A Sense of Where You Are: The Great American Eclipse of 2017

She sat in the middle of the field’s dry stubble, with her braided pigtails and her paisley shorts. “Which way is north, Mom?” She crossed her arms over her chest, playfully pointing in different directions. “Which way is east?” She wiggled her fingers as if the answer was in the air. It wasn’t a question as much as a clarification of her confusion: Where are we?I’d been watching as she and her family pedaled their bikes up to the top of the Buena Vista hill. I would learn later that they’d taken the train from Eugene to downtown Albany, Oregon early that morning, then ridden their bikes ten miles north and west through our little town and up this winding road to the top of the hill. There were hundreds of people like them who’d traveled by plane or train, by bus or car or bike, often great distances, for that summer morning, come right here to stand in the path of totality, to witness the Great American Eclipse of 2017.

Most people drive up the Buena Vista hill from the south, at first winding through flat fields of flowering meadow-grasses, crossing a river, then up through blueberry fields and hazelnut orchards and a half dozen farm homes far off the road. The two-lane road in late summer is lined with Queen Anne Lace. The top of the hill is a glorious wide-open vista; you can swing full circle from the green western hills, to the wide northern plains, to the eastern foothills below the Cascade Mountains. Then that wide fertile valley of fruit and nut orchards rolls up to the Willamette River and the green hills beyond. It’s a back road place any other time. But for the solar eclipse, it had become an outdoor theater for people as far away as Vancouver BC, Perth, Australia, Eugene, Oregon.

This hill is holy ground for me. I have stood on this hill, some six miles from my home, a dozen summer mornings for sunrise, watched the landscape take on color, the fog and cold rising up from the valley floor. Been launched slowly into daylight as on some ship of faith and love of light and warmth. I’ve stood on this hill, this celestial observatory for moon risings and settings. Buena Vista is where our family comes for meteor showers and lunar eclipses and the super moon.

I came late in life to navigating a sense of place; I still struggle when I’m in a new environment trying to get my bearings. But I’ve been working hard on this. And these past few years, I’ve learned to tune my directionals at the top of Buena Vista hill with these celestial turnings, sun’s risings, moon’s settings. At a busy train station, for instance on the first morning in a new city, I think, Sun rising over Mount Jefferson and begin from there. Which way is north, Mama? I wish I’d wondered when I was eight. I watched her that summer morning, that young girl in her paisley shorts, whose first gesture was to locate herself, with a bit of admiration tinged with envy.

It is thrilling to stare, through protective glasses, at our star, to look directly through the cosmic heat and flares, to “see” the circle of the sun, its round edges, its perfect strength.

Naturally, we chose that hill for our eclipse observatory. We planned for months with friends and family who came from Seattle and California, Portland and Eugene. We’d been preparing as if we were hosting a sacred ceremony in our back yard, festooning lighted hop vines between oaks, arranging outdoor tables and sleeping areas. A friend brought a homemade beer keg. We feasted on dishes made fresh from our summer gardens. We took turns reading out loud, in our backyard circle, excerpts from Annie Dillard’s classic essay, “Total Eclipse” (1982). We shuddered together imagining what Dillard described as the soon to arrive “swift shadow cone of the moon,” which is 195 miles wide and travels 1,800 miles an hour, “hauling darkness like plague behind it.” In our backyard woodland, we might have been in a forest clearing in a long-ago simpler time preparing for a sun worship ritual. We forgot—collectively—about the plague-of-madness that is Trump. We were surrounded by enchantment. Someone played a ukulele. Night’s darkness settled gently, when we weren’t paying any attention to the thinning light, rapt in our stories and song. We slept out under the stars, each one of us trying to imagine which stars we might see in the next morning’s eclipsed sky. 

But the feeling I woke with was fear, fear tinged with excitement and anxiety. I was jumpy and irrational. It was primal, a wildness, untamed by knowing, in kinship with our ancients, whose explanations of the sudden total darkness were driven by their supernatural wisdom and their deep morality. Our word eclipse comes from the Greek ekleipo, meaning “abandonment.” The sun was abandoning us, turning its back on what ancients described as our sin-ravaged earth. In an account of an 1177 BC total eclipse in Homer’s Odyssey, that darkness is evil: “And the sun has perished out of heaven and an evil mist hovers over all.” Even in our more modern interpretations, we have ascribed a moral meaning, reading cosmic signs in the darkness. Preacher Nat Turner took the solar eclipse of February 1831 in Southampton, Virginia as a sign from God that the time to rise up and revolt had come. Darkness, as we’ve always known (and feared), is deeper and older than the light. 

We woke that summer morning to clear skies and a gentle landscape with warm breezes. We rose from our scattered backyard beds, had breakfast, counseled each other on the proper way to wear our eclipse “glasses,” packed ourselves and folding chairs into several cars and made our way the six miles to the top of the hill. Buena Vista had transformed from what I’ve always known as a private landscape into a festival arena; hundreds of people had camped out on an adjoining hill and were in various stages of rising and preparing. Our group of twelve scattered. Walking the road between the hills, we heard different languages in greeting. Like a set in a sci-fi thriller, those clear moments just before the apocalypse, common but disconnected elements were coming together: an emergency vehicle sped through one way and then back again minutes later, practicing its siren call. In the growing anticipation—all at-the-same-time—dozens of cell-phones pinged in unison across the hills, the same state emergency-alert: “Do not leave parked cars unattended.” I was anxious. I was jumpy. Where were my children? “Can you see Mount Jefferson from here?” Annie asked. I swung around searching the horizon, not knowing now, as if I were searching that horizon for the very first time. Which way is east? In the distance a red hot-air balloon was hovering. Scattered groups were doing sun salutations. That young girl was cartwheeling in circles, pigtails flying. Where was my husband? Stay close, I begged, because we had begun. 

It is thrilling to stare at the sun. It is thrilling to stare, through protective glasses, at our star, to look directly through the cosmic heat and flares, to “see” the circle of the sun, its round edges, its perfect strength. Just after nine a.m. with the sun a quarter way to zenith, rising in the eastern sky, we watched as at first a tiny crescent disappeared. Hollers across the hillsides! That shared giddiness. We were patient, vigilant, gazing with our protective glasses, throughout this initial stage, which lasts over an hour. The sun appeared to go through phases, like the waning moon, from full to gibbous to half-sun to a silver sliver. The winds shifted, strengthened. On this warm summer morning, we reached for our sweaters and jackets. We held hands, we did sun salutations, we stared and we stared at the sun as it disappeared in our morning sky.

Colors thinned. Colors thinned to something like silver quickly as the blues deepened in the growing darkness. “Oh my god! Oh my god!” my son screamed, looking at his hands which had flattened to platinum, which were not his hands. And I remember the cool winds. Quickly, in seconds, all that was familiar was falling away. A heavy howling private silence drawing us down. And then in an instant: Darkness.

It was a transport to another world in this one. Not in this time, but of this place, the earth gone dark and cold in an instant, that we were the only ones here, that there was nowhere but here. We were screaming; across the hills everyone was screaming. Slack-jawed, we stumbled in crazy circles. Eyes gaping we searched our shadowed landscape; we’d fallen into the darkness primeval. 

“It had been like dying,” wrote Annie Dillard of the 1979 eclipse. The first time I read her essay, “Total Eclipse,” this single line disturbed me, frightened and intrigued me—dying! —my own realized. I’ve turned that line over and over since, seeing my own experience with totality refracted through her simple simile. “There is another world,” wrote Rilke, “but it is this one.” Do those words come closer to the truth of my experience? A darkness that reveals colors never seen or felt before, colors that wash over the landscape. The way that darkness takes a sunny summer hillside in the blink of an eye. I understand now why people become so entranced by totality that they follow eclipses around the world. Why ancients, so terrified by the sudden transformation, died of fright. Why people weep and scream and change their lives. Why Annie Dillard’s simile is so apt.

I have returned to that hillside a dozen-dozen times since the eclipse, circling, picking up these pieces to recreate our two moments of totality, to give language to this experience. “All those things for which we have no words are lost,” wrote Annie Dillard.

The darkness came out of the west. 

Why, when the new moon “rose” that summer morning, why did the shadow arrive out of a western sky? 

It has to do, I’ve since read, with the relative speed we’re all orbiting: the earth, the moon, the sun. It has to do with the relation of space and time, of motion and gravity. It has to do, scientists explain, with “the difference between angular speed and linear speed,” a physics which will always be beyond my comprehension. I try to “see”—from the perspective of a northern star—moon circling earth, earth circling sun. Sun spiraling with 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way swirling among billions of galaxies in the universe. Which way is north? The felt experience, the speed and gravity of eclipsed darkness, has forever loosened my grip. “In a dark time,” the poet Roethke writes, “the eye begins to see.” The darkness, the moon’s shadow, arrived out of a western sky. In the perfect line-up of Sun to Moon to the Buena Vista Hill one summer morning in a Saros Cycle, I felt my place in the cosmos. 

The moon was new that morning. But was not invisible. The new moon, for two moments, was completely full, its darkness silhouetted by the sun’s corona. An ebony moon with a crown of golden flares. The most majestic celestial image I have ever witnessed. Scientists tell us that earth’s surface swells upwards on a hill that is in line with moon eclipsing sun. I felt that pull. I feel it still. 

It was like an awakening that morning, when suddenly the light returned, all-at-once. We who had been stumbling, slack-jawed, weeping and screaming, alone together, we were saved in an instant by the light. Brilliant sunlight illuminated everything all-at-once with color and texture and warmth. It was the first moment. What happened next? We looked around the hillside. People were giddy, smiling and laughing, stretching and staring into space. We began again by sharing our stories. “What was it like for you?” “What did you see?” “I’m pretty sure I saw Venus and Mercury,” Kathleen said. Miles was pointing to the sunlit ground where, just moments before in the darkness, there had been ripples of light snaking across the field: “Remember the snakes?” Who had seen that giant wall of darkness thundering in from the west? “Did you?” Paisley shorts and pig-tails had seen a perfect pink sunset surrounding us. She pointed to the eastern sky and twirled. “It was soooooo beautiful,” she sang, pigtails flying. I hadn’t seen that. I wanted that too. 

I wasn’t entirely clear then nor am I now what I had seen. Our shared stories that morning blended. We soon scattered and have over the years re-told what we remember of that morning. It marked us, bonded us, placed us all back into a new landscape. For those two moments it had changed everything. When we went back to the light, I had a new standing, a moving foundation. In the cosmic darkness I had felt, for the very first time, a part of it all.