We saw the lights

“Marfa Lights”

    ALPINE – Have you ever heard of the Marfa Lights? Strange lights dancing around on the horizon outside of Marfa, Texas? Have you heard of those things?

    Well, Kay and I decided to go on quest to see the Marflites. That’s the way they’re supposed to be pronounced. Real fast and run together. I made that up, ‘cause I like the sound. -- Marflites.

    Few people I’ve talked to have ever heard of the Marfa Lights. And, that’s not entirely because of my pronunciation. I don’t remember when and how I learned about ‘em, but ever since I did, I’ve wanted to see ‘em.

That’s why Kay and I are here in Alpine. Alpine is only about 30 miles east of Marfa and it’s a little more accommodating. Not only that, but Amtrak from Houston makes a stop here. Try to figure.

    It’s almost 600 miles from Houston to Alpine. That’s about 12 hours by car and 16 by train. It would’ve been 13 by train, but we had a three-hour stopover in San Antonio. I don’t know why. I’m not even sure the engineer knows. 

    The stopover is an inconvenience, but not nearly as big an inconvenience as me having to drive the distance to Alpine. The train trip was a fairly decent experience. Nothing I’d care to revisit in the next couple of years, but decent.

    One good thing about it was the fact that we met a charming young couple returning to their home in Alpine. Tony and Brandy had ridden the rails before. They adopted us and kept us informed about information that the RR people didn’t care to share.

    I had no idea how the railcar ended up hooked to the back of us. Starting off we were the last car. Tony said they attached it during our stopover in San Antonio. I didn’t know that ‘cause Kay gave me a sleeping pill as soon as we got to SA. She thought I was getting a little antsy. Kay can tell stuff like that.

    Tony also told me that there are no Marfa Lights. He was a Marflite pooh pooher. He said he’d been to the place five times and never saw anything. He said you had to be either drunk or nuts to see ‘em. Brandy believed in the lights because some members of her family had seen ‘em. Tony apparently didn’t respect his in-laws all that much. That didn’t bother me.

I didn’t let Tony’s disbelief dampen my spirits. After checking into our motel in Alpine, we did the regular touristy stuff, just biding our time until nightfall. And fall it eventually did.

I don’t know if you knew this, but it gets dark much later out here than it does back home. That’s because the night still has 600 miles to go after it leaves Montgomery County before it reaches Alpine.

The minute the dark arrived, we headed out in our rented Ford Focus to the observation point just a few miles east of Marfa. When we got there we experienced near absolute dark. We had to feel our way across some thorny terrain on our way to the concrete observation deck. We would’ve taken the trail had we been able to see it.

There were about four other people on the deck when we got there. One lady said, “There’s one to the left. Oh, and there’s another one straight ahead.” I figured she was drunk. Kay and I stared into the dark, and in just a few seconds we saw ‘em.

Tony and Brandy lived minutes from the place, yet never saw ‘em. We were there for ten minutes and we saw ‘em. Just as weird as they could be. You’d see a light bobbing up and down and side to side. All of a

Observation area

sudden it’d turn into two lights. One would grow dim and go out, while the other moved over and married another light.

They were mostly white, but we saw a few red and one green one. Kay tried to take a picture, but it was too dark. All the while, I was thinking about how sightings of the Marfa Lights have been reported for at least a couple of centuries, yet no one has come up with an explanation. Only theories.   

Tomorrow we’re going into the town of Marfa. I promised Jill I’d get her a souvenir with “Marfa Lights” written on it. I had to first tell her what they were. 

And, tomorrow night, we’re going to the McDonald observatory outside of Fort Davis. They’re having a star party. I’ve never been to a star party. I’m not sure what we’ll do, but I’m pretty sure we’ll do it in the dark.

Hey, it doesn’t really matter what else we get to see and do before our train trip home. After you’ve seen the Marflites, everything else is gravy. I’ll let you know about some of the gravy… next time.

END

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