Looking into the Sun...and Marfa's Lights

Mexican artist, across the Rio Grande, awaits an opportune time to cross the Rio Grande and pick up his money for selling artwork to visitors on the U.S. side. 

The entrepreneurial spirit is strong and it crosses international borders. When you walk the river path alongside the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park it springs forth when you round a bend and you’re confronted by an artist’s work. The artist is not visible, for he lives over the water, 100 yards away, in a foreign country. He’s Mexican. And he’s talented as well as trusting.

The hand-written sign asks that you pay $6 or $12 for the road-runner birds made of copper wire and beads, or the scorpions or and a cactus tree made with beads. There is an empty Maxwell House plastic coffee can with a sign that asks you to “Put the money in here.” We continued on and soon came to our destination among the cliffs and the river. The hot springs bubble gently out of the rocks and were corralled a hundred years ago by some early entrepreneur who thought he’d make a killing by offering up the hot springs to the tired tourists of the time. Now they are there for anyone to use.

We sank into the 105-degree water, with the Rio Grande racing by briskly right behind our backs. The stark cliffs with their swooping swifts faced us.

On our way out, we bought a roadrunner bead bird and left the money in the Maxwell House can. Then we noticed the artist across the river. “Hola,” we shouted to him and he gave us a wave. We knew he’d ford the river to pick up his sale proceeds and then retreat to the Mexican side.

In a car journey of more than 100 miles through the Big Bend Park, we constantly were left gasping at the endless beauty of the place. It’s the first days of spring. There is scant rain here (3.2 inches thus far in 2015) but, somehow, the desert has come alive. Poppies, bluebonnets, buttercups, myriad cacti exploded in color with the most delicate and fragile colors. My heart soars as we roll around every bend.

We decided, on the advice of a park ranger, to stop by The Window at Chisos Canyon. We’re very high by this time – 6,000 feet. And we have to watch that we don’t run out of steam. We stopped in a little shop in the park at day’s end to pick up a bottle of mineral water because we’d already consumed the water we’d brought along. And I looked around the store at the trinkets. We found walking sticks, hand-painted by the artists across the river, selling for $18. The same sticks were offered on the trail for $6.

We walked the trail as the sun sank over the mountains. A sign told us of a lion being seen in the area and warned us how to deal with that predator should he come into view. “Pick up children. Make yourself as large as possible. Shout and wave sticks. Do not lose eye contact with the lion. Do not run. Do not play dead.”

We watched the desert floor stretch for 100 miles to the west from our high vantage point. But we saw no lion. And the view was breath-taking.

The next day, April 1, we loaded up and rolled north to the minuscule town of Fort Davis. Our next adventure took us to a mile-high state park. We then drove the car to 6,700 feet, the highest paved road in Texas, to the McDonald Observatory, run by the University of Texas, Austin.

This is a live picture just in from our sun (top). That plume of hydrogen on the left is 68,000 miles high. The 107-inch telescope helps astronomers look back billions of years in the universe.

Our three-hour tour exposed us to live views of the sun, from two different telescopes, transmitted onto a high-definition screen (you no longer look through the eye-piece of these enormous scopes!) Judy, our guide, showed us the sun was fairly quiet on April 1. But there were plumes of hydrogen jetting out from the limb of the sun. 

She asked the 14 of us on the tour for estimates of how high these plumes reached. One woman offered “a mile”, another man said 5 miles. I took a stab at it and came up with a guess of 30,000 miles. We were all wrong. 68,000 miles was the correct answer. The pictures took eight minutes to reach us. And Judy explained the sun is two thirds hydrogen, just under a third helium and then there are about 1.4 percent other metals. The nuclear fusion occurs between the hydrogen and the helium.

She then drove us to the 107-inch telescope and we were all allowed to use the remote controls to move it up and down and around. She then handed me the controls and I was able to rotate the dome. There was no viewing until night-time, however, and you don’t open the shutter on the roof during the day. The inside of the dome is cooled to a chilly 60 degrees so it emulates the night-time temperature. This way, the astronomers don’t have to wait for the temperature to equalize when they come in to work.

Next, she drove us to their biggest telescope – the Hobby-Eberly 10-meter – one of the largest in the world. Two astronomers from University of Pennsylvania figured out how to build this monster by making the mirror out dozens of individual, perfectly-fitting hexagons that are coated in highly reflective aluminum. This powerful machine currently is being renovated and upgraded and will be used in conjunction with an array of other scopes around the world to reach out to gain a better understanding of the mysterious dark matter that makes up most of the universe. Judy said they don’t expect to solve the mystery – but do expect to eliminate a large number of theories of how this dark matter works.

What an awesome piece of equipment. And what an awesome day. We left the top of the mountain exhausted but exulting in the inquisitiveness that is Man.

When we returned to the park, we made our way to the Indian Lodge, a huge adobe structure, built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. This beautiful old place is in pristine condition and has been modernized with air conditioning for the current visitors. We went to the dining room and stepped back in time by having a CCC dinner – liver and onions, potatoes and zucchini for me; A CCC chicken sandwich for Jo. 

I’ve written about the CCC before, as some of you may remember. For those who have joined this blog in the past three or four years, the CCC was a jobs program, created by FDR in the Depression. Young men were given a job constructing parks, roads, bridges, dams, among other things. They were given three meals a day and were paid $30 a month. They were allowed to keep $5 of that. The remainder was sent home to mother.

April 2: Before heading out from our base, we drove to Fort Davis National Historic Site. This is where the U.S. met and tried to subdue the Apache and Comanche. We wanted the land. They wanted the land they’d always roamed. The West was expanding in the 1850s and settlers needed protection.

This is one of the Enlisted Men's bunkrooms at Fort Davis.

This was the era of the Buffalo Soldiers – black men, freed by Abraham Lincoln. But they were far from free in this outpost. The white settlers scorned them and treated them as inferiors while they were expected to protect those folks on the trek west. And, of course, the white soldiers also treated them like dirt. But they persevered. The fort has been rebuilt and it is possible to wander among the buildings used to house enlisted men, as well as officers.

Recorded bugle calls interspersed our walk and we had been provided with a paper that explained each of them. We sat on the porch of the commanding officer’s home and listened as Retreat was played and you could hear the men marching, with the sounds of horses and artillery being moved about.

We headed south to the tiny town of Marfa, Texas. There’s nothing there when you get there. But there’s the promise of seeing fairy lights, floating between the mountains and the prairie if conditions are just right. There’s even a free parking area for motorhomes and a bathroom and lots of bronze signs to keep you entertained while waiting for the light show to begin.

We read all the signs. They were about the kinds of grasses and tumbleweed that rolls across the desert into Marfa. There was one about how the U.S. Army Air Force bought thousands of acres of land where we stood and trained thousands of  fly boys for World War II. We had supper and watched the crowds gather. Maybe 50 people came to watch for the lights.

We took up our position, camera on tripod, binoculars primed and focused. And we waited. And we waited some more. A glorious sun was followed by a magnificent almost-full-moon. The lights began to appear on the horizon. They were white and red and I wasn’t buying it. They looked like headlights and taillights to me. One old codger stood there and swore those were the magical lights.

Naaaah. I love a good story. But I’m not buying this one. We retreated to our motorhome and went to bed.

The Marfa Lights, bouncing around in the blackness of a desert night.

A glorious moon at the viewing site was more real to me than the purported lights of the desert.