Eclipse
I wasn’t even supposed to be in the path of totality. I just moved down to Lexington, Kentucky about two weeks ago to begin my graduate studies here. It turns out that moving in to an apartment costs a lot of money, money I didn’t have. Given that, I planned to stay in Lexington on Eclipse Day and enjoy the 90ish% partial eclipse.
But last Wednesday, a TED video about why we should all see an eclipse showed up in my YouTube suggestions and I just knew that this was an opportunity I couldn’t miss. I was only three hours from the path of totality, classes didn’t start until Wednesday, and the weather forecast for the region showed clear skies. I had nowhere to be and nothing to do, so I started planning.
My main goal in picking a site to view the eclipse from was to avoid traffic, which meant avoiding big cities like Nashville and prime tourist destinations like the Great Smoky Mountains. I referenced this map, showing predictions of how many people would converge on locations within the path and decided to find a spot in Tennessee between Nashville and the Smokies. I saw the town “Cookeville” on the map, a town I’d never heard of. I Googled it and found that Tennessee Tech was in Cookeville, and that they were hosting an eclipse viewing party in their football stadium. The best news: they were giving out free eclipse glasses to the first 10,000 who entered the stadium! This was a relief, since by this point eclipse glasses were selling for $60 on Amazon and were entirely sold out at retail locations.
I woke up at 3 AM on the morning of Monday, August 21st and hopped in my car to Cookeville. The goal of leaving so early was to beat traffic and to ensure that I got the free eclipse glasses and a good seat in the stadium. The drive was interesting and terrifying, as Google took me down side roads through rural Kentucky, roads with no shoulders and tight turns. They would have been difficult to drive in the day, let alone at 4 in the morning.
I arrived around 6:30 AM, well before any of the festivities began. I tried to take a quick nap in the car but the excitement was too much. Before long, car after car came piling in to the parking lot, sporting license plates from all sorts of different places. Once a good amount of people had arrived, I rounded the lot and took note of all the different license plates I saw. I counted 22 different state plates, from Texas to Rhode Island, plus plates from Ontario and a US Government official plate!

By 9:30 a line had formed near the gate where we would be entering. I didn’t think they would run out of eclipse glasses, but I didn’t want to risk it so I waited. While waiting, I talked with a guy who graduated from Penn State in 2014 with a journalism degree. I found it strange how much we had in common and what a strange coincidence it was that we ended up in line right next to each other. I talked with a 1973 University of Nevada-Reno graduate who joked about how he graduated before I was born (he even graduated before my parents were 10!). And I met yet another Penn State graduate, this time a 1982 grad who was a mother of 10. We bonded over both being part of large families. Her first question when I said I was the oldest of six: “Do you live on a farm?”
At 10:30 they opened the gates and let us in to the stadium, an hour and a half before the partial eclipse would begin and a full three hours before totality. But I was eager to get in the stadium — not just to finally get my hands on the eclipse glasses, but to bask in the shade of the press box. That I needed to seek shade was a good thing though — that meant that skies were clear!
While waiting in the stadium, I met more interesting people. A man who drove down from Maryland, someone from right up the road in Kentucky, and two teachers from the Cookeville area. One of them was wearing a handmade dress with all the planets on it. The other was the stereotype of a “Southern woman”, recommending a local donut shop in the classic Southern drawl.
Around 11:30, seemingly all at once there were puffy cumulus clouds sprouting up everywhere. By noon they were growing taller and wider, and I was seriously worried that they would obscure the eclipse. In fact, for about the first twenty minutes of the partial eclipse, the sun was shaded by a persistent cloud that seemed like it was going nowhere. In between clouds, I used the eclipse glasses to get a glimpse at the partial eclipse. At first it was just a little nibble of shadow, then a whole crescent, and soon half the sun was covered. Even with half the sun’s light blotted out by the moon, it wasn’t any noticeably darker.
By 1:00, 30 minutes to totality, I was getting excited. Not just because totality was so close, that I was about to live out a dream I’d had for a long time, but because the clouds continued to diminish. By 1:15, they had all but disappeared, likely due to the moon’s shadow blocking out the source of energy that clouds need to grow. This was around the time I actually noticed it getting darker, as I no longer needed my sunglasses on when looking around. The colors looked duller, objects lost their focus, everything looked fuzzy.
1:25, 5 minutes to totality, only a tiny sliver of sun remaining. My heart was racing, the adrenaline flowing. I could sense the excitement of everyone else there. The sun was still bright, you could see it glinting off cars, but everything else continued to get more dull and fuzzy. You could feel the darkness closing in from all sides, increasing at every moment.
1:29:44: totality begins. I’m standing now, most everyone else was and we were all whooping and cheering as the last sliver of sunlight is extinguished. I had the eclipse glasses on for the last few minutes and when I took them off, I was amazed. I first started by looking around at how much darker it had gotten since I had put the glasses on. It was dusk, in the middle of the day. In every direction, a sunset. I looked over at the building and you could see where lights were turned on. The lights in the parking lot came on. I looked around at all the people there with me, the lights of a thousand cell phones trying to record the moment, everyone looking up in awe.
Then, finally, I looked up at the eclipsed sun. I couldn’t take my eyes away from it. I spent the rest of totality in complete awe, mouth agape, staring at the black hole in the sky, gazing at the milky white corona spewing outwards from it. It was as transcendent as described, as incredible as anything I’d ever witnessed. And to be there with thousands of other people made it so much more intense, to feel that colossal one-ness with the entirety of humanity, with the people surrounding me, with all those across the country who had found their way in to the path of totality on this day, with everybody in history who has ever had the opportunity to witness this miracle of physics. In the intense darkness, you could see Venus. You could feel the temperature drop. It was all so surreal.
And then, just like that, it was over. I think the image that will stick with me from this event was the moment the triumphant sun returned. Its light shone so brilliantly and instantly the world was made new. At that moment, the crowd let out their largest round of cheer and applause, a recognition of the incredible sight we were all treated to.
It took maybe 15 minutes for the adrenaline to wear off, for my heart to stop racing. As I sat, it got warmer and warmer, the sun brighter and brighter. Most people left when totality ended, but I figured I had made the investment to come see the eclipse and I was going to see the whole thing, from first to last contact. The crowd dwindled from thousands to hundreds, to maybe one hundred, until I was one of maybe 20 people left. As satisfying as it was to be around others during totality, it was equally satisfying to sit back, relax, and enjoy the rest of the partial eclipse in relative solitude.
The eclipse was incredible. It is one of the best, certainly the most elusive, shows that nature provides. As I reflected on the drive home, I was amazed at the incredible coincidence that allows eclipses to happen. I thought about the fact that, as far as we know, we are the only life in the universe that is able to see the eclipse, and that someday in the future eclipses won’t occur on this Earth anymore. I thought about the reaction that eclipses must have elicited from our ancient ancestors, about how scared and helpless they must have felt to see their source of life disappear without warning. Here we are today, with a scientific understanding of why these events occur and an ability to predict with high precision when and where they will take place. Sometimes we forget how far our species has come. I felt incredibly lucky to be a sentient being on this tiny rock in this tiny sliver of time where eclipses are possible.
As awesome as the natural display was, I was just as intrigued by the human display. Often you will hear people say that animals act weirdly during eclipses, and they do, but if a higher life form were to look down on our actions during the eclipse, they would surely conclude that our eclipse rituals are the strangest of all the animal kingdom. We migrate en masse, from thousands of miles away, to the path of totality. We put our lives on hold for a day. We plan for years in advance. We suffer through heat and traffic and hours or even days of travel, and for what? For two minutes of darkness that a cloud may conveniently cover up? This is not meant to diminish the eclipse but to admire our ability, as humans, to seek out and enjoy these incredible acts of nature.
The fact that we are capable of appreciating the world around us and seeking to explore it is what makes us humans. It is this unique capability that sets us apart from the rest of the animals of this planet and it is what has kept us around for so long. It is the reason we invent, the reason we explore, and the reason we go out of our way to see eclipses. The eclipse is the ultimate reminder of who we are. It is the ultimate reminder that we are all the same species, regardless of the artificial boundaries we’ve placed on ourselves. During the eclipse, we are all one people, united by our understanding of our place in the universe. That we are cognizant of who and where we are is the greatest gift our consciousness affords us, and it is a gift we should never take for granted.