Thursday, August 24, 2017

The Eclipse of 2017

One of the big themes this summer has been the eclipse, and preparations for our Michigan cousins to visit. The whole thing was kind of like New Year’s: All the preparation and anticipation; then the compression of time the closer we got to the event (the family visit and logistics) and finally the eclipse itself, which seemed to last about ten seconds, and then it was over—we were spewed out the other side of the event and into the vastness of the future, the rest of our lives, all the stuff we weren’t thinking about as we were focusing on the point of time that was the boundary.

I used the event of my brother’s and cousins’ visit as a catalyst for doing a great deal of straightening, cleaning, and fixing up of our place. It hasn’t looked this good in a long time. It’s still not a showplace, but it’s much, much improved. And the progress we’ve made on the house, I think, will motivate us to do more—to continue the trend. “An object in motion . . .”

I have to admit that the eclipse itself underwhelmed me somewhat—Annie Dillard’s masterful essay “Total Eclipse” had me psyched and ready for a spiritually, existentially, chronologically, anthropologically (etc., etc.) moving experience. But the silence of it, the gradual movement into darkness was more subtle than I’d expected. It looked a lot like an approaching thunderstorm, which is normal enough around here, especially with a line of puffy cumulous, as there was, along the northern horizon. It just looked like a thunderstorm on the way. Or passing us by on the north.

Sue and I opted to view the eclipse by ourselves, while the rest of the family viewed it from near my parents’ home in Columbia (in the parking lot of a Baptist church, where a nearby lawn-mowing man didn’t ever stop mowing the lawn to view the eclipse). Sue and I didn’t want to spend our precious few minutes of totality in a parking lot. We invited the others to join us at our spot, but none of them felt confident there wouldn’t be horrible traffic between Columbia and our soybean field—and who wants to see an eclipse from a traffic jam?

I felt strongly that because it’s a natural event, I wanted to be in nature. I didn’t want to be with the hordes at the state capitol, or the crowds at Columbia’s official viewing party. Ugh! Later, we watched the NASA broadcast that had shown the Jeff City capitol area, and they actually had people blowing AIR HORNS to signal the beginning and end of totality. Godawful ~~~AIR HORNS!~~~ I’m soooooooo glad I wasn’t there.

Weeks before the eclipse, Sue and I had scouted out a little “numbered” county road (479) just southwest of the tiny town of Mokane. It was almost right on the center line of totality. This little road is a straight line between MO 94 and a Conservation Department access point (the Mokane Access) on the Missouri River. It’s in the broad, flat river bottoms, with wide-open sky, and except for a strip of forested land along the river, soybean fields all around.

On the morning of August 21, 2017, the great eclipse-viewing day, we packed our stuff into Sue’s truck: lawn chairs, our patio umbrella, and an ice chest full of beverages and comestibles. And we set out for our spot. We expected to see a lot of crazy traffic, but that wasn’t ever the case, before or after.

We got there super early, which was fine, because we spent time just enjoying the anticipation and taking pictures of insects and things. Of course! Like this peacock fly and straight-lanced meadow katydid.

We were a little worried about a pretty persistent layer of gauzy clouds that would seem to be in the wrong part of the sky during totality, but those clouds pretty much cleared up just in time, and what was left of them created cool, moody atmospheric effects all around the sky. (St. Joseph, to our northwest, was screwed, however, with thick clouds.)

The silvery light before totality was pretty interesting, and it might be what I will remember the most. Since we were parked on a (limestone) gravel road through soybean fields, the contrasty lighting was especially pronounced, since the shadows cast by the broad leaflets of soybeans already look kind of sharp, and the plants nearby were coated with white dust from the gravel road.

We got a good view of the sunset/twilight effect on the horizon, with yellow, salmon, pink hues all around us. It kept getting more and more interesting! We kept saying: Wow . . . look at that!

From a line of trees off to the south, close to the river, a colony of scissors-grinder cicadas, which usually only chorus in the evening, sang when it got dark: wheee-ooo, wheee-ooo, wheee-oooooo . . .

Using solar sunglasses, we didn’t see the diamond-ring effect or Bailey’s beads before totality; the last edge of the sun just seemed to “wink out” in the glasses—when we removed the glasses, all that could be seen was just the darkness of the moon and the corona. . . . And a really interestingly blue sky, a color that doesn’t show up in any of the photos people took.

Instead of looking like something . . . dynamic, or tremendous, the eclipsed sun mainly just looked weird, like a new kind of star, a black moon, or a small cloud, or a balloon. A tiny round hole in the sky that hadn’t been there before. Knowing it would only last a few minutes, we looked around and tried to notice as much stuff as possible. We kept spinning around and pointing: “WOW! Look at THAT! . . . Oh, WOW, look at THIS!” We saw some pink prominences. And although we got something like 2 minutes and 40 seconds of totality, it seemingly lasted about ten seconds.

We did see the diamond-ring effect as it left totality, then everything started happening in reverse, and we watched the shadow drift away from us toward Kentucky.

My camera and video recorder, with their automatic light metering, didn’t capture the true changes in the amount of light. They kept compensating for the darkness, and lightening the images. I’ll have to remember that in 2024.

We were not the only people on our little gravel road—there were about fifteen other vehicles, which all arrived after we’d settled in. Some of the cars that drove by were hauling boats, heading to the MDC river access, to no doubt see the eclipse from the water. (That’d be sweet, eh?) Of the viewers parked along the road, we saw license plates from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Ontario. Some of these folks packed up and took off as soon as totality was over; others took longer to leave. We stayed the longest.

The other cars were pretty far away from us, but most of the people seemed to have some sort of setup like ours: a patio umbrella, a few chairs, an ice chest.

My photographic capabilities are quite limited, and so is my knowledge. I did venture to take one picture of the sun, once it was getting close to totality (I could tell because I was using my protective eclipse-viewing glasses). The sun, of course, was all blown out in the photo, but the lens flare, below it, replicated the crescent shape of the sun, rather like a pinhole camera. Anyway, I thought it was cool.

I didn’t spend any time trying to take photos during the eclipse; I only took pictures beforehand of the place, our setup, the road, the horizon, the soybeans, the insects. Then, a few minutes before totality, I started my video camera (on a tripod, aimed at the northwest horizon) and just let it run and record what we were saying. I’d share it with you, but it’s nearly 530 MB and I don’t know how to upload it without completely destroying the quality of sound and image. I guess I need to upload it to YouTube, then embed it here. (Sheesh, so much work.)

But anyway, we fiddled with our cameras, video, tripods so much during the hours before the eclipse that we didn’t have our picnic before, but after. So while the other cars were departing, we broke out our little fruit, wine, and cheese party.

Everyone had been warned that there could be some serious traffic before, during, and after the eclipse, so we weren’t interested in getting involved in it. As it turned out, the crowds were seemingly minimal except at major highway interchanges and bridges.

I have real sympathy for our local restaurateurs, who were told by festival planners and city officials to expect lots and lots of business . . . and it was a big fizzle. The restaurants had stocked up on foodstuffs, then, for many of them: hardly a customer. True, the motels were all completely booked months ago, but apparently not many people ate out. It might have been that the locals were scared away from the town center by the warnings of possible traffic.

But who can blame anyone for such guesses being wrong? This kind of event has never happened before in the United States, and there were hundreds and thousands of places where people could go to see it, ranging from big, organized city festivals, to nearly anyone’s backyard, to our lonely sea of soybeans along the Missouri River.

No comments: