This summer, staff members of Marfa Public Radio are contributing to the Desert Dispatch. This week, Carlos Morales takes us down one of Marfa's iconic roads.
For my dad, there’s always been something about the open road.
"It’s just very peaceful,” he told me over the phone recently. “It’s soothing for me.”
When he was in his 20s, he spent a lot of his time traveling the highways of the Big Bend. For nearly 10 years, he'd venture to Pecos from our home in El Paso, and then roll on to Fort Davis, Alpine, Marfa and Presidio. He was an automotive parts salesman at the time — a job that required him to “take care of the pluses and the minuses,” as he put it — so he had to swing by all the major auto shops in West Texas and eastern New Mexico.
On some drives, he said, he’d blast the radio. Other times he’d drive in silence and lower the windows to feel the West Texas breeze. He knew the roads closely, their turns, dips and rough patches. “It’s just you and the road,” he said, reminiscing. “That’s basically what it amounts to.”
However, there was one stretch of the Big Bend that my dad wasn’t familiar with: Ranch Road 2810 — the famed “road to nowhere.”
2810 was first constructed back in 1963. In the beginning, it was just a 10-mile stretch of paved road, but by 1966, the state had tacked on 22 miles, paving the road to its current endpoint where it meets the unpaved, rock-strewn road that takes you to the Texas-Mexico border.
It’s a stunning, singular drive, but you might not realize it immediately. At first glance, this stretch of highway looks like most other two-lane highways that carve through this region. But there’s something special to 2810, and I couldn’t quite explain it to my father. When I moved out to Marfa, I tried, but words failed: “You would just love this drive,” I’d tell him whenever we’d catch up on the phone.
The appeal of Ranch Road 2810 is different for everyone. If you don’t live in Marfa, you’ve probably seen it: the road has served as the backdrop of music videos, iconic movie scenes, cycling races, album covers and, even an ad for a toilet (twice now, by my count). It’s also the place where folks here take their dogs on long walks, and where you’ll find the occasional runner and cyclist, but very few cars.
But I didn’t immediately understand it. So I talked with people around town, folks who I knew frequented the road.
“There’s something about the quietness of it,” Mark Scott told me before he headed down 2810 on a moonlit stroll. “You just get what you're looking for.”
Mark grew up in Marfa, and has some history with the road.
“The first time I got to drive a car, I was nine years old. And my mom let me drive it on this road,” Mark told me.
Mark spends a lot of his time these days cruising down 2810 on his bike. He said, after his spin behind the wheel as a kid, the road became the place where he’d sneak away with girlfriends, hang out with friends, and even ride motorcycles with his parents, Allison and Rudy.
“And then I started riding bicycles, and this road changed for me,” he said. “All of a sudden, I'm seeing it at 13 miles an hour. And at that speed, you start seeing everything.”
Now, Mark knows the road intimately. He can tell you where water will pool into little pockets, he can quickly fire off the kinds of wildlife you’ll come across — elk, antelope, badgers, rattlesnakes — and he can tell you, with pretty close accuracy, just how far down the road you are by looking at a tree or a tilting power line.
The road, he said, is simply a reminder.
“We remember why we live out here. It’s because of the space out there, the views and the mountains and the openness. We're lucky to have it.”
A few years back, my dad decided he wanted to visit me in Marfa. Ahead of the trip, he fired off a handful of texts in an all too universal, parental style of messaging. Each text was rife with ellipses, random letters capitalized, all signed with “DAD.”
He detailed everything he didn’t want to do. “Will scrap hiking (too hot)” he wrote to me on WhatsApp. But he was also clear about what he wanted to do — get pastries at the farmstand, head to Marathon, do some backyard barbecuing and, the thing he couldn’t miss, drive down Ranch Road 2810 for the first time.
When he got here on a Friday night, we hopped in his truck — a high-clearance vehicle with four-wheel drive is a requirement for any travelers heading down the road beyond the paved portion — and we loaded up lawn chairs, a few flashlights and cameras. He wanted to capture the glimmering stars and the enormity of the night sky here.
“It’s a lonely road, yes, " he said. "But that isolation is actually kind of nice."
“When you sit there, lying in the bed of a pickup and looking up at the sky, all you can think about is the vastness and nature of this world and how open it is.”
People call Ranch Road 2810 the road to nowhere, but living in a small town where there aren’t too many things to do, where you’ll always see someone, “nowhere” can actually be somewhere, it’s just about what you’re looking for.
And I’ve realized, sometimes I’m just looking for quiet.
Out on 2810, it’s unlikely that you’ll see another soul and, I think, that’s part of its appeal. In a place that can feel claustrophobic, a quick trip down 2810 helps me to feel readjusted. It grants me a moment of anonymity. It took me driving down this road and sitting along its edges, looking up at the stars, to see the appeal of the open road. I guess my dad was right — it’s just soothing.
Caló
Stufas - a contraction of the expressions “ya estuvo,” which is Spanish for “that’s enough” or “it’s done.” In Caló, it’s what you say when you’ve reached a breaking point with something that’s irritating you or when you want to report that you’ve completed an assigned task.
Caló is a borderland dialect. You can find more episodes here.
Other recent programming:
Midland officials are rushing to figure out how to make up a multimillion dollar deficit in the city’s firefighters pension. Currently, the Midland Firemen’s Relief and Retirement Fund doesn’t have enough money to pay for the retirement benefits promised to the city’s roughly 250 firefighters. Now officials are left to walk a tight rope of trying to appease the firefighters, meet required deadlines and try to figure out the best way to pay off the this massive debt. Marfa Public Radio’s Mitch Borden has that story here.
At Terlingua Ranch, a sprawling desert subdivision near Big Bend National Park, growing water demand from more people moving to the area is prompting property managers to launch a new four-stage water conservation plan, a first-of-its-kind measure for the rural community. Travis Bubenik spoke with Brad Anthenat, board president of the Property Owners Association of Terlingua Ranch Inc, to talk about it. You can listen to that conversation here.
High Five
With the theme of this week’s dispatch in mind, DJ Churro Papi (aka Morning Edition host Alberto De Leon) tries to answer the age-old question: what kind of music do the cars in Cars the movie listen to?
- Airplanes - B.o.B. ft. Hayley Williams
- Smog - Indigo De Souza
- Tints - Anderson .Paak ft. Kendrick Lamar
- Fast Car - Syd
- Wheelz of Steel - Outkast
You can find find archived episodes of all of our music shows on our Mixcloud.
PSAs
This month’s Alpine Public Library Travel Talk series will feature Sul Ross photographer Bobby Greeson with a presentation entitled “Antarctica: Snapshots From The Bottom Of The World” on Friday, August 30 starting at 7 p.m.
More information available at alpinepubliclibrary.org.
If you have PSAs you want on the air or in this newsletter, head to www.marfapublicradio.org/psa.
