights and They’ve seen me,” reads an unsettling and perfect tee shirt, tucked in the blue bin at the Marfa Museum. It alludes to their reciprocity—the lights are not passive. They’re staring right back. Maybe they’re stunned by what they see. 

I often think about a scene in the movie Contact that captures the exchange of messages in the desert. The movie stars Jodie Foster as a woman who believes that she’s made contact with alien life in another universe. Foster dons headphones and sits on the hood of her car before a field of gigantic satellites, their dishes moving in unison like synchronized swimmers. She’s sitting at a real location, another roadside attraction called “The Very Large Array”—a telescope facility outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

These giant instruments, with their 82 feet antennae, funnel their data into Foster’s headphones (coincidentally, the same ones I use at work every day at the radio station), condensing the large and unknowable world of the stars into one small frequency. Foster sits in contemplation as the satellite dishes twist and turn, catching radio waves like disembodied elephant ears. She hears nothing, nothing, nothing, and more nothing.

It’s only that night in the dark, after falling asleep beside the satellites, that she wakes to something crackling and sharp, a tone, a frequency, a sound that wasn’t there before, speaking directly to her.

That is the best representation of the desert I’ve seen thus far—the experience of grand intervention, of waking up in your small house in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, the deep knowing, in your bones, that something within your experience is speaking to you. There’s a way in which every theory combined is true: living in the desert is falling through a hole. You disappear out here, you follow the voices towards some dream, you commune with that dream, and then one day, you wake up and it’s been years on a different planet.

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“Have you seen the Marfa Lights?” I asked Dan. 

“Not yet,” he said.

I’d met Dan the summer before. He was a botanist, and the first time I’d slept at his place, I’d opened the shower door to find it was filled with succulents, tall green stems leaning against the tile, a bouquet of mysterious orchids tucked into the door handle. Dan had ceded his shower to nature. It was odd. I loved him instantly. 

Dan did not just love plants more than he loved showering—he loved them more than life itself. Out in the desert, an hour-long hike would spin into four. He’d kneel down in the dirt to examine every bloom, each one remarkable for its location, for its unusual growths, for growing in the desert at all. I found myself jealous of the plants and Dan’s endless empathy for them. He turned pale when he stepped on a bluebonnet, cried when his cactus died in a freeze, and went catatonic on the road south, eyes glassy as he gazed over reams of plants dried to bony husks. 

That night, many cars were parked in the small lots flanking the center. The viewing center was crowded with spring breakers—frat bros in backwards caps, a group of girls in matching neon green tank tops and cutoffs, an older couple with binoculars around their necks. The vibrant activity felt at odds with the neutrality of the viewing center. Like a corporate hotel room, it maintains its steady, agreeable personality regardless of who’s standing on it. Dan stopped on the steps for a full ten minutes to look at a goldenrod. I stood with my arms crossed. 

We walked onto the deck, the slatted roof casting long, striped shadows across it. We approached the binoculars at the edge, and looked out. We didn’t see anything, and stepped away.

We went back to the car before we had a chance to see the lights. He’s far away and in some other world of plants now. I’m taking the same hikes we took, going to the same bars we went to together, remembering over and over again the things he told me about the desert, about the ways in which creatures out here protect themselves with spines and poison, about how all they ever want to do is live a little longer in the face of that which wants to destroy them.

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When people come to town, I almost never recommend they go see the Marfa Lights, but when a visitor named John asked me if I’d go see them, I said yes. We were on a dinner date. I liked him. He was staying with a man I knew. It was summer, and the world felt easy. Loosened, somehow. He was sort of dumb, but he wasn’t there to stay and I liked his sunburnt skin. We sat on the viewing center ledge and drank wine out of jars. We looked out at the vast nothing, the cars passing, a plane flying low overhead. No lights. 

“Have you been out here before?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“And you’ve never seen them?” 

If you believe hard enough in something, you will see it. John and I were quiet, squinting out at the distance. We walked to the edge of the deck and sat on the wall, facing the Mitchell Flat. The drop from the wall to the dusty ground was 10 feet or so. Our legs dangled. The moon was new that night, making the dark sky as dark as it could be. Dark enough that I couldn’t see his face move towards mine. I just felt it, suddenly, there.

The viewing center cycled through states of filled and unfilled—people milling in, then out, unfurling camping chairs to sit and stay a while, folding them back up. Motors turning on and off, cars braking and parking, beers opening, then tossed in the bin. We kissed like none of it mattered, like we couldn’t hear any of it, like we were alone. I wanted to crawl inside of him. We did not see the lights. 

We ambled back to the car and dawn started to break over the east. John looked at me as he put the key into his car, smiling, pulling towards the mouth of the driveway. He didn’t stop looking at me as he braked, reached over, and clasped his hand around my neck. The shift was so quick, but it was clear. Sharp. Still, I couldn’t comprehend his hand. It felt like a dare, or a challenge. His eyes were dark holes knocked into his sockets, and they held this intensity, something I innately understood as a living, breathing, animal. He was locked into the fact of my aliveness, and the accompanying fact that he could change that with enough force. He let go and said he’d like to see me again, his eyes flattening. As if it never happened. 

I had been lulled into the romance of it. That’s the flipside of the desert, I think, how it convolutes reality: a kind of safety, a seduction into some romantic magic, its ephemerality. 

◆

There’s a BBC special about the Marfa Lights featuring a local historian, his whistling voice floating over time-lapse footage of Mitchell Flat at night, addressing the question of the lights’ existence: “I believe they are there,” says the historian. “Or I believe something is there.”

I emailed the historian after seeing the special, and he wrote back within the day:

Frankly, I didn’t think it was very good and I never thought the BBC would buy it. To me there are a lot of things that are more interesting about Marfa than the Marfa Lights.

Having never seen them, I have to agree. But the lights are a stand-in for what is interesting. Their folksy mythos, the way that they are everything and nothing all at once. They are the desert in the most distilled sense, and I am still here. With them. And I cannot tell you why. 

I have always thought of myself as an adventurer, passing through places, knitting the people I’ve collected into the large quilt of my life, their specific ways of seeing this place now lodged somewhere in mine. I fell in love with each person I kissed at the center. I mention them to make a point about the magic of emptiness and promise, how in the desert you’re almost always looking out at nothing, but if you view that nothing with some kind of belief, some romance, it transforms.

But as I sit in my house, so quiet I can hear the blood in my body, the sunset painting the sky a deep, pink hue, I can only think that all of these men are gone and I am still here. I continue, continue, and continue, to still be here. It seems I am in wait, Jodie Foster on the side of the road, letting the world, and the world beyond the world, whisper into my ears. I wonder sometimes if I am the viewing center, just a widened shoulder on the road that people visit and leave. I wonder what I am looking for. 

I think about how much of the world has been engineered to make us think it’s ours. Roads outfitted with attractions so we won’t get bored, and bathrooms so that we can pee into a toilet simulacrum instead of squatting in the dirt. Things that reinforce over and over again that this land is our land when it is so distinctly not ours. It belongs to something else. 

There are roadside attractions that mark themselves, and then there are spots on the map that don’t have names. The lone oak tree down a West Texas ranch road where you can find shade for a moment if you want it, or the broken barrier on Mulholland Drive where I saw my first coroner. The place in Arizona where I saw a memorial in honor of an unknown someone (I still look for flowers when I pass by the spot). The bolt of wire fence off I-10 by Lobo where a boy pulled over the car so we could have sex on the gravel in a teary, ecstatic mess, knowing it would be one of the last times we’d ever see each other. After we finished, we rode into town silently. I fingered the asphalt divots stamped into the backs of my thighs, hanging on to the proof, which felt somehow important. Over the hour drive, I felt them rebound, flatten out again until they were smooth, as if the roadside tryst had never happened. But I know it did, and whenever I drive out of Marfa, I imagine the day has waned, that it’s dark, that there are two people who might love each other sprawled beneath the stars. 

It’s hard to commemorate something ephemeral, something that never really had a name to begin with. When love is fleeting and out in the middle of nowhere—small and enormous all at once, then gone, out of my life entirely, one half with me and one half with the person who left, I don’t know how to make it feel entirely real. The Marfa Lights Viewing Center has become a monument to life in the desert as much one to the lights—a place that can hold hope and promise, and also, sometimes, disappoint. 

One night, I drove out to the Marfa Lights Viewing Center alone. I sat on the ledge and watched people cycle through it all—the delight, the disappointment, the reality, the impatience, the desperation, the hope, the wonder. 

The Marfa Lights, like Marfa and the desert itself, is a big Rorschach test. What you see is what you get. But that “sight” reflects the beliefs of the seer. The desert has a changeling effect, transforming lights into magic, desert into space, visitors into lovers, me into something apart from what I actually am.