Behold the vast and wondrous spectrum of human emotion: joy and despair, bliss and terror, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, just for starters. So much feeling, arising from life’s deep cauldron of experiences! Birth and death, success and failure, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, you name it. Then there’s this fabulous natural world we all share, and the emotions which that can at times arouse, and look out, as it all can get pretty intense, in case you didn’t know.
Consider just the wonders of the earth and sky for a moment: sure, there’s the inspiring glory of a landscape or a sunset or a rainbow – or a solar eclipse – but what about an earthquake or a tornado? Are terror and mortal fear not also worthy and powerful emotional experiences, to be remembered vividly and forever, assuming one survives? There are those who’ve personally endured such moments, while most of us must settle for the stuff of movies. It is no surprise that Hollywood gave us Earthquake and Twister a long time ago, both relatively forgettable, but what about Jaws?
Never forget there was a time when a total solar eclipse was just one amongst countless terrors of nature offered up by life on this planet, back before homo sapiens had managed to subdue it for the most part, which robbed nature of much of the awe and mystery and terror, all of which had ruled the human imagination for millennia. Some called this “progress,” but of what kind and at what cost?
One thing that seems certain is how a flat disc of the deepest creepiest darkness, appearing out of nowhere all at once in the sky, must’ve rudely snatched away the pleasures of a fine sunny day and offered up instead the worst of possibilities. For many in that moment, the very workings of the heavens had gone awry, in the most sudden and dramatic and inexplicable way, and just wait’ll you see what comes next! Such musings had to be in a class by themselves in the primitive mind’s catalogue of dangers, for this was something outside of all previous experience which made no sense. What could be worse than the cosmos cracking apart without notice?
Let us not forget that people’s relationship to the sky in those days was something much different than ours of today, for it was a vastly different sky. This was especially true at night, when the view overhead was rich and brilliant and spectacular and stunningly immense. Shooting stars and meteor showers were commonplace, not to mention the occasional supernovae, and one can only guess at the splendor of the Aurora Borealis. A total solar eclipse – so sudden and unexpected, in a sky that was part of the deep texture of people’s daily lives – must’ve packed an emotional punch we can only begin to imagine. Did most just breathe a sigh of relief when it was all over, reassured that the universe had righted itself? If you’d lived back then, would you have been so sure? It seems likely that at least a few lived out their lives in dread of an event that was probably never to recur.
So behold modern humanity: collectively knowledgeable of the basics of the clockwork of the universe, almost smug in its trust of the astronomers, who can predict to the second when the sun and moon will rise and set, what circumstances lead to eclipses both lunar and solar, and what steps you can take to view one near you, or maybe not near at all, in which case you’ll have to plan ahead. And oh yes, pray for good weather, or hire an airplane, which seems like a form of cheating.
Pity the poor meteorologists! Unlike the experts on the grand movements of the cosmos, who work with hard information gained from centuries of observations and clever calculations, the weather so-called “experts” must deal with the relatively mundane meanderings of pressure systems and the like, moving about willy nilly right down here in the humble neighborhood of our local atmosphere. Do not be fooled; what seems so mundane is a complicated and downright capricious bit of choreography, indeed.
It may not quite be chaos, but if the latest satellite and supercomputer technology can still struggle with foretelling the chance of rain later this week, not-quite-chaos comes pretty close and maybe we need a new word to describe it. When it comes to short range forecasting, tomorrow’s weather has become a pretty easy call, right down to hourly temperatures and chances of precipitation Predictions for the next few days have also become almost eerily reliable. It goes quickly downhill after that, and long range forecasts are more the stuff of Vegas than anything else, place yer bets and take yer chances.
Which is sort of what one of us did, when it was revealed that for them, viewing a total solar eclipse, in person, was more than a casual ambition. Much more, in fact, like bucket list more, to the point where she obtained plane tickets to Austin TX months in advance, so as to be in that part of the country on Monday, 4/08/24, eclipse day, which is something everybody in North America should know by now, unless they’ve been living under a rock.
Now why would a person go ahead and do a thing like that? Because a person who is that serious about a thing like a total solar eclipse does their homework, wherein calculating the weather odds is no small matter. As it turns out, this can lead one to conclude that traveling to the arid Great American Southwest, away from the moist and cloud-prone Dreary American Northeast (at least in springtime), is the best way to assure success at the totality-viewing game. This is all well and good, though in the end it’s just playing the odds and hoping for the best.
The operative emotion here is excited anticipation, to which one can add a bit of tension, if only of the mildest sort, for what if she’d calculated wrong? What if the weather gods ended up tricking her, sneaky and conniving rascals that they are, forever ready to torpedo any confidence imparted by those know-it-all astronomer gods, with their perfect understanding of the clockwork of the cosmos? Better, for the moment, to ignore the sad plight of the meteorologists, all too human when it comes to long range forecasting. Hey, they get it right most of the time!
And would you like to guess how it all played out? Who’s fortune’s fool now? As we headed into the final week before totality, weather for our in-the-bag clear-sky destination, Austin TX, was due to be anything but as-advertised on the all important day. The operative emotion here is shock, followed by a kind of disbelief, followed by despair. Not quite the five stages of grief, but not all that different, either, as both are about loss, in this case the worst kind of lost opportunity. Disappointment is also in the mix somewhere, and what you get is a complex and most unfortunate stew of bad feeling. And here you thought the eclipse experience was all about the awe and wonder of beholding a few minutes of absolute weirdness in the sky, and nothing more!
Wait – as you might already know, it gets better, for the forecast for New England on the Day of Solar Reckoning was for clear skies. Any true believer in Murphy’s Law or the perversity of the universe wouldn’t have been surprised by this, at all, and isn’t irony one of the great elements of living, when all is said and done? With irony, the operative emotion is usually mild depression, followed by sober reflection on the burden of living, followed by a shrug. After that, maybe a loud long laugh or at least a giggle that is neither bitter nor joyful. Would that we were all so enlightened, but most of us are simply not, with no apologies.
A person of lesser ambition and not so infected by what might be called Eclipse Madness might’ve just gone the way of philosophical resignation, accepting fate and talking up the charms of Austin in the springtime. Is totality all that big a deal in the end? What about all that great BBQ and Texmex cuisine and live music! Aren’t all cities great destinations if we simply believe the tourist brochures and online trip “experts?” Sure this might just be making lemonade out of lemons, but need we discuss whether we really like lemonade all that much?
One of us might’ve just followed the easy path of least resistance. One of us might be kind of a wimp sometimes, and you got a problem with that? But for one of us it meant capitulation of the worst kind, as in Not Acceptable, whereby cancellations were made, financial losses absorbed without (much) regret, and fortune’s fools made a second attempt to become fortune’s blessed children. Maybe this had been in the cards all along, for among the blessings overlooked until this moment was a friend with a second home that happened to lie directly in the path of totality, and how about that? And wasn’t she more than ready to invite us to join her in the right place at the right time? Is friendship not on a par with cosmic events in the grand scheme of things? This development was especially fortuitous as lodging prices in the path of totality had skyrocketed. The rules of capitalism, supply and demand in this case, are as predictable as the clockworks of the universe, in case you didn’t know.
By all indicators the emotions meter was gyrating wildly at this point, jumping from despair and resignation all the way up to joy and exhilaration. One could say we’d been whipsawed, in such a way that emotional exhaustion was no longer an abstract concept. Like totality itself, this was another novel experience, at least for those of us whose emotions tend to sail on mild seas, with but rare forays into the doldrums.
From that moment on and quite unbelievably, the whole rendezvous with cosmic destiny proceeded smoothly, even the three and a half hour drive up to northern VT. This was a quick time, indeed, despite rumblings about how an impressive portion of the population in the country’s northeast seemed to have travel plans of a similar nature, almost all those people tracing the same limited Interstate routes. Could it be a factor that we went the day before and not the day of the event? What’s your guess?
And, as our little group gathered on a Green Mountain hillside the night before, what emotional levels would you predict? What would be yours? High excitement is an easy guess. Last minute trepidation amongst a few, surely, especially for those whose destiny her had followed an indirect and glitchy pathway already. Some of us were spooked, in a word. Would it be cloudy tomorrow? Word was that “high, thin” was a possibility, but how high and how thin? Little did we know at the time that many just to our south and west, down there along the Great Lakes, were facing prospects worse than ours. We were later to hear of one sky-thrill seeker changing plans from Dallas to Buffalo then to northern New Hampshire at the very last minute, proving there’s always somebody who’s got it worse than you, which is something Mom might’ve taught us once.
Would you believe that even in our relief and excitement at having “made it,” so to speak, there were those among us still planning and calculating? As in, do we drive in the morning to the perfect spot, for isn’t there always such a thing, somewhere? The perfect broad field or hilltop, not towards the edge of the path, where we happened to be, but some miles away closer to the center? One of us had crunched the numbers, for as we all know, numbers are there to be endlessly crunched, and this tweak would lengthen the period of totality from two minutes and change to something over three minutes, no small potatoes, that, at least in some minds. At which point curiosity led to the discovery that maximum totality is something like seven minutes, an experience achievable somewhere in the world in the next decade, so start planning now!
In the end less fanatical heads prevailed and the next day, at the appropriate time, we walked up the hill from our lodging to a clearing on the hillside that was perfect enough. There was a thin overlay of whiteness that gave way to blue sky now and then, no real threat to a proper experience, and experience it we did.
Countless words have been spoken and written to try and do the whole thing justice. Let’s just say it’s great when a thing follows the well known script and turns out to be something unexpected and extraordinary nonetheless. Unlike reports from some places, of shouts and cheers and spiritual proclamations, our little group shared the enthusiasm and specialness of it all in its own way, one that can only be described as perfect, as you might expect.
The local newspaper, of course, pouncing on a journalistic opportunity, had more than enough to say about all this the next day, in people’s own words to make it personal and real:
“I had done my research and I knew what to expect, but this was way more than I expected”
“It was something I never felt before…a sense of awe, a sense of surprise more than anything else. I had hair coming out of the back of my neck”
“It’s so wonderful to see everyone together for a common good and a common purpose. It’s a real sense of community”
“It’s such an amazing experience, bonding with all the humans, everyone having the same ‘Oh my God’ moment together” and “in this tragically divided country, this kind of thing unites us, so here’s to a decisive number of voters uniting together in November to blot out another big orange ball of gas!”
That last one, in its earthbound practicality, takes some of the magic out of the moment, but heartfelt is something different for everybody. There were more than enough accounts of people in tears or feeling chills.
Then there was the local Vermont guy who was so sick of hearing about it for months on end that he planned to stay on his couch and sleep through the whole thing, being “eclipsed out.” He also admitted to renting out his house “for a fair price” unlike many of his neighbors, and described the event as quintessentially American: “a money grab,” while noting that a nearby location for charging electric cars had jacked up its rates by a factor of five. In the end we’re just a small world in a huge universe, where awe and splendor for some are somebody else’s opportunity to make a buck.
And what about the opportunity for human connection? Is a total eclipse all that different from a Taylor Swift concert, besides being an event that doesn’t last nearly as long or charge admission? Would someone who’s attended both please speak up?
A few weeks after the event, the newspaper ran yet another bit of eclipse reportage (an eclipse is a journalistic gift that keeps on giving) by an introspective reporter telling us how he remained overwhelmed in such a way that he knew it would be a life-changing event, same as going to Paris and the Grand Canyon and witnessing the births of his children. For him the memories of the suddenness of it, and the total uniqueness of the light and viewing “an entirely new object in the world” had generated a new aspect of consciousness, an awareness of the passage of infinite time he was sure would never fade in his mind. Maybe he was speaking for all of us who’d been there. True epiphanies are few and far between, and maybe this one truly was the real thing.
In his reverie he mentioned Joan Didion, writing about the lasting cosmic impression of a star map she’d seen at Hoover Dam, of all places, and Annie Dillard’s memories of seeing solar totality high on a hill outside Yakima, Washington, in a piece she wrote two years after the event. He noted how vivid the memory remained for the noted nature author after all that time, describing her resultant memoir as “trippy.” In all the write-ups devoted to the recent event, not a one had mentioned Ms. Dillard’s piece, strangely enough titled Total Eclipse. Annie has her fanatical fans, though she’s not everybody’s cup of tea, and of course journalists might assume that their readership probably includes few literary types, whoever those people are. But anyone who considers themselves such should give Total Eclipse a few minutes of their time, if only to determine what the guy meant by “trippy.” Anybody who’s witnessed totality in person should check it out, if only to compare notes. It’s only twenty pages long and if you can’t stand it at some point, you’ll know what to do.
Any attempt to describe what it’s about would not do it justice. Let it be said that much of it is straightforward and reflective and insightful in all the ways Annie Dillard is that way, an excellent example of which is her comparison of a partial eclipse with a total (she’d seen both): “A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.”
Much of the memoir is full of observations like that, but just as much is about strangeness and disorientation and confusion and a kind of dread and terror, and the reader might get very confused themselves at times and start to wonder “Is this the Annie Dillard I loved in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek?” “Trippy” is an apt description for some of what she writes, and just what might she have in mind? One possibility is that she is trying to channel the consciousness of all those generations of h.sapiens who’d witnessed the event back when it was, indeed, something strange and terrifying and confusing and “psychedelic!” as we’d say in the ‘60s, some of us on drugs and some of us only guessing at what the word meant. Whatever it is, some of us think she pulls it off splendidly, but you might read it and find out for yourself.
No report on this eclipse experience in its entirety would be complete without some mention of the trip home, especially notable in our case. We’d hoped for the possibility of staying another night, avoiding the potential highway cataclysm that had been part of the buzz from the beginning, but it was not to be. Northern New England has what one might describe as a quaint and very scenic road system, one where no major metropolis exists to justify any accommodation to ridiculously heavy traffic. In the afterglow of the previous beautiful moment, our little group scanned their trusty traffic apps, as a new kind of tension built. Five and a half, maybe six hours back to Boston was what they were getting, not too shabby.
But real time and future time are two very different things, and might it be said that traffic is another complex and dynamic and chaotic system, much like the weather? With the same built-in defiance of any attempt at accurate prediction? Let it be said that what we were all about to face was a singularity, maybe not along the lines of solar eclipse totality but pretty close, and the two had some connection, in a cosmic/earthly way, if that even makes sense.
What resulted was seven hours of tension, frustration, and moments of hopeful excitement followed by total deflation and disbelief, a rich emotional package unforgettable in its own way and a perfect complement to the preceding cosmic event itself. There were reports that the most dramatic bottleneck, now the stuff of local legend, was on I93 squeezing through the very narrow Franconia Notch, which narrows to one lane in each direction, always has, and you gotta problem with that? There were reports of people getting out of their stopped vehicles to stage public peeing sessions, adults and kids and dogs, some more than a bit self-conscious, others not caring a whit. There were people on the road for thirteen hours or thereabouts, getting home at three AM on Monday morning and going on to work and school after a few hours of sleep.
The consensus was that the event had been so special that enduring the disaster that followed was a small price to pay, or was even just another special memory amidst a whole lot of memories that were special, none of them really disastrous, looking back. Maybe it’s too bad Annie Dillard wasn’t stuck on the road with the rest of us, so she could eventually offer us her writerly two cents in The Atlantic or Kenyon Review. Or if by chance you were there, Annie, will it take you two more years of reflection before you can put it into words? For those of us who lived it, maybe we know enough already.
