Tag: eclipse

Last time, I wrote about my experience of getting to and from the eclipse. But what of the eclipse itself?

I was at my friend’s house in Vermont for the big event. The conditions were not ideal. The sky was a little cloudy and where we were the totality lasted a bare minute. And yet it worked its magic all the same. It only takes a second to drive a spike through your soul. What had I just seen?

Of course, I knew what I had seen. Mr. Moon had simply dragged his cloak across Madame Sun. No big deal. The science is well understood, and the pictures have all been taken. We’ve done modern, thank you very much. Might as well stay home, now that you mention it.

But I didn’t want to stay home. I wanted to go full medieval. I wanted to lean into the ancient raw experience as much as possible. Thinking with the old brain. What would it feel like to be plunged into this baffling cauldron?

Here’s what it felt like: It was disorienting. It was shockingly visceral. It was terrifying.

I don’t want to give the impression that I was genuinely frightened in any conventional sense. Instead, rather than repeating a scientific catechism to dampen the vibrations of wonder, I gave my psyche plenty of slack to indulge in the cosmic dread of this mystery. This is a high-stakes game, yes? Day, month, year… our very notion of time is based on the dance of these objects. When they misbehave, you feel the quaking deep in your bones.

Photo courtesy of Caspar Hare

Our viewing party was on the side of a mountain, which gave us excellent landscape views of the approaching shadow carpet. As the moonstone slowly rolled in front of the sun’s face, I had the distinct feeling that something very wrong is happening, and I can’t stop it. I got chills. My bowels felt loose. It was as if the moon was methodically driving a stick into god’s eye. “Don’t do that,” I thought. “No good will come of that.”

Science tells us all the whens and wheres of an eclipse. Clutching maps and smartphones, it’s easy to feel clever as the big moment approaches. Then you start to feel not so clever. This thing is enormous, bigger than expected. It looms over mind and soul. Is it too late to hide under a bucket? As the ratcheting moon closes daylight’s door, I think, here we are at the top of the roller coaster. What happens next? We know and we don’t know. I am anxious, alarmed. Good lord! What happens next? We want to know and we don’t want to know.

The first act, a waning sliver of crescent sun, is nearly over. It’s been a good show, but the instant of the totality comes as a shocking discontinuity, as if announced by the report of a cannon. Act two is more remarkable than act one by a factor of ten thousand. You take off your solar safety goggles and step blinking into a new world, like a visitor to a strange planet. You want to shout and be quiet at the same time. Somehow the silence of the spectacle emphasizes its enormity. There is no fanfare, only a vast, predatory shade.

What… did you do… to my sun?!

What is this place that I thought I knew?

Where the sun should be, where the sun was only seconds before and where it by right ought to remain, there is a smoking hole, a gaping wound in the sky, a crater. It is a black drain sucking at the scraps of remaining light. A gasping mouth, blind and hungry. It is large and close, hanging just above me, searching for me with its unseeing eye, with its ravenous mouth. It is at once menacing, appalling, thrilling. May the door close before it finds me!

The appearance is surreal. It looks cartoonish, unnaturally diagrammatic, like something a third-grader would draw. It seems to dance, more colorful and dynamic than I expected. A void surrounded by a thin filament of pale fire. Small orange and magenta gemstones of flame decorate the bottom of the disk.

I had the feeling that, even though the sun was being masked, something was being revealed rather than hidden. It was as if we were illuminating the workshop of the heavens. You see the gearwork of the implacable clock, and it does not reassure. The sky is not an image painted on the backdrop of a set. The sky is a blind machine that can go to pieces at any minute. This is the horror of vivisection, the bloody beating heart of the solar system. Earthbound motes, we dangle between hammer and anvil, forever at the whim of the cosmic smith.

And then BOOP! the light switches on again. Act three. All is well. Move along, people. Move along. What had I just seen? What happened? I had survived something harrowing. Something I will remember for a long time.

I have a friend who has noted my tendency to catastrophize: “You could make a sunset sound like the apocalypse.” That’s true enough, and it would make a good topic for another day. Even so, I’m glad I took the opportunity to see the eclipse like a medieval peasant. Ye gods, it was a hell of a show.

So I drove to Vermont to see the eclipse today (spoiler: the sky was bright, then dark, then bright again).

Months ago I had decided I wasn’t going to fly to Texas or anything to see this eclipse. So I kind of mentally checked out about it until it was nearly here. Then a friend who has a house in Vermont texted me: “Hey, come up to see the eclipse.” It wasn’t until I looked at the shadow’s path on a map that I realized exactly how close the totality was going to be to me. It was going to sail right over my friend’s house, and remarkably, the weather looked promising. I had never before witnessed a total eclipse, and suddenly here was an invitation that required only a three-hour jaunt north and a day off work.

Okay, I’m game. Let’s make this work.

The situation was complicated by the fact that I have an electric car with only 200 miles of range. I would need to charge once on the way up and once on the way back. The Tesla supercharger network is pretty well filled out these days, but this trip was going to take me right through one of the sparser areas on the whole east coast. More to the point, there was going to be an extraordinary crush of people on their way to the same party. Many of them would be in Teslas hungry for the same electrons as me. I feared that there was a big demographic overlap between people who travel to see eclipses and people who drive electric cars. My fear, as it happened, was justified.

I decided to drive up the night before to see if I could avoid some of the rush. The traffic wasn’t bad, and at 10:30 PM, I turned into a dark shopping center complex in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. I was looking for a set of 16 Tesla superchargers, and as I came around the side of the building, I saw that all but two of the charging stations were already occupied. I had a spot, but it was disconcerting to see how busy the place was at such a late hour. It ratcheted up my anxiety for the next day. I knew I was going to have to come back to this very spot tomorrow afternoon when the traffic would be much worse. There were simply no other alternatives. My late night pre-eclipse charge took a half hour, and then I was on my way.

The next day was the eclipse: bright, dark, bright. I think I mentioned that already. Just as soon as the totality was over, I hopped in my car and headed south. I wanted to beat the crowds, but almost immediately I was in a dispiriting amount of traffic. Clever as I was, it seems that other people had conceived much the same plan. The bums. I now faced something like an hour on I-89 before I would get back to the West Lebanon superchargers. And every minute I wondered how long the line of thirsty Teslas would be. I mentally prepared to spend hours in that parking lot.

Pulling off the highway, I couldn’t help but notice the large number of other Teslas using the same exit. My blood pressure was rising. Then at last came the moment of truth. I turned into the shopping center lot and found a queue of a couple dozen cars ahead of me. I was actually relieved. I had my place in line, and now I could just wait. Charging takes a while… how quickly would we advance? I arrived just before 5 PM, and about fifty minutes later I was at the front. Once plugged in, it took another half hour before I could finally start the last leg of my voyage home.

What was my takeaway from the experience? Going electric in this case was indeed a nuisance, but I’m still a believer. This was a rare situation. I have never before had to wait in a line just to charge my car. And a total eclipse certainly qualifies as an extraordinary event that would stress the network to its limit. They’re not going to size the network based on eclipses. Despite my delays, the system held up pretty well. People were in good spirits and behaved well. The chargers did their work quickly enough, all things considered. If I had had access to a gas-powered car for this trip, I probably would have taken it. But I didn’t, and I was happy enough with how things turned out.

After all that, was my drive to the eclipse worth it? Yes. That dark part, when our smiling sun was crushed into a smoldering gasping mouth, hovering just overhead, blind, hungry, and dripping flame? That was terrifying. Worth the trip. Five stars, would go again, electric car and all.