Thursday, August 24, 2017

TOTAL ECLIPSE

(Please note: the images of the eclipse are not my own--I would not have wanted to bother with a camera for even one second. These ones are borrowed from various public domain sources online. They accurately reflect the event I witnessed.)

We're just back from a trip up north to Idaho, where we were witness to the recent total solar eclipse. It was an awesome event--in the proper sense of the word "awesome": it inspired a sense of unmitigated awe. And awe, in my view, is the most profound experience available to our human species. It raises us far above the mundanity of the everyday and into the realm of what we inadequately call the spiritual.



So here's the story:

Starting a few weeks before the event, I became more and more convinced that this was something that I needed to see--an event so rare, so beautiful, so cosmic in the reverberations of its infrequent occurrence, that those who reported on it struggled to find words to adequately describe it. Now in the eighty-second year of my journey to the great unknown, I was seized with the realization that this was something that I needed to see.

Recalling, happily, that Ellie's cousin David and his wife, Nancy, our friends, have a home in Idaho, I wrote to share my new-found obsession and was rewarded with a generous invitation to visit them at the time of the eclipse. Not only do they live directly on "the path of totality" (that wonderful phrase!), they also have a remote cabin at the very center of that path. Determined, now, to do anything to be able to accept their invitation, I soon discovered that all flights to Idaho from Southern California were fully booked, and that even rental cars from nearby cities were no longer available.

If we were to go, then, we would have to drive. I no longer much enjoy spending time at the steering wheel and battling the traffic--or even speeding along sparsely populated interstates. The eight hundred and fifty miles and fifteen hours of driving--thirty hours, if you consider there and back!--were not appealing. Still, this was the only way... We packed up the car a few days before the event, borrowed some audio books from the local library, and set out.

Warmly greeted on our arrival, we enjoyed the opportunity to visit with David and Nancy, who led us out on long, both literally and metaphorically breathtaking hikes into the hills and mountains that rise above the lovely valley where they live...




The weather was fine and sunny, and promised to remain so for the great event. Aside from some smoke drifting over from fires in neighboring Oregon, the skies were clear.

Sunday, the day before the eclipse, we set out on the journey over the mountains--with steep drops from a narrow dirt road that would have alarmed my acrophobic self had David not thoughtfully placed me on the "safe" side of the car--and down into the neighboring valley and the tiny town of Mackay. Just past the town, we turned off the highway to find the charming log cabin...


... where they come to escape the stress of city life. Situated on the bank of the fast-moving Lost River, it's an ideal spot for the fly-fishing that is David's much-loved hobby.

I woke in great excitement very early Monday morning and, after meditation by the river, watched the sun rise over the mountains to the east; and watched, through David's magnificent binoculars, the countless breeds of birds from the river bank: water birds (little flickers, and the occasional heron drifting past on huge, outstretched wings), hawks, and even what we identified with a thrill to be a golden eagle, soaring on an updraft.

The "first contact" of the eclipse was due to start at 10:15 that morning, and we readied for the moment, taking chairs out from the porch to place them with their backs to the river and its restless motion, with a view to the sun now arriving in the south-east and, with a swing of the head, to the mountains in the west. Our view up into the sky was unobscured--no clouds!--but closer to the horizon, and especially to the north, a serious bank of smoke had drifted in to blur the mountain tops.

At 10:15 precisely we were all gathered in our spectacular front row seats, our eyes protected with sun-safe glasses...


... gazing up into the sky, awaiting the first bite of the moon into the surface of the sun. In itself, this was a breath-taking moment: there it was, yes! No! No! Not yet! Yes, now for sure! A tiny, dark dent at two o'clock on the orange dial...


 Slowly, it seemed infinitely slowly, that tiny dent grew into a clearly identifiable bite, and in the course of the next hour or so we watched as it continued to grow, first into a fat crescent, then an ever smaller, skinnier banana in the sky...




The light on planet Earth changed slowly. We debated, first, whether it was darkening; then were sure that yes, it was. Before long, it began to take on an eerie, silvery glow as the darkness gathered. Our shadows sharpened, soon to be etched in exquisite clarity on the ground around us...


An unnatural silence seemed to descend on the landscape; the only sound now was the rippling water of the river behind us. The temperature began to drop precipitously.

The excitement by this time was electric, bouncing back and forth between us in gasped comments, shared observations, sheer delight... Then, finally, came the moment of "Bailey's Beads"--we had read about what to look for earlier that morning--the last, glittering glimpses of the sun though the jagged horizon of the moon...


Then, the celebrated diamond ring and suddenly, incredibly, the jet black hole in the sky that seemed to reach into infinity. (In that moment of intense drama in the sky above I missed, we all missed, one thing I had been looking forward to: the rise of the dark curtain to the west, and the split-second, two-thousand-miles-an-hour rush of the moon's shadow toward us, across hills and valleys, from that direction.)

Then, totality...


... the moment to snatch off the viewing glasses to witness the brilliant, unspeakably beautiful corona, streaming white against the dark violet, deep midnight blue backness of the sky, with that impenetrably black hole at its center. Then, too, the sudden vision of a night sky in the middle of the day, as stars and planets popped briefly into view--if you could tear your eyes away for one second from the awesome spectacle at the center...

It all happened so fast, too fast. It was supposed to be two minutes. It felt like seconds, no more, before Bailey's Beads made their fleeting reappearance, followed by the dazzling, all-too evanescent flash of the diamond ring...


... as the sun escaped from the interference of the moon... and it was time to replace the glasses. Through their filters, the sun turned a thin sliver of orange again, and the process began to reverse. The birds resumed their flight and song. Behind us, in the river, remarkably, dozens of fish began to leap to the surface--prompting the fishermen amongst us to step into their waders, grab their rods and gear, and head out into the current of the river, still in eerie darkness. They did well for fish, that morning.

It took an hour or more for the reversal We checked every now and then with our viewing glasses to watch the progress of the crescent as it slowly fattened and, finally, swept away to reveal the full circle once again. If those moments felt like anticlimax, well, the memory of the event remains intense, something surely never to be forgotten and always to be treasured in the mind's eye. We stayed a few hours longer before making the trek back over the mountains into... what shall I call it? The real world? Certainly, that awesome place we had visited a short time ago now had, in retrospect, an air of unreality, and with it the delicious, lingering glow of dream.

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