Excitement about the eclipse didn’t hit me until a week before. We’d been talking about it in our community for months. Despite the televised shortage of eclipse glasses, many of us bought ours well in advance in preparation. Almost all small towns in our area that were directly in the path had some sort of party. Local government officials scrambled to estimate how many visitors we should expect, with some predicting highs of 250,000 visitors to our small county. Bread, eggs, and milk cleared shelves and plans for school, work, and anything else that Monday were canceled or postponed. Law enforcement and other emergency personnel called everyone in for service and spread them at strategic locations across the area. News vans setup live Facebook coverage and as the time drew nearer, live television broadcasts. It felt like a holiday weekend at the beach. As a resident you know something big and exciting is happening but you just want to touch the outside edge, not get too close to the middle of it.
Monday arrived and I was glad I took the day off from work. I could hardly contain my excitement. I checked traffic delays and despite suggesting there is no way I would be on the road, decided to go through drive-through at a fast food place nearby. Traffic was much busier than usual but the area hadn’t been paralyzed, thankfully. The few people I bumped into on this short trip all spoke of the craziness and hoped they would be able to take a break for a few minutes to view totality. I hope they did. On the way home I saw more license plates for other states than our own. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood.
Around 1 PM I scrambled to setup a GoPro camera to attempt a timelapse. I promised myself I wasn’t going to spend the entire time with my face in a gadget so this was my backup plan to try and capture some of it for later. I should have planned ahead a little because for some reason my GoPro wifi password didn’t work and resetting it didn’t help. Of all times to experience some weird problem, I thought. I struggled to set the camera up using the tiny LCD screen with the help of YouTube videos that were much longer than they had to be. By this time the moon had already begun to budge in front of the soon. I setup the GoPro, huffed and puffed a little because I was annoyed and then sat down in a lawn chair under a tree in our front yard. I remember thinking what the heck were we going to do for an hour or so before totality but this time went by incredibly fast, especially as we periodically peeked at the sun using our eclipse glasses. We looked around to see if we could find the crescents we were told to expect in the shadows but didn’t see them right away. They eventually showed up on flat surfaces and then everywhere we looked. I took lots of pictures of these, exclaiming every time like a big kid discovering a geocache.
As totality approached, the reduced light was noticeable and it had an eerie look. It wasn’t like a storm cloud covering the sun or dusk but more like looking through tinted glass covering my entire head. Nearby some of our community was gathered and I could sense the excitement building. It was contagious. Knowing the time was approaching, we got into position. Darkness came fast, the shadow of the moon traveling at over 1,800 mph and crossing the US in 90 minutes. We took off our glasses and looked up.
When we tell people about the Grand Canyon, we never feel our descriptions are adequate enough to convey the enormity of it, the important of experiencing it. It just comes off sounding silly and over-hyped. Life-changing can’t be explained or demonstrated, it must be felt. That is how it felt looking at the sun with the moon perfectly covering it. Sure, it was a big black dot with a brilliant glow surrounding it, with waves of light moving in waves all around it. But there is something about seeing a thing so rare most people you meet have never seen it. There is something about a moment when three planets are in perfect alignment and you’re in the center of it. The goosebumps weren’t just from the almost 10-degree drop in temperature but in the fact that at that very moment millions of people were looking up at the sky with tears in their eyes, clapping, cheering, hugging each other…experiencing the eclipse.
And now I know why people drive a thousand miles, fly across an ocean, brave crowds, and spend lots of money trying to see a total eclipse one more time. I plan to join them in seven years.