The Total Solar Eclipse Converted Me
When those who have seen a total eclipse say it is a life changing experience, they mean it. I had been listening to stories on NPR all week leading up to the 2017 Total Eclipse. They described their individual experiences with eclipses, how to watch it, and what to look for while it happens, but the number one thing that everyone who has ever seen one said is that it’s life changing.
I wasn’t sure what that would mean for me. I am a fairly logical and grounded person. The last time something truly life changing happened to me was when my good friend Ben passed away. It affected the way I thought about my personal timeline, and accelerated my work. It also added a load of stress to my consciousness because I was worried about my own life ending too soon.
That’s not the kind of life changing experience they meant. Totality was a more primal experience than the intellectual wonderings of an entrepreneur and writer dealing with loss.
Logically, it’s obvious that the experience must be a pivotal one in some way. It seems clear as to why our ancestors would have thought the world was ending. The sun is suddenly covered, the world goes dark for several minutes, and no one knows why. But I was armed with modern information, so a part of me thought I would have an enjoyable experience and that would be that.
I didn’t realize how little I knew.
Myself and two friends, Adam and Kris, drove all day Sunday to reach St. Charles, just north of St. Louis, Missouri on the path of totality. Unfortunately, I had come down with a cold from a Saturday night of hilarity which was my birthday party. 150 of my friends came to my home and four of my friends’ bands played as entertainment. I was awake until 4:30am, and though I was sober the entire evening, my immune system was unable to fend off the cold. I was useless, and spent the entire eight hour drive asleep across the back seat of the car.
Monday morning was mildly better. My amazing friends got breakfast and brought it back to the room, using fresh cooked waffle smells to wake me. We then readied and left the hotel at 11:15am and drove to a nearby state park. We aimed for seclusion, where we could see the landscape change with the sun without too much bustling from other humans. We parked the car in the small gravel lot and walked down a trail into the woods, prepared for mosquitoes and flies, but experiencing none. The cicadas droned and the birds sang, the trees cast their shadows, but nature left us alone and carried on in normalcy.
We considered walking the length of the trail to the Missouri River, but 95 degree heat with 90% humidity stopped us from completing the mile and a half journey. We found a bench partway, and we sat.
Adam pulled out his phone and began reading an essay by Annie Dillard, the American writer, describing her experience of witnessing a total solar eclipse. In her words,
“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”
It was her description of the world around them changing during that eclipse that began settling the fact in my mind that something very profound was about to happen. I no longer felt flippant about the event as I had upon waking that morning.
I asked Adam during a pause in reading, “What time does the eclipse begin?” He changed apps to view the timeline.
“11:45am,” he replied. It was 12:15pm. We were sitting on a bench in the woods outside and had not yet looked at the sun. Everything seemed normal and so we had no prompt to do so.
We put on our glasses, walked to a clearing in the trees, and looked up.
“Holy shit!” I yelled, being the first to reach the clearing. They both exclaimed as well. The moon was already covering 20% of the sun and we had no idea.
I was too young at age ten to remember how the last partial eclipse had affected the world around me. I didn’t know that, even at 90% coverage, it’s very hard to tell that something unusual is going on. The sun is still too bright to look at, the color of the world seems next to normal, and everything still has its shadow. This is why, in centuries past, people would have freaked out about a total eclipse. There is no tell-tale sign that it is happening until minutes before.
There was still an hour before totality, and we were hot. Even in the shade drinking from water bottles, it was hard to stay regulated. We decided to go back to the car and wait in the air conditioning. The parking lot was embedded in the park, allowing us to stay in touch with nature as we had hoped while still providing a good clearing from which to view the sky.
After we settled into the car, Kris decided to open the sun roof. We had parked in a split of trees, and could perfectly see the eclipse through the sun roof! There was a moment of silliness as we recognized how ridiculous it was to be watching the eclipse from the car while enjoying air conditioning. As we settled in, Adam continued reading Dillard’s essay to us, and we waited.
At 1pm Adam leaves the car to walk around and check out what others around us are doing, but returns quickly. “It’s time,” he says.
We get out of the car and immediately notice that, while the world is still visually untouched by the eclipse, the temperature had cooled. The air is bearable, and getting cooler by the minute. We look up through our glasses and see the moon closing fast across the sun.
I notice the women next to us playing with shadows with their hands, and ask them what they were up to. They reply that the moon changes the shape of the sun and so changes the shadows, turning what is normally round to crescents. This is not a new concept to a photographer — one of the simplest tricks in photography is to cut a heart into a piece of black construction paper and tape it onto the camera lens. The focus of the camera will look normal, but the bokeh (out of focus lights) will look like hearts. I look under the tree next to the car — the crescents are VERY clear, now. And the light is growing dull.
1:10pm, and minutes from totality. The light made it seem almost as if there is a terrible storm rolling in. I kept looking at the sky without my glasses despite NASA warnings about eye safety. I couldn’t help it — the things around the sun are changing.
The clouds began getting streaks from the indirect light of the sun. Rainbows came out. The blue of the sky darkened in hue. And everything around us began to dim.
Moments before the sun was completely covered, I saw something I would not have seen with my glasses on — the NASA plane that was following the eclipse zoomed by at Mach 2. The shadow of the moon moves over 1,000 miles per hour, and the plane rocketed past us at an arc no commercial jet would carry. I resolved to be on that plane someday (other civilians have managed it — I believe I can, too).
The sky is very dark, and everything around us is quieting. The cicadas have stopped, and the crickets are singing. The birds, too, have gone to roost. Nothing seems to be moving anymore. Twilight is upon us in the middle of the day.
Everyone is looking up. I’m holding on to my friends, in part for balance, and in part because we are excited. Many in the parking area are speaking, but it’s unconscious, words like “here it comes” and “it’s happening”, a gut reaction acting as pressure valve for the excitement without full understanding for what’s about to happen.
I ooh and ahh as the light in my glasses disappears. The lenses are so dark that only the sun could penetrate, and the sun is only a sliver, then a pinhole, and then…
It’s gone.
I remove my glasses.
And look up.
It’s a cliche among those who have seen an eclipse, but there’s nothing else to describe what I saw: there’s a hole in the sky. A black hole with radiant light bursting around it. And I can’t help but start laughing.
The rainbows are gone, the shadows are gone, the light is gone. The only reason we’re not in total darkness is thanks to a large thundercloud right behind us, reflecting the sunlight back.
And I’m laughing like an idiot because the animal in me has taken over and is wondering what the hell is going on.
Kris is beside me, crying.
Adam is pacing and laughing with excitement.
The two-year-old baby with the women next to us begins to cry. She doesn’t understand what happened to the world. Everything has gone silver. The color has drained from the trees and sky. The cars don’t shine. The crickets are out. The warmth has gone from the world.
There’s nothing that I can tell you to describe what it was truly like. All the words in the world won’t do, because words are logical. Words are math for meaning. They approximate emotion and definition but they are not experience. The language is never created for something that happens so rarely. There are no words.
I wish there had been more time. A minute and a half is so short when you’re experiencing something so magnificent. I can’t tell you what anyone said during totality. I only know that I was laughing the entire time.
And then, the pinhole sun peeked from the other side of the moon, and we returned our glasses to our faces. The moon rushed on at a thousand miles an hour, and it was over.
Seeing the other side of the eclipse is less exciting compared to the build up and totality. We didn’t stare long, this time. I removed my glasses and looked around. I watched the color come back to the trees. I listened as the cicadas remembered who they were and began to buzz once more. The birds began to sing. We talked and laughed with our neighbors, asking if this was their first, trying to describe it ourselves.
I am the converted. I will eclipse chase as long as I live. I can’t equate it to much, but I suspect it’s something like sky diving. One’s world is so altered from usual reality that something primal happens. This is but a glimpse into why space men never really come home. It reminds me of a quote from the TV show Firefly, during the episode “Safe” when the crew transports cattle from one world to another.
“They weren’t cows inside. They were waiting to be, but they forgot. Now they see sky, and they remember what they are.”
For the moment of totality, I was no longer me. I stopped worrying about bills, clients, accounts, speaking engagements, and social media. I was no longer the woman in the middle of editing her 72,000 word book. I wasn’t selling, wasn’t buying, wasn’t strategizing.
I was just a human animal looking at the sky in awe.
