Culberson County
Adam Bork bought a place in Lobo because he has too many cars. Thirty cars, to be exact—or maybe a few more, he can’t remember. The cars became a problem when he was living full time in Marfa, always requiring shuffling to one friend’s empty driveway or another. “You can’t have them on the street,” Bork explained, “or they’ll put those nasty bright orange or green stickers on the window.”
January 2020 turned out not to be a bad time to start building a compound near the Culberson-Jeff Davis county line, though one new neighbor initially misunderstood Bork’s living situation as a harebrained attempt to sell used cars in the middle of nowhere. It’s where he keeps the “Ghost of Food Shark”—the remains of the popular food trailer from Marfa’s pre-pandemic cultural heyday—and numerous mounds of metal objects he sorts into piles to watch them oxidize.
Lobo is just a few miles from the border or a few miles from Valentine or a few miles from Van Horn, but it feels a world apart from any of these places, home to a handful of misfits renegade even by Big Bend standards. “Keep the lonely places lonely,” an often-Instagrammed sign implores from the side of the road.
It’s a place few of the hundreds of thousands of people who cruise Highway 90 each year stop, except to toss something in the TxDOT trash barrel or take a picture of the town’s sign. But for more than 100 years, Lobo has been a place that has drawn a very small and specific handful of people to hang their hats.
Over the years, many people have tried to make something out of Lobo. According to the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), a townsite was laid out in 1909 and quickly became the subject of a land scam where advertisers attempted to lure buyers out to Far West Texas with the promise of artesian wells and a large hotel. (The developers were eventually forced through legal action to deliver on their promises.)
This early 20th century boom was short-lived, and after Lobo lost a bid against Van Horn for the designation as the Culberson County seat, things gradually declined. Lobo caught a second wind in the 1950s as large-scale irrigation and cotton production took hold, but the ensuing drop in the water table dashed dreams of taking on bigger markets.
Lobo was put on the market as an intact ghost town for the first time in 1988, after the owner-operator of a roadside store encountered problems with “drugs and crime” that the fine people of the TSHA declined to elaborate on in their online almanac of Texas towns.
Enter German duo Axel Roessler and Alexander Bardorff, passers-through who saw its potential. They bought the ghost town in 2001, and over the course of the next 20 years hosted a series of festivals and gatherings at the space, including Desert Dust Cinema, a multi-day nonprofit film festival that drew attendees from all over the world.
When Roessler and Bardorff decided to sell, they wanted it to go to likeminded folks who would carry on its legacy. Bork crossed paths with Wini Hunton-Chan, an enterprising young creative and part-time Californian who was also interested in making something out of Lobo. The two teamed up for the purposes of a potential real estate transaction, but when the Germans passed on their offer, they tried to look on the bright side. “It was a blessing in disguise,” Hunton-Chan said, and one that prompted her to buy a permanent place of her own down the road from Bork.
It turned out that being a few miles off the highway created a peaceful and more generative environment. “When the big rigs go by [on 90] it’s deafening, you can’t even carry a conversation,” she explained. “Lobo was a magical property, but it wasn’t right for where I wanted to live.”
Bork and Hunton-Chan are now trying to carry on the desert rat tradition of making something from nothing via D.U.S.T, their semiannual festival that defies description. The name itself is meaningless. “D.U.S.T. is an unstable acronym,” their website insists, generating hundreds of new meanings per visit to the page (think “Delirious Unplanned Sonic Travels” or “Dreams Under Strange Trees”), which also directs the curious toward Hunton-Chan for “most questions” and Bork for queries specifically about “sound and music and explosions.”
This anarchic approach to collaborative art and outdoor recreation drew a crowd of about 75 to May’s iteration of the festival. Last weekend’s edition was a little more low-key, with around two dozen folks filtering in and out over the course of three days to create and share in a place with few neighbors to bother with noise, fireworks and general wackiness.
There is some order in all the chaos: Hunton-Chan instituted a sign-up board system this time around, letting guests know at least a few of the things the day might hold in store. A generator-powered three-sided barn is the go-to music venue to keep out of the wind and sun, but spontaneous acoustic sets are also welcome around the campfire. Out in the pasture, a fragment of a cinderblock wall juts up like a tooth, inviting visiting visual artists to hang up or project their work.
The mascot of D.U.S.T. is Dolly, a permanent installation by Hunton-Chan of a child’s toy from a bygone era. You can usually find Dolly in her room, watching a series of VHS tapes from the ‘90s from a pile of blankets on the shag carpet. More than a straightforward testament to elder millennial nostalgia, the festival revolves around her—VIP guests sometimes stay in Dolly’s room but are discouraged from interrupting her television time.
Most of the campers were sprawled out around a double-wide mobile home that serves as the center of activities, but Bork also made his land available as an “introvert’s campground,” offering silence and solitude for the overstimulated. (One guest who came all the way from Philadelphia reported that Bork’s open-air composting toilet with 360-degree mountain views made the long trip worth it.)
For now, the duo welcomes anyone who comes out to the desert prepared for off-grid living and spontaneous fun. “I want it to always be free,” Hunton-Chan said. “I feel like that’s what [the film festival] was at the ghost town—it was a community event, and it was a very inclusive definition of community.”
“I feel like the point is that we are the resource for each other,” she continued. “We make D.U.S.T. together.”
