Totality
On eclipse chasing
In August 2017 most of what was my social group carpooled from Seattle to Portland to witness the total solar eclipse. I chose to defy what I felt an excessive amount of hype and curmudgeonly stayed home, though catching a partial eclipse as a darkened apartment unit and a hundred crescent shadows.
In December 2021 I jumped through a million hoops at the height of the pandemic to try and see the eclipse off the Antarctic coast, but the only totality that day was the cloud coverage. The brief environmental dimness felt this time like mockery, but at least I couldn’t blame myself since I really had pulled out all the stops to stand there. Although: I would not trade that experience for clear skies and full eclipse, having instead encountered some deeply fascinating, equally obsessed and in all likelihood perhaps more than slightly unhinged characters on the last-minute cruise we’d each scrambled to secure after our first choice company cancelled, in a somewhat hilarious but altogether truly rather horrid way, the one we’d all booked, some of us years in advance.
Today is April 8, 2024 and I have finally beheld my first properly total solar eclipse: at the Riverfront Park in Little Rock, where I flew impromptu redeye from cloudier Austin. There was a large stadium with a band playing Pink Floyd instrumentals while the moon fulfilled its engulf. There was a group of Black Israelites with loudspeakers preaching passionately about the end of days, YOU, ARE ABOUT TO WITNESS, A PROPHECY OF BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS… AMERICA IS ABOUT TO BE JUDGED… AMERICA SAYS, A HOUSE DIVIDED WILL NOT STAND. A HOUSE, DIVIDED, WILL. NOT. STAND. and the fervor of such belief must be quite lovely to have course through one’s veins were not the failure, as we know, so guaranteed in every attempt, however endearing, to persuade oneself through the tragically speculative social fiat of minds not one’s that something more obtains. And there was I, on the grass with my backpack as headrest, EclipSmart binoculars ready at hand, and for two minutes and thirty seconds the hole in my heart disappeared.