Travel
Metal of Honor
New Mexico’s legendary Lightning Field is a precise grid of steel rods that attracts bolts from the sky—and visitors from the world over.
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Outside, the sun was blazing. A narrow porch ran around the cabin, and on the far side, facing The Lightning Field, sat a gray wooden rocking chair. All around us a sea of high grass was bending and waving in the wind, making an endless shushing noise. I slowly realized that mixed in with the silver-green grass were thousands of tiny flowers—patches of yellow, lavender, purple, and white. Off in the distance, Lydia and Tade were silently gesturing. Alison had disappeared, swallowed up by a hidden contour in the valley. With the sun high overhead, De Maria’s grid was barely visible: It interfered with the view in the most minimal of fashions. At the same time, it was utterly unavoidable; you couldn’t look at the ring of mountains except through the rigid geometric pattern of metal rods, each of them two inches in diameter and about twenty feet tall (their height varies slightly so that the tips create a level plain). In his book, Robert Hughes likens the effect to a “fakir’s bed of nails.”
I set off for The Lightning Field myself. Once you are close by, you have to go toward it; like lightning, you too must reach out and touch the shiny stainless steel. The first rod I came to felt surprisingly cool and had a highly refined surface, like commercial kitchenware. An individual rod was sort of boring—it looked like a flagpole or the thing you hang on to while riding the bus—but as a group they were oddly compelling. They formed avenues that you had to walk down; they formed boundaries that you had to stay inside. “When you’re in the middle of it, even though the rods are far apart, you feel inside of something,” Tade said when we met up. “And if you take one step beyond the last rod, you feel outside.”
This bothered Alison immensely. She trudged over to announce that she couldn’t stand the feeling of being commanded by the work to head in certain directions. She liked getting outside the field and looking at the mountains without De Maria in the way. But I loved the feeling of being pulled along. I liked how the rods choreographed meetings, how they altered the landscape irrevocably but didn’t obscure it. When I got to the edge of the grid and confronted the naked view, I turned around and dove back in again.
The sun was reflecting off the tips of the rods, so that they took on the appearance of spears stuck point-up in the ground. A flock of birds wheeled through them, weaving in and out. As the day went on, the rods grew more emphatic, until eventually they stood out like light bulbs against the twilight. Soon you could pick out every individual rod, illuminated in the gloam. Then the light drained from the sky, and the grid abruptly dimmed as if a giant battery had given out. “Now it’s gone,” Alison said.
The four of us gathered on the porch, shivering in the twilight. The perfectly cloudless evening sky was filling up with stars and a crescent moon. I was not disappointed—a flashy electrical storm would have been spectacular, but the slow transmutation of the field in ordinary light was perfectly satisfying. I was also enjoying the company of the other guests; in a funny way they had become part of the experience. (The number of people allowed to visit at a time is restricted to six, both to ensure that the isolation of the desert is not obliterated and to create an intimate party among strangers who might otherwise never meet.) We went inside to cook dinner (groceries are in the home when you arrive). Over cheese enchiladas Lydia and Tade talked about Slovenia, its separation from Yugoslavia, and the nature of war. Alison and I tried to explain the difference between Americans and Europeans. Then we built a fire and drank whiskey until we started to fall asleep.
The next morning we all woke while it was still dark, pulled on our warmest clothes, and left the cabin, diving into the shocking predawn chill. It was after first light, and the steel rods were already discernible, a ghostly series of insubstantial silver lines. Even before we made it to the first row, our feet were soaked by dew. It took forever for the sun to come up. Slowly the eastern horizon reddened, slowly the sky brightened, slowly a lavender light bled upward. At last the sun itself surfaced, turning the steel rods fiery white in the gold morning, making them substantial once again. Lydia and Tade were off in the distance; Alison was nearby. We all started to walk toward one another when an eerie, bizarre sound to the west suddenly made us freeze. A gang of children was whooping or women were screaming—or were ducks honking? It took me a long time to realize that I was listening to a pack of coyotes. Barbarous and haunting, the sound embodied what De Maria had searched for in the desert. It was the antithesis of his machine-perfect rods; it was uncivilized.
Later that day, Robert Weathers picked us up at the cabin. On the way back to Quemado he told us about something else De Maria would consider uncivilized, but in a different sense of the word: the subdivision of large ranchlands, which could lead to more-concentrated development in the area. So far, no development threatens to spill over into the valley where The Lightning Field sits, but it’s possible that someday lights from surrounding buildings could encroach on the sense of total isolation there. “That would probably mean the end of The Lightning Field, ” Robert mused. “Walter has always said that if it ever got to the point where you could see lights, he’d dig it up.” Bouncing along the rutted dirt road, looking out at the virgin desert, I wondered why people would ever move here. Probably for the cheap land, the cheap homes, and the dry, sunny weather. But winters in this part of the country are ferocious, so, thankfully, it’s hard to conceive of the day when The Lightning Field would indeed be surrounded by tract homes. De Maria ventured into the desert specifically in search of wilderness, and he picked an appropriately rugged site for his grand statement about mankind’s relationship to nature.
Travel Information To visit The Lightning Field, you have to make a reservation. You can write to The Lightning Field, Dia Center for the Arts, P.O. Box 2993, Corrales, New Mexico 87048; or you can send an e-mail to thelightningfield@msn.com. In May, June, September, and October, the fee is $85, which includes transportation from Quemado plus two meals; during July and August, it’s $110. It’s a good idea to provide several possible dates for your trip, as spots in the cabin are limited. Dia’s reply will include directions.
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