Marfa to Marathon: The Great Empty

The sixty miles of United States Highway ninety between Marfa and Marathon pass through some of the most thinly populated terrain in the continental United States. There are mountains visible to the south, the Davis Mountains behind you, and the sky that West Texas is known for, which is the sky that produced the McDonald Observatory and keeps producing astrophysicists who cannot find this quality of darkness anywhere closer to a city.

The Gage Hotel in Marathon, built in nineteen twenty-seven to serve ranchers and travelers making the long approach to Big Bend country, is one of the few places to stop on this stretch. Its construction date is a reminder that the period when this corridor felt empty and remote is actually quite recent. In nineteen twenty-seven, Big Bend was not a national park. The families being removed to create that park were still on the land. The mercury mining at Terlingua was approaching its final decade of operation.

The emptiness that this road produces now is the emptiness of a place that was contested, worked, and inhabited within living memory of people who were alive when the park opened. Comanche raiding parties moved through this corridor within the last two centuries. Ranching families whose names are still in the Brewster County records raised livestock on land now inside park boundaries. The silence is not primordial. It was made.

The Chisos Mountains become visible about halfway between Marfa and Marathon, rising from the desert floor like a separate country, which geologically and ecologically they are.