We set off from Lubbock pointed south to begin our fall trot around West and southern Texas, destination: Marathon.
Cotton fields and scrub were replaced by litters of oil derricks pumping and turning such that you could nearly feel the fossil fuels being sucked out of the ground. We stopped off in Midland, where you can “feel the energy”, as advertised on the water towers, for a sandwich and then continued south on our journey through the Permian Basin. The Basin is 86,000 square miles, 250 miles wide and 300 miles long (or about the size of North Dakota) and gets its name from the Permian geological period when the dinosaurs roamed these parts between 299 and 250 million years ago. Those inhabitants were wiped out by an asteroid strike on Earth which eventually transformed their bones into fossil fuels. During World War II about half the world’s oil and gas came from here, and those resources helped fuel the allied victory in the War.
As we continued south the vast expanse of oil wells, drums, refineries and derricks receded and were replaced by desert scrub and cacti with a mid-late afternoon lit backdrop of the blue and purple mountains of the Glass and Sierra del Carmen mountains. Only a few miles outside of Marathon you’d never know it existed, despite the GPS indicating it as such, as you rumble south around bends and over dips through the Chihuahua Desert, but then it appears, an oasis on the roadside, with the Gage Hotel its centerpiece.
The town of Marathon was founded in 1882 by Captain Albion E. Shepard, a railroad surveyor, when the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio railroad was built. Shepard named the town Marathon because it reminded him of his ship captain days visiting Marathon Greece with the ring of mountains here being reminiscent of those around the city there. Captain Shepard’s home, in which we stayed, is now part of the hotel.
The Gage was founded by Alfred S. Gage who left his native Vermont with, allegedly, only a twenty-dollar gold piece in his pocket, eventually building a 500,000-acre ranching empire. In 1926, he hired architect Henry Trost to design and build a hotel from which Gage planned to run his ranching business. Alas, Gage died only a year after the original hotel opened.
A few years after Gage’s death, the hotel fell into disrepair and closed until it was purchased by JP Bryan, a descendant of “father of Texas”, Stephen F. Austin in 1978. Melissa found the Gage many years ago when we were mapping out our many planned roadtrips and when we planned to pass through this part of Texas this year she dug deep into her research files, and we booked it up.
We arrived in time for a good stretch of the legs, wandering across the train tracks and out of town a ways, through the desert along the road south towards Big Bend National Park and Mexico. The local dogs alerted all to our presence as we passed out of and then back into town just in time for a shower and a margarita in the White Buffalo Bar before our appointed dinner reservation at the hotel restaurant, the 12 Gage.
We stuck around long enough the next morning to retrace our steps southward, much to the chagrin of the aforementioned dogs, and then back across the tracks past the churches, school and ball fields and around the neighborhood on the hotel side of town, stirring up that neighborhood’s dogs, before hitting the road and heading south towards the Rio Grande with the Gage in our rear view and a pledge to return should we find ourselves in this neck of the world again in our hearts.
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