OPEN WHEN OPEN, reads a nondescript poster for the Valentine Texas Bar on a coffee shop corkboard. Rather than a true advertisement, the poster may well be a piece of art. I’m in Marfa, Texas, after all, a desert oasis revitalized by the artist Donald Judd in the early seventies; ever since, the line between reality and art here has been as blurred as the mirage-lines that flutter up from the pavement in the scorching summer.
I’ve been to Valentine before, and I can’t imagine a bar there. It’s about thirty minutes outside of Marfa, with a population of 63. Tourists know it for the famed Prada Marfa art installation (which is not, in fact, in Marfa) beside the highway. But I look into the place anyway: the bar has a small social media following and seems, despite all odds, to exist. I message the account owner on Instagram, who replies hours later and says they’ll be open “tomorrow, probably from 2ish until late.” The poster has not lied.
When my husband and I pull into Valentine around 5:00 the next evening, skeptical at best, we see a rusted white car door standing solitary in the shoulder. Its spray-painted surface reads, BAR OPEN, in red. Now is the “when.” We briefly ponder if this is a trap, if we’re the hapless fools in the opening scene of a horror film who the audience will judge for their first-day-on-earth-ness. So be it, we think, and we walk inside. A puppy greets us at the door, and the barman introduces him as Milo.
I’ve been to Marfa many times since; each visit, I must enter the Valentine Bar at least once. The business has opened and closed throughout the years, but between owners, no internal changes have been made. Everything is preserved from whenever the building first became a watering hole. Different locals will tell you different dates and owners. The wall is covered in dollar bills defaced ingeniously by patrons past and present, a hole is borne into the wood above the urinal-trough in the men’s bathroom at “glory” height, and a retro swivel chair from an old barber shop rests against the back wall. Bartenders occasionally give late-night haircuts for some sort of barter. You may just stumble upon the birthday party of a powerful Rio Grande Valley attorney and trade a bead from your mother’s heirloom necklace for the trimming of your bangs, a beer can in hand. (This is not, dear reader, a clever metaphor, but rather something that has happened.)
The Valentine Bar’s drinks are much like their OPEN WHEN OPEN slogan: they have what they have. Sometimes the beer is Native Texan; sometimes it’s Lone Star; sometimes it’s neither, because the most recent shipment into Marfa has been delayed or is different. There might be a hard seltzer; there might not be. Liquor isn’t what they serve, but hell, there might be some if you know who and how to ask.
The space boasts a cast of characters that never falters, disappears, or disappoints: the owner, affectionately known to locals as “Professor Dumpster” (you’ll have to ask him why); a local rancher who books haircuts exclusively at the bar; and a cowboy hat-donning, chain-smoking woman named Miss Cammie who tells anyone who has slung back more than one or two, “Remember: this highway? Seventy-five. Ten-and-two!” The closest Ubers are three hours away in El Paso. Whatever you drink here—for most, a gracious, cheap plenty—you must dry out upon the blacktop that runs parallel to the train tracks, which are the reason why Marfa and Valentine even exist: water stops for what was once the only railway to reach El Paso from San Antonio.
The bar is becoming popular (especially on Valentine’s Day, a festival in the town that draws hundreds), but shows no signs of losing its commitment to oddness and obscurity. What Austin once boasted—that keep-things-weird mantra—now only places like Valentine still preserve. You might see an influencer or two on a popular Marfa weekend, but the place’s true influence remains the place itself. Lord keep it that way.
Beyond the beer, the bent-up bills, and the bargaining, what keeps the Valentine Bar special is this: its reminder that the best things are sometimes the simplest. Open when open, we have what we have. Just try arguing with that.
