“Once in a lifetime” was how many described this year’s solar eclipse to me, even though it is, in fact, a recurring phenomenon. Unless I’d been born less than seven years ago and died within the next twenty, the total eclipse will occur again in my lifetime. It was all over the news: guides on when and where it would occur, illustrations of the shining convergence, and warnings against looking directly into the sun without protection.
I hadn’t made a plan of it—earthly concerns were more pressing—but a group of freshmen in the Edon Club floated the idea of a trip to Vermont to see the eclipse. I had offhandedly agreed, but then it was suddenly the day of, and I was traveling three hours to Ludlow, VT. We stayed the night in a cramped Airbnb, and then drove two hours to North Montpelier, where, at last, we planted ourselves in the middle of a farm to view the eclipse.
Manure was scattered all over the field. We played a brief game of frisbee and tried out our cardboard eclipse glasses, peeking through their characteristic opaque lenses that crinkle like wrapping paper. Through the dark lenses, the sun appeared impeccably circular and yellow, cheese-toned like the moon in picture books. It was the only thing visible; the moon and everything else was black.
We wait. The sun still shines too bright to look at directly, but the moon’s effect is perceptible. The moon partitions the sky into half a pastel orange, half a mellow indigo. A few minutes away from totality, a gray, premature twilight washes down. The breeze picks up. Birds grow silent; cicadas begin to chirp. All of our heads crane upwards like skydivers arrowing through the atmosphere. I press the glasses to my face. Inching further up, the moon takes bigger bites of cheese. The sun turns gibbous, then crescent, then to a tangerine fingernail, then to a sliver of a copper wire, then to an infinitesimal, primordial singularity.
Then to black. We take off our glasses. Bare-eyed, we gaze at the totality, an obsidian jewel in the new night sky, perfectly spherical, emanating a brilliant corona around its circumference. The scene is entirely black and white, a cosmological noir, except for a slender, fiery streak in the bottom-left corner that was later identified as a comet. The moon floats unperturbed in front of the pale, thrashing blaze of the sun. The two bodies possess a divine clarity: the glow has no haze, the spheres have no roughness, as if carved by a chisel and polished with sandpaper. Wrought by epochs of eroding gravitation and cataclysmic reformations, the celestial couple bears something very close, in this universe at least, to supreme perfection.
The immediate awe lasted no longer than the first shouts of elation and wonder. All of us jumped up and down, embraced each other midair, exclaimed the insanity of the sight above us. We took a group photo, and then I tried to take my own photo of the eclipse, which was pretty bad. And then the second wave of awe hit: the eclipse was still there, a real thing, not a collective delusion or illusion. I think I prayed.
Then it ended. The sun resumed its duty. It still didn’t have its usual sheen, appearing dimmer, like a camera flash, but the totality was no longer visible. It had lasted two minutes. We expressed our disappointment at how short it was, but then cathartically rejoiced that we got to see it at all. “It was something indescribable,” someone said.
Steams of blinkers, also coming from eclipse viewing, I imagine, flooded the southbound lanes on the I-89 and I-91 that evening. It took six hours of driving to return to New Haven, making the entire trip a 30-hour pilgrimage to see two minutes of totality. Exhausted, we ate belated dinners and slept under a gray moon. I looked at the picture of the eclipse I had taken, and it was even worse than I remembered, just a tiny, blurry white ring. A mediocre souvenir. The next total solar eclipse in North America will happen in 2044.
My own iPhone photo of the totality
