Marfa Lights
As a high school student, a couple of friends and I took a long drive down a desolate road late at night in a far corner of west Texas. It was time to find the Marfa lights, and we were not disappointed.
I’m a chicken about scary stories. I don’t like to hear them because they freak me out when I wake up in the middle of the night and have to leave my safe bed to go to the bathroom. I don’t watch scary movies, either, even now as an adult. At least not often. My worst scary show experience happened because of “Twin Peaks” when my eldest was a newborn. Between sleep deprivation and physcial exhaustion, my mind was ripe for imagining those weird flashes of crazed maniacs crouching behind chairs.
But when it comes to natural supernatural stuff, I’m totally enthralled. I’ve never seen the Northern lights, but would love to. I love meteor showers, finding satellites, looking through telescopes, watching the weather, taking pictures of clouds.
So, back to Marfa. We (three other girls and I) piled into my friend’s Buick and headed to the remote roads. The drive out from where we were was a good hour. As I recall, we arrived at the general area and kind of moseyed around for about 20 minutes up and down the road. It was pitch black, being far from any kind of city and many years ago. Finally, headed back toward the way we had come, a few individual lights hovered, swirled slowly, and faded in and out behind us. They lasted a good five minutes or so, close to the horizon, but above the highway, and far back in the distance.
We were sufficiently thrilled and headed back toward the camp we were staying at in the Davis Mountains. It was after midnight by then, and I’ve always been likely to fall asleep in the car, so I was drifting in and out of sleep while my friend drove. She had the windows all down and the radio blaring to stay awake herself.
It was altogether surreal, and still sends a chill down my spine when I remember it.
