In a Flash
When I heard that the path of the solar eclipse was going to arc right through Cleveland, I called up my friend Rob who lives there part time and asked if I could crash with him that weekend. He said yes.
On the big day, we pored over a half dozen weather forecasts and decided that we’d improve our chances of a clear sky by driving west. We made cheese and turkey sandwiches, jumped into his car and hit the road.
It was unseasonably warm, so we cruised along the Ohio turnpike with the windows down, past corn-stubble fields and an impressive variety of roadkill, singing at the top of our lungs to country songs on the radio that neither of us knew. We made it about 200 miles by the time the eclipse was supposed to start, so we stopped at a town called Lima and made our way to a park just off the freeway.
There were hundreds of families there, set up with barbecues and lawn chairs. It looked like the Fourth of July, except for all the telescopes, and the people glancing up at the sky with their weird cardboard eclipse glasses.
We put our glasses on too, and through them the sun looked like a little orange ball with a bite taken out of it. Over the next hour or so, the bite got bigger, but all around us nothing else really changed. Then, as we got close to totality, the light started to get eerie and weird. It was like looking through sunglasses without actually putting them on. And then, all of a sudden, it was as if someone pulled down a blind. The crowd let out a collective gasp.
We all took off our glasses and looked up at a glowing silver ring in the sky. The birds went quiet. The stars came out. Off in the distance, beyond the path of totality, you could see light on the horizon, but where we were it was as dark as night.
People who had seen an eclipse before had told me that it was far cooler than they had expected, but I hadn’t really understood what they meant. I can’t imagine what an eclipse would have felt like to our ancestors, thousands of years ago. Even with all the forewarning in the world and a full understanding of the planetary alignment that caused it, nothing could have prepared me for this. The sun, that had risen and lit up the sky for every single day of my sixty-four years, had suddenly gone dark. But not completely dark. I was looking directly at it for the first, and perhaps last, time. It was like an ancient myth, where a goddess reveals herself for a moment, and you’re dumbstruck by her beauty.
The four minutes of totality felt both longer and shorter than that. And just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, the edge of the sun peeked around the curve of the moon, and a brilliant splash of silver light appeared at the edge of the corona. There were spontaneous cries of delight all around us, and then we all had to look away, or risk being struck blind by the sight of the goddess in her full, undiminished form.
It’s not often that we recognize a singular and irreproducible moment even as it occurs. Because of that, we assume such moments are rare, but actually, they happen all the time. Some we look back on and recognize much later. The last time we carry our child on our shoulders. The last time we hold an aging parent’s hand. But even more often, we fail to recognize them at all. A moment speeding down the turnpike with the radio turned up, the windows rolled down, and a dear friend singing along with you to a song neither of you knows.
The miracles we are blind to are no less miraculous for our failure to see them.
