“Totality is in five minutes.”
A young man wearing a brown leather stetson and matching duster–like we were staging a production of Annie Get Your Gun, not waiting for an eclipse–was walking from group to group around the park, giving out stage directions.
We all nodded and smiled, even though he was about ten minutes off. A nearby mother had been announcing the countdown to totality, scheduled for 3:06pm, to her children, and we were all eagerly eavesdropping.
“Sixteen minutes!” she yelled, and her two sons leapt with excitement, her dog barked, and her husband continued to snap endless photos, his solar glasses held over the lens of his phone.
This was my first total solar eclipse, and it was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever experienced.
I was at a small-town park, a spot I picked on a map an hour and a half’s drive away. It was a baseball/soccer field park with plenty of parking, right in the path of totality.
When I arrived the parking lot was near-full, but there was still plenty of room for me. I set up a chair in a grassy area, around other people.
Families played soccer, tossed frisbees. The concession stand distributed nachos and hotdogs. The atmosphere was festive.
As the light dimmed people kept looking up through their protective glasses and exclaiming. The family beside me (“Six minutes!” the Mom called) wore matching eclipse t-shirts for the occasion. The two boys, maybe 9 and 11, kept yelling to their father, “Dad, it’s getting dark! Look! LOOK! This. Is. CRAZY!”
They were very hyped. The dad seemed less vocal but just as enthused. And their dog kept barking; I’m not sure it understood what was happening, but it joined in the fun.
And then: “One minute!”
Totality itself was so gradual and then so sudden. Things got dimmer and colder for an hour, and then wham—darkness.
“It’s like someone turned off the lights!” someone behind me yelled.
The bottom of the sky was like just after the sun goes down except not to the west but in all directions–a reddish horizon of light 360 degrees around us. But other than that the sky was dark. The stars came out as though it was night.
The sun backlit the moon. During totality the sun is lighting up the topography on the edges of the moon, a phenomenon called Bailey’s beads, after Francis Bailey who first recorded it. If you zoomed in you could see the mountains and divots standing out along the moon’s edge.
The birds grew silent in the darkness, though it was difficult to tell initially with all the people cheering. People clapped and yelled throughout the park—it was like being at a festival when the main act arrives on stage.
They cheered at the moment of totality, but there was an eerie quiet during the three minutes of darkness, which flew by. The applause erupted even louder when it ended, as though we were all grateful to have witnessed this once-in-a-lifetime performance.
The mother of the two boys beside me was thrilled, louder than almost anyone else, voice cutting the quiet. She hadn’t said much before (besides her minutes count), but during the three minutes of darkness she cried out in delight. “I’m so glad we did this! I love this! OH!”
Everyone, including me, was smiling.
I’m not sure why. I’m not sure why the eclipse was such a joyful thing. It was spectacular, uncommon, fleeting. The best things are. But it was also a reminder of our place in the universe, how small we are, how we are a pinpoint on a sphere, revolving around a ball of light.
And yet people didn’t seem to feel insignificant. On the contrary, they seemed to feel lucky. Lucky that they had witnessed this rare behind the scenes glimpse into the intricacies of our wild space voyage.
I imagine that this is what it must have felt like to be at a temple or pyramid or earthen mound hundreds or thousands of years ago, watching celestial events with our communities.
The light shines through the massive rocks of Stonehenge, just at the right moment, lighting them in just the right way. The crowd erupts in cheers.
For this moment we feel in control of our spinning rock—we predicted the heavens! But also we feel aligned with them–with our earth, with our sky, and all the wonders they both provide. We feel a part of that alignment, if only for a few moments. That is a feeling worth celebrating.