Awesome Indeed!

Well, we drove from the outskirts of New York City, to Ithaca, New York, and then further north to get under the total eclipse, then northeast to a town called Old Forge, New York. That added up to about seven hours of driving.

       Old Forge had become our destination that morning because it was possible to read the various weather forecasts, which uniformly foretold clouds, as allowing that there just might be a break in those clouds in the neighborhood of Old Forge in the neighborhood of 3 p.m. on Eclipse Day.

       And there was indeed some blue in the sky when we arrived. But the gray coming from the west seemed in the process of overwhelming it, and the eclipse was still a half hour away. So, we got back in the car, the lead of a three-car caravan, and kept driving east—racing the clouds—until it became clear that they were moving faster than we could drive.

       Then we parked and surmounted a hill that seemed likely to have a view of the sun (or its absence). And we glanced up and realized that the sun was powerful enough to shine (or suddenly stop shining) through those run-of-the-mill clouds. And we looked out toward the horizon and realized that it was getting steadily darker. And we put on those cheap avoid-blindness glasses and looked up. And we saw that the moon had already devoured most of the sun and that the sun had been transmogrified.

        The eclipse was, in other words, very much underway: an accelerated “sunset” in the middle of the day, a darkness whose approach was almost visible, with the sun, safely stared at through those glasses, recast as a moon-like crescent.

         That was what most people in the northeast were seeing, with the size of that crescent varying. But, since all that driving had brought us into the “zone of totality,” we also saw something else.

         The crescent became a sliver and then disappeared entirely. Then came the wow—the whoa! the holy-shit! the awesome!—moment. We took off our glasses and looked up once again. And, with the sun entirely blacked out by the moon, the sun’s corona had suddenly become visible: a fiery halo around a black void, with a few tiny, jewel-like “Baily’s Beads” shimmering in pink on its inner edge.

         The moon, when properly aligned, can entirely block out the sun, while letting the sun’s corona shine through, because—remarkably, presumably coincidentally—our moon and our sun occupy more or less exactly the same amount of space in Earth’s sky. (A fact non-religious folks like me ought occasionally to ponder.) This is not the case on Saturn, Mars or any other planet.

So, from a solar-system perspective, if not from a galaxy perspective, total solar eclipses like this—that allow viewing of a star’s, corona—must not only be wondrous and lovely but unique to our planet.

This total eclipse lasted a few minutes before—glasses back on—the sun reassuringly began to peek out of its hiding place. (I had, of course, been confident that it would. However, I couldn’t help thinking that our ancestors might not have been similarly confident.) The show set about ending. Normality, reasserted itself in sky and on earth—with the exception of the New York Thruway, where traffic was much worse than normal. It took us seven hours to drive back to Brooklyn.

So 14 hours in the car for maybe ten minutes of celestial fireworks. I won’t mention any names, but some of the family members who shared car rides with me questioned whether it was worth it.

I didn’t. I don’t.

          And, yes, I do realize that a lot of what amazed me was in my head: the knowledge, to begin with, that the little pas de deux in the sky I was observing was really being performed by an unimaginably large star and a relatively large moon. And I know and appreciate that no heavenly bodies were injured in the spectacle: the moon didn’t really inflict any damage upon the sun.

          However, if celestial things ever want to appear to black-out each other or suddenly reveal their coronas or otherwise behave in an extraordinary, though similarly benign, fashion, I’m down for it. Same goes for terrestrial occurrences, as long as no one’s getting hurt. And maybe too for some larger human-generated things—for the weird, the extraordinary, the spectacular benignly asserting themselves: Springsteen at Met Life Stadium, for example.

Will pay high ticket prices or travel large distances, by plane or car or ship or mule, for awe.