• What to know if you go

Jill Johnson/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/KRT (ENLARGE)
The bathroom inside the Austin Street Cafe in Marfa, Texas, is filled with art from Sante Fe, New Mexico school children.
Jill Johnson/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/KRT (ENLARGE)
From the man who made Marfa what it is today, inside one of the 15 outdoor concrete works by Donald Judd at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.
Jill Johnson/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/KRT (ENLARGE)
'I think the new art scene here is wonderful, in reality it has saved the little town,' Marfa resident Cecilia Thompson said about the influx of artists to Marfa, Texas.
Jill Johnson/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/KRT (ENLARGE)
The only liquor store in Marfa, Texas, El Cheapo, even has an artistic flare.
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MARFA, Texas — The stars are pale, overwhelmed by a nearly full moon.

The only real light so far is in front of a home. We pull over on a rise in the dirt road, climb on top of the car and look to the right. Before long, they come. A yellowish light. Then a second. And a third.

They fade in and out. Car lights on the road to Presidio?

But then the first reappears, this time high in the sky, like it's on a pole. Another returns and waves in circles. These are not car lights.

Coyotes start their eerie crying. The house light goes out. Time to go.

Town historian

Cecilia Thompson told us over coffee that morning where to go for the best look at the Marfa Lights. Raised on a ranch outside Fort Davis, she moved to Marfa in 1982 and has written a history of the town. She goes to the weekly free movie at the Marfa Public Library and lives quietly in a simple home with a Peter Hurd painting on the wall.

In a typical Marfa-esque quirk, she also has a Ph.D. in drama from the University of Iowa.

Photographer Jill Johnson and I are in Marfa mostly because of Jill. She loves this place, with its clean desert air, tremendous bookstore, minimalist art galleries, renovated adobes. I am a little jaded. I lived in Santa Fe in the early '80s and witnessed its transformation from a beautiful, centuries-old cultural crossroads into a plywood-coyote-bedecked attraction with a chain ice cream store on the historic Plaza.

Could it happen here? Some of the elements are in place: desert, adobe, art, great sunsets, simplicity, serenity. In fact, some of the same transplanted Easterners are here — they left Santa Fe and moved to Marfa. The price of a quaint, crumbling adobe is climbing faster than a lizard up a tree — from around $20,000 decades ago to as much as $300,000-$400,000 now.

A day's drive from Dallas

But Marfa is pretty remote. It's a long day's drive from Dallas-Fort Worth, and three hours from the airport in Midland. The only thing it's really on the way to is the Big Bend, a good place to go when you really need to be in the middle of big, gorgeous nowhere.

On the surface, Marfa looks like any other small Texas town. Then you find out about great New York-style pizza; an Andy Warhol hung in giant, otherwise empty room that is randomly open for viewing; world-class sculptures standing around out in the pasture; a never-to-open Prada store sitting in the middle of the desert and planned to become a ruin (it's an art installation) ...

Thompson says, "So far, Marfa is intact. We don't have any of those tacky, craftsy stores."

Finding a motel

The problem is snoring. Mine. We're sharing a room, and Jill wakes me up four or five times to get me to turn over in the hope of getting some sleep. At one point, I even wake myself up and find the poor woman trying to sleep with her head sandwiched between two of the Thunderbird Hotel's soft, white pillows. Somebody has to go, and I decide it's me.

The Thunderbird is an example of Marfa minimalism. A typical Texas roadside motel has become a starkly elegant tribute to the brilliance of simplicity. The 1959 bones are wearing a new coat of pale-blue paint on the outside, pure white on the inside. Platform beds are wrapped in white-on-white bedding with striped Peruvian blankets neatly tucked at the ends.

The lobby stocks chocolate bars blended with curious ingredients such as wasabi and sells New York-made (MALIN+GOETZ) toiletries.

I check into the Riata Inn at the edge of town (about three minutes away). It is a tribute to nothing, but it's roughly half the price.

And the pleasure is all mine. If you book an eastward-facing room, you can haul your chair outside, drink in the desert stretched before you for miles and breathe under the big blue empty sky that makes you feel like a thousand pounds just dropped off your shoulders.

See the light from desert trail

In the morning, I awaken at 5 a.m., get out before sunrise drive to the Marfa Mystery Lights viewing area. Stone monuments with plaques are built next to a small trail into the desert.

Why's it called Marfa? A railroad engineer's well-educated wife named the town after a character in Dostoevski's "The Brothers Karamazov."

What are those lights, really? Nobody knows. Theories include the idea that they're reflections of gases coming up from the desert floor.

I sit next to a yucca in dawn's cold and watch the sun come up over a horizon that feels bigger than the world. The moment will never leave me.

Movie 'Giant' was shot here

James Dean is everywhere. On posters, coffee mugs, signs, even light-switch plates here in the Hotel Paisano's gift shop. He stayed in the hotel, with the rest of the cast of "Giant," when the 1956 movie was filmed.

Based on Edna Ferber's epic novel of the same name, "Giant" is the tale of a Virginia girl, Leslie Lynnton, who marries a West Texan and learns to live with heat, wind, barbecued calves' heads, over-the-top wealth and the oppression of the people who lived on this land before it became Texas — Mexicans who worked the enormous ranches for pennies.

"We're the white Americans, we're the big men, we eat the beef and drink the bourbon, we don't take siestas, we don't feel the sun, the heat or the cold, the wind or the rain, we're Texans," Ferber writes. "So they drank gallons of coffee and stayed awake while the Mexican Americans quietly rested in the shade, their hats pulled down over their eyes. ..."

Ethnic differences are built into Marfa, a town of about 2,400 people that is now about 60 percent Hispanic. Early homes that belonged to people with Anglo-Saxon last names were mostly made of brick. Thompson concedes that back then there was a "bias about adobe, because Hispanics built adobe homes."

Adobe houses

That doesn't seem to be who's living in many of them today. For example, Dick DeGuerin — the Houston lawyer who defended David Koresh — bought one in 1998, according to an April 2005 Marfa growth story by The New York Times that rankles some locals, who now refuse to speak to the press because of it.

Other adobe owners include Jack and Lisa Copeland, formerly of Santa Fe, who run — and live in — the Austin Street Cafe.

Thompson sees the newcomers as the latest in a pioneering legacy: "Young people coming in here have found a place they can expcts or spaces of the same size are built on either side of the complex.

As you would expect, the buildings are spare, inside and out. Most rooms, including the two-building, 10,000-volume library, include a bed, simply standing somewhere in the huge rooms.

Schmitt explains that they were for guests, although Judd himself slept in one of them at times.

Freakish art

Thompson says when Judd arrived and began his work in Marfa, "the town regarded it as a freakish thing."

They must be used to it by now, but it's hard to say — the publicity-shy Marfans seemed afraid to talk much about the Judd-related ventures.

Out at the Chinati Foundation, Judd's cement cubes look, at first, like construction plans gone bankrupt. Like the rest of Marfa, they seem pedestrian at first glance. Big, empty, cement cubes. Why?

Jill and I wander among them, walk inside them — they are some of the few Judd works available to see and touch without fees or warnings. I think about how my farming relatives back in southern New Mexico would have laughed.

You have to step back and see the works against the mountains and the desert sky to begin to understand. Like many of Marfa's attractions, they don't work for everyone. But the odd combinations in the art and in the town exert a rare kind of pull that sticks with you — if you stop, breathe and try living on Marfa time.

IF YOU GO:

GETTING THERE: If you're not in the mood for a road trip, fly to Midland Odessa Regional Airport and rent a car; it's about a three-hour drive.

WHERE TO STAY: If you're not on a budget, the Thunderbird Hotel, 601 W. San Antonio, is a good bet. The 1959 motel's clean, simple, contemporary rooms are a nice surprise in a small town, and the outdoor fireplace is a lot of fun. It's within walking distance of galleries, restaurants and the bookstore. Rates: $125 weekdays, $150 weekends for a double March-July and in September and October. Rates drop to $115-$130 in January, February, August, November and December. Holiday rates are $175. Rooms that also include a daybed are available at slightly higher rates. Dogs are welcome for an added fee. www.thunderbirdmarfa.com or (432) 729-2984.Or, if you'd like to stay where James Dean did during the filming of "Giant," try the Hotel Paisano, www.hotelpaisano.com (866) 729-3669. Rooms are $99 to $210.

If you'd like to spend less, try the Riata Inn at the other end of town, on U.S. 90 East. Clean, basic doubles run $42-$65. Try to get a room facing east, so you can look out at the desert. (432) 729-3800.

WHERE TO EAT: A couple of unusual options present themselves. One is the Pizza Foundation, 100 E. San Antonio St., which serves New York-style thin crust pizza at $12 for a whole cheese pizza. Try the tomato bread salad (onion, garlic, fresh basil, tomatoes, warm croutons, feta cheese and balsamic vinaigrette) for $6.

For high-end dining, go to Maiya's, 103 N. Highland St. The cheese-plate appetizer includes French triple cream, aged Spanish manchego and domestic goat cheese. The spinach lasagna was creamy but not particularly unusual. The roasted pork was tasty, but not so tender. The profiteroles drenched in Belgian chocolate made up for any deficiencies. Plan to spend around $100 on supper for two in the beautifully designed restaurant, and be sure to make a reservation: (432) 729-4410.That said, the best food we had was at Austin Street Cafe, 405 N. Austin St. It was packed one morning in March, partly because the popular Brown Recluse coffeehouse was closed. The "huevos gringos" were just about perfect — a kind of crustless spinach quiche swimming in black-bean soup, all of it tasting like the ingredients had been chosen fresh that morning by owners Jack and Lisa Copeland. Austin Street is open Saturdays and Sundays, 8 a.m.-3 p.m. and by appointment. They recently also added "Takeout Tuesdays." (432) 729-4653.

WHAT TO DO: You can use Marfa as a base for exploring the Big Bend, about an hour and a half away. Information: www.nps.gov/bibe/home.htm. Or, you can just hang out and be on "Marfa time," a phrase coined by the locals. The big sky, lack of traffic and easygoing small-town attitude slow everything down. Take a walk downtown. Check out Andy Warhol's "Last Supper" and Maria Zerres' "September Eleven" at the Ayn Foundation's galleries in the Brite Building, 109-109 N. Highland. Browse Dennis Dickinson's 2d gallery at 400 S. Highland Ave., or go to the Highland Gallery at 119 N. Highland Ave. (Hours at some galleries can be random. Drive by and check or call to see whether they're open.) Have a cup of coffee at the Brown Recluse, 111 W. San Antonio St. Go to Marfa Book Co., 105 S. Highland Ave., and have a cup of coffee or a glass of wine while you look at books or visit the gallery there. Better yet, buy a book and take it outside, sit in the sunshine and read.