The eclipse started a little after 9 am, on a Monday.
We had arrived at the farm on Saturday, six of us in our party, and about 30 other guests by Sunday. We pitched our tents in one of the spiky new meadows mowed into the field of cover crop. The field was in a flat space between the blackberry bushes at the foot of the fir-covered hill to the east and the blackberry bushes that marked the beginning of the descent to the cold, rocky river in the west. (We ate a lot of blackberries. There is nothing more delicious than a sunwarm blackberry right off the bramble in late summer in the Pacific Northwest. It would never make it to a store—too fragile, almost disintegrating with ripe sweetness.) The meadow was about 20 feet wide, and the green, green, broad, chest-high blades of the grassy cover crop rippled in the wind on either side of it. At 9 am the sun was well over the hill to the east and it was getting hot. We were sitting in our borrowed meadow, and I was sweating in a short sleeveless dress, putting on sunblock. A. kept checking his watch and announcing the time, and we broke out the eclipse glasses so we’d be ready. We speculated about why the shadow would move from west to east instead of vice versa and learned that the moon actually does move (appear to move, fellow nerds!) from west to east; it rises in the east and sets in the west because the earth spins faster than the moon orbits the earth. Then someone looked and said, it’s starting! I put on my glasses and looked too, and there it was, a tiny nip out of the sun, in the upper right corner. I started to get excited. The weather was perfect—there was a band of wildfire smoke to the south but the sun was clear of it. I thought, I’m actually going to see it! That sense, you know, when something long anticipated is finally happening, and you are on the leading edge of something inexorable. We inspected glasses for scratches and traded out a questionable pair, and then made a pinhole camera. We didn’t have a pin, but I poked a hole in D.’s paper with a blackberry thorn (ovoid, not round!), and we adjusted D.’s tent to make a better projection surface. A. found a metal poking thing, and we made more holes in the paper. It actually worked! It was really cool. I wanted a colander so we could see lots of little crescent holes, but we didn’t have one. We kept watching as the bite out of the sun got bigger. It went pretty slowly. We took eclipse portraits (“show me how you feel with your face!”) and tried to take pictures of the sun. D. got one, and taught the technique to J. and L. When the eclipse was at about 30%, we decided to go down to the river to see if we could find dappled tree shadows and see crescents in them. We climbed down and looked for weird shadows, but they just looked normal. The rocky ground was rough and it was hard to see any patterns at all. The light was getting weird, though. Someone said, it looks like sunset! And I said, but the colors are wrong, it’s not golden or pink, it’s so weird! We had this same exchange at least 30 times over the next hour. We climbed back up and the eclipse was at about 50%. It was starting to get cold, and I got a sweater out. It was at least 20 degrees colder—enough that it was uncomfortably cool in a summer dress. It was mindboggling that it could be so much colder with just half the sun’s light blocked out for less than an hour. It was getting even darker (like sunset! but the wrong colors!). D. thought it looked like sun through wildfire smoke. We saw that the bugs were coming out, like it was evening. I don’t remember if the swallows were out snacking on them. We were quiet then, just watching. I was thinking about how glad I was to be there, glad that I hadn’t taken the apocalyptic warnings so seriously that I hadn’t come at all, glad that I had taken them seriously enough that I hadn’t just tried to watch it from Salem at work, glad I wasn’t missing it all to sit in some goddamn meeting, glad I was with lovely friends, glad that this impossibly beautiful farm existed and that the farmers and C. had invited us to be guests on the land and made us feel so welcome, glad for the social connections that brought us together, glad that I had said yes when the opportunity came up—just really, really glad to be in that place at that time with those people, to be part of this spectacular event, feeling so small but so connected. Then the eclipse was close to 75% and L. said we should go to the fields by the farmhouse, where other people would be. We all agreed to go, but I was worried we would miss it, so I walked as fast as I could. It was much darker (but the colors were not right for sunset!) and it was still chilly. We were almost there when L. pointed out that the trees’ dappled shade over the path really did make crescents! It was so neat. I have no idea how that happens. How can that even happen? It was the coolest thing ever. I felt like, it’s happening, it’s really happening! We got to the farmhouse and the fields and stood with a small group of people that I didn’t know. There was a kiddo who had a welding mask and offered it up for a look, and I looked. You could see more of the sun’s rays. People were putting their arms around each other and we were all excited. We knew it was almost time. Two new people came up and they didn’t have glasses so we gave them our extras. I watched the crescent thin. I did peek without glasses for like a millisecond, and it was pretty cool to see that slender crescent of sun. (Don’t do it! I am still 100% not blind, don’t worry.) I kept looking around because the light was so strange (like sunset! but not!). The farm house was behind us, and the fields to the right to us were like something out of a picture book, all black dirt and neat rows of different plants with different textures and colors and heights, big but human in scale. The green of the plants was intense and saturated in the weird light. To our left, there was a small orchard and then more fields, and in front of us, to the south, another tall hill covered in black-green firs. I put my glasses back on and watched the crescent thin and thin. I was waiting for Bailey’s beads, but I didn’t see them. I felt a thrill of excitement and thought, it’s happening! I am going to see it! Then the glowing gap closed and it was completely black behind the glasses. I took them off and looked, while people exclaimed and cheered. The moon was a perfect dark gray circle in the exact middle of the pearly gray sky, surrounded by the sun’s glow and corona. The corona slanted around in all kinds of irregular patterns, to the left at the top and every which way, as big again as the sun-moon. The sky and the moon and the corona were all gray and white and glowing and it was the most beautiful, strange, majestic thing I have ever seen. I wanted to look at it forever. It was so quiet. The colors were just exactly right and the dark, glowing moon and its borrowed, magnetic corona were so perfectly centered in that gray, gray, gray sky above the black firs. I felt a wave of emotion, choked up throat and tears in the back of my eyes and nose, that something so beautiful and otherworldly existed in this world and that I got to be part of it, that everything was so perfectly aligned and suspended in this tiny moment of joy and wonder and awe. Everything got bigger, my imagination grew ten sizes, and it was so, so quiet. Then J. said, look, it’s like sunrise in the west, the shadow has passed there! I looked at that, and it did look like sunrise, all golden yellow, and I looked at the fields, and I tried to look at everything in that strange light. It was not dark like night; it was dark like dusk, but just barely dusk, after all the colors have gone out of the sunset. Then someone else said, look, it’s Venus! And I looked up, and Venus was right overhead, shining so brightly in all that grayness, shading to lavender at the top of the sky. It was the only star I could see. I looked back at the quiet, glowing gray sun-moon and watched it for what seemed like only a second or two longer, and then there was an explosion of blue-white light in the upper right hand corner. It was shocking and invasive. It was like taking a walk on a summer evening, slipping quietly through the soft darkness, and then suddenly being pinned by an obnoxiously bright motion-detector light, leaving you scared and blinking, with all the peace of the night shattered. I turned away and then looked back again, as if it might be gone and the gray world back again, but the light was even brighter. I felt so sad. I wanted more time, it felt like it had been only a few seconds since totality began, and I wished I had not looked at the sunrise in the west or at the fields or at Venus, so that I could have looked at the moon and the glow and the corona and the gray for longer. I thought I would have more time! And then everyone was talking excitedly, and the chickens started to do their morning yelling, and the light crept back. The second half of the eclipse gets no love, someone said. Folks started going back to their meadows to pack up their tents—C. told us later they were mostly farmers who needed to get back to the harvest. The kiddo with the welding mask said, I’m going to watch for a while! They were so excited and happy. We were all comparing notes and impressions, and we made weird crescent shadows with our hair and fingers, and everyone crowded around this old Subaru parked in the driveway of the farmhouse, to see the crescent shadows the trees cast on it. Our group started back towards our meadow, talking with other people, and I picked a peach from a tree. A peach tree is the prettiest thing in any light, but the returning eclipse light made it glow especially, all green crescent leaves and gold-blush fruits. The peach was a little bitter. We walked past a field planted with basil and dill and the air was full of the smell of them; much stronger than it had been when we walked by earlier in the eclipse. The light came back slowly, and it got hot again. People were hugging, and then they packed up and pulled away. The folks in our contingent that had to catch a flight in Portland left. Then it was just D. and me, looking out at the flattened grass in the hot meadow from a scrap of shade near the blackberries on the river side, with the irrigation pipe sweating at our feet. We ate vegan tacos for lunch and then we spent seven hours driving back to Portland and D. SAW THE ZEBRA TOO (there was a zebra, I am not making this up).
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AuthorBitter Water
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Archives
June 2019
Categories© Francie Nevill and Every Sweet Thing, 2017.
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