08.21.2017

Curtis Lindsay
Aug 24, 2017 · 6 min read

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Winding along a necklace of hamlets on the shoulder of the Cherokee National Forest, I chuckled to myself at the morning preparations underway on ball fields, parking lots, and church steps.

Benton, Delano, Etowah. These wayside towns were getting ready to dance to the music of the spheres, more power to them. But I managed to slip past long before the heavy crowds rolled in, the tip of the needle ahead of the thread.

I came by my lonesome, purposing to find a quiet spot far from the paths the throngs were likely to travel. Fairly familiar with the area from long-ago camping trips, I was able to stake my claim — a bend in the diligent murmur of the Tellico River, where the folks at NASA said the totality would compare to that of Bonnie Tyler’s heart (when she’s only falling apart).

Two sturdy little hemlocks on the steep, craggy bank were kind enough to host my hammock. I spread a blanket over an enormous flat rock out in the middle of the riverbed.

Clear and crisp she ran, babbling gregariously though the water line was a foot low. I waded, floated on my back, splashed, cavorted, slipped on slick stones and fell a few times, and then retired to the shade to take up some reading.

High overhead a hawk glided lazily. The day was fast growing hot. I dozed beneath the emerald canopy for the better part of an hour, lulled by the cicadas and the throaty rush of the stream. Creeks like this have always felt like home to me, more than any street address. I know many of their secrets, and they know damn near all of mine.

For lunch I produced a truly awful ham sandwich and, to wash it down, a tall beer I had left to cool in the river. Then I made more trouble for the trout, because a mountain stream on a searing bright afternoon is pretty well irresistible.

I started peering through the eclipse glasses every few minutes, awkward and pestilent and wonderful contraptions. The moon was nibbling at the disc by about ten minutes past one o’clock. My view was going to be ideal, with only a thin wisp of cirrus trailing well out of the way.

Traffic now trickled along the access road at the top of the bank far above me, folks looking for spots of their own. Maybe a hundred yards upriver a gentleman began to set up a substantial camera rig. We waved at one another mildly.


By a quarter til two the daylight had changed perceptibly. It was somehow rarefied, silvery-orange, like a spring afternoon in the hillside groves of Assisi.

I kicked around the water for a few minutes more, listless. Part of my intention in lounging the whole of the morning had been to get a deep impression of the surrounds before the glorious transformation to come. The other part was that I wanted to be a lazy river bum for a while, something I happen to excel at doing.

Another half an hour ticked by as the daystar was ceremoniously obscured. The light at the forest floor was much fainter now, gray and spectral. The whole sky was deepening toward royal purple velvet— a hue unknown to the palette of daily dusk, one whose provenance is a shadow on the wing.

The chorusing of the cicadas fell tremulous.

There came a brilliant saturation of greens and blues. The foliage all around me and the rocks beneath my feet harmonized in coruscation, a Middle-Earth woodland just as a band of fair folk are passing westbound nearby. For a moment I half-expected to hear singing in the distance…

…A Elbereth Githoniel! A tironin!
Star-kindler! Look toward me!

It could be that the Elvish of east Tennessee is Cherokee.

When but a sliver of sunlight remained, the temperature in the alluvial corridor dropped precipitously. Strange, slight breezes rustled in the rushes: forgotten woodland spirits roused from a millennium of slumber, just to have a peek. I parked on my rock and joined them, letting my legs dangle in the water. The gradual descent plunged into otherworldly darkness, and the afternoon ceased forthwith.


Only a handful of poems have I committed to memory in my life. Mostly these have lingered on in retirement long after I have set them to music. I suppose I did invite them into the shop, after all — free coffee and everything.

It was my imagination, I know, but the flow of the Tellico seemed to quicken. From within its whitewater static I recalled a sonnet of Cummings:

this is the garden:colours come and go,
frail azures fluttering from night’s outer wing
strong silent greens silently lingering,
absolute lights like baths of golden snow.
This is the garden:pursed lips do blow
upon cool flutes within wide glooms,and sing
(of harps celestial to the quivering string)
invisible faces hauntingly and slow.

This is the garden. Time shall surely reap
and on Death’s blade lie many a flower curled,
in other lands where other songs be sung;
yet stand They here enraptured,as among
the slow deep trees perpetual of sleep
some silver-fingered fountain steals the world.

A sense of sedation washed over me in the coming of the shadow, and tears welled up unbidden. I put the glasses aside.

I stared up at the father of the heavens, now fully eclipsed, admiring with open mouth his wild blond mane of hydrogen streaming and swirling beyond the emphatic globe of the moon. Cold mountain currents coursed around my ankles. Ten toes grasped at the muddy bottom; two disbelieving eyeballs leaked liquid wonder.

I whispered the names of the celestial siblings huddled in witness near the zenith: Mercury, Venus, Mars. The hawk had set to flight again. It circled the flaming black disc in great easy swoops. I had never seen something so beautiful, and do not expect to again.

Don’t you get burned, a singsong voice chided across a space of thirty years. My grandmother used to worry so on summer afternoons like this one. It was always either sunburn or snakes that was going to do me in. Memaw was a Tennysonian, “Nature red in tooth and claw,” I reckon.

The moon would not be deterred, deaf to my pleas that she might pause especially for me this one single time. I knew I must very soon turn away from the spectacle.

Just before I did, there was a sheer instant of magic which no words can mirror: a tiny, ineffably radiant drop of sunlight, as if the blood of Apollo Aegletes were being squeezed from a dropper, appeared at the circle’s edge and glanced across the ridge of some wild lunar canyon. A split second later the light raged too white-hot to withstand.

Unlike my neighbor upstream, I had determined not to try any photography — gods, how could I spend the moment that way, behind a shutter? — but I am certainly thankful for the many who did. Still, even the most expert captures cannot convey how impossibly minuscule and fierce the jewel of sun’s blood flashed at its appearance.

Five seconds, and the surface of the water shimmered with bronze and ocher again. I washed my face and rose to stretch. Then an echo from The Faerie Queene:

But who can turn the Stream of Destiny,
or break the Chain of strong Necessity,
which fast is ty’d to Jove’s eternal seat?


This had been the moon’s day if ever there were one, but it would turn to Tuesday soon enough. All that remained was to pack up my things, crank the wagon, and start the trek out of the woods.

Ethereal zephyrs acquiesced to a thrumming August haze, as if nothing at all had happened.

In the town of Tellico Plains the smell of smoked meat spiced the air. A boy with wild golden hair and an electric grin was working the roadside, cheerfully collecting donations for the public library. I pitched in, of course, and drove on smiling.

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Curtis Lindsay

Written by

musician, teacher; scribbler, thinker.

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