| This article was published on July 22, 2004 in the Desert-Mountain Times
Thunder, lightning and beer drinking with the German ghosts of Lobo
Lobo, a ghost town on U.S. 90 south of Van Horn has a few abandoned buildings, blowing wind and lonely sunsets.
By Tom Michael
Correspondent
The sun was still high above U.S. 90 between Valentine and Van Horn, but it was dropping fast, along with
the temperature. I was parked across from a pecan farm, at the gates of Lobo.
At one time, there was a reason to be parked here. At one time, Lobo was a living, breathing seven-acre town
with a roadside motel and swimming pool. But these days Lobo is a ghost town - so it was empty.
Still, I waited. I slumped into my car seat. I knew that this evening, the ghosts of Lobo would come out.
Dusk was approaching when a pair of headlights scanned my dashboard and pulled up to the white metal
gate. In the spooky glow of the car lights, two ghosts unlocked the gates, waving me inside.
Lobo had come alive, thanks to the good spirits of Gabi and Martin, two free spirits from Hamburg, Germany,
who for the past week had been haunting the town. They were part of a German collective that years ago
bought Lobo as a relic and pretty much have kept it that way. Many of the crumbling adobe walls are still
splattered with another generation's graffiti.
Lobo shares its name with a nearby mountain range, but its new owners define Lobo as an abbreviation for
"lowlife Bohemian," a self-description of their rag-tag assortment of artists, teachers and tradesmen,
who occasionally board a silver bird to West Texas to laze around their town.
"I like it here," Martin said more than once, as we tracked a family of rabbits. Gabi watched the sunset
and smoked.
The citizens of Lobo don't want to be bothered. They don't want intruders, and they don't want stories
written about them. When you do get to know them, though, they are welcoming. Last summer Lobo hosted a
housewarming for the surrounding communities, serving up traditional German fare and untraditional
German artwork. That party was called LoboMotion, and they even filled up the abandoned motel swimming
pool for some splash-happy children of neighboring ranchers.
Gabi and I sat on the porch overlooking the fire circle on which Martin was grilling tilapia, a rare
catch in Van Horn and an obsession for Martin, who had grown up on the high seas of Scandinavia. The
amber sunset battled with the approaching rainstorm for our attention. To applause of thunder, the
storm won out, pleasing this crowd with an encore of lightning.
Night fell, and the electrical front eventually moved east to knock part of Marfa off the electrical
grid. Lightning lit the black skies like faulty wiring, blinking on and off like the string of
Christmas lights that lit the porch where we sat. A sudden arrival of cold rain put a damper on
things. We kept scuttling our folding chairs backward out of the rain until we found ourselves
sitting inside a barren one-room adobe.
We warmed the cool night with heated conversation over grilled fish and cans of beer. Our potlatch
ceremony was an odd clash of cultures. I brought what I thought was good German sausage - something
from Wisconsin - and they brought what they thought was good American beer, something from St. Louis.
We didn't chat about their big architectural plans for Lobo. There aren't any. And besides, there were
more important fish to fry - we had international problems to solve. We also had some puzzles to solve.
The past week Gabi and Martin had immersed themselves in a peculiarly Texas game, deciphering the
pictograms on the flipside of Lone Star beer bottle caps.
This was challenging for non-native speakers, so they saved a couple of tough ones for me. After all,
I was not only a native English speaker but also an encyclopedia editor. Maybe it was the alcohol or
the lateness of hour, but I was stumped too.
I didn't learn any German words that night, but I did learn a new English phrase: sleeping beer.
"Martin solved this Lone Star riddle," Gabi yawned as she flipped me a bottle cap. "He solved it
during his sleeping beer."
I was tired, but I understood: the sleeping beer was the last swig before slumber. As if on cue,
Martin laid back on his deflated air mattress, staring at a nightcap in one hand and a bottle cap
in the other, eyelids fluttering.
I, too, was blinking to stay awake, but didn't. I woke up in my car the next morning. The ghosts of
Lobo were gone.
Tom Michael lives in Calamity Creek. He works as a writer and editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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