So, I got to see the totality yesterday. In a fair world, this would have been something I planned for, and then executed that plan. Instead, a bunch of my friends were going to see it, so I kind of just grabbed a lawn chair, hopped in their car, and rode with them.
Traffic was pretty light on the way up. Dense, but it was still possible to drive the speed limit. It took maybe an hour and a half to get to Crystal Lake Park in Barton VT from our starting location. The place was pretty packed up, so we parked nearby, and carted stuff into the park.
The park itself was nice, but the recent snow melted off pretty quickly, so things rapidly went from damp to wet. At this point, it was maybe 11:00, so we sat down, waited, cracked jokes, and ate food and had soda. Not too much though.
It turns out that the real limiting reagent for staying at the park was access to bathrooms. There were 3 portable toilets, and what felt like 500-1000 people, if not more.
Outside of that, we had enough food, water, and other supplies to last quite a while.
And then the eclipse started.
The Eclipse
The eclipse is cool, but for me, it was mostly interesting because of the tension that arose from the impending totality. It’s fun to look up with your glasses and see the sun start to get covered up, but it’s more a “Hmm, neat” sort of experience. At least to start.
As things got closer, everything started to feel slight weird. It had been a very bright day, and all of sudden, it was not so bright, and I didn’t need the sunglasses I had been wearing. It had been a very warm day, and all of sudden it got a bit colder. That said, most of this didn’t feel super apparent until maybe 70-85% of the sun was covered, at which point things started to feel a bit weird.
And then we hit totality.
Totality
I’ve seen photos of totality before. They don’t capture the experience. I can tell you that the sun turned into a black hole in the sky surrounded by a white corona, but just saying it isn’t the same. I can tell you that at 3:00 PM, that everything went from feeling like a quiet afternoon, to a deep summer’s 7:00 PM. I can tell you that the temperature dropped; but instead of a creeping chill, all of a sudden it was just cold.
It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever witnessed. There are no photos or video I could take to do it justice, and the ones I did absolutely don’t. To look up, and see a hole in the sky, to be able to just stare at the sun is insane. For the light to just vanish mid-day is crazy.
It’s the sort of thing you witness, and you understand why you could found a religion on something like this.
And then it was over. It lasted just under 3 minutes. Shorter than it took me to write this paragraph.
Drive Back
We waited a few hours after it finished to head back home.
Remember how I mentioned that traffic was dense, but manageable on the way down? Yeah, absolutely not on the way back. A one hour trip easily became a four hour one. This (and some sunburn that I absolutely could have avoided) was the only real downside to this trip. There was a ridiculous number of cars on the road, and we slowed to a crawl. We were lucky to be able to go 20 MPH; mostly it was stop and go.
Worth It?
It’s tricky to assess the value of an experience. The costs to me were low.
I took a day off work, rode in a friend’s car, and ate other people’s food. Outside of the mild sun burn, I did not have a very difficult time. My costs were pretty much non-existent.
That wasn’t a universal experience though.
There was a family behind us who’d come up from Massachusetts. It’s a bit longer of a drive, but they were there because they’d tried to see the eclipse in 2017, but it had been cloudy. They’d then tried to schedule to see it in Texas, but after flying down to Texas, they realized it was looking like wasn’t gonna work out yet again, so they cut their trip short, flew back to the East Coast, and drove all the way up to the same park we were at.
They also seemed to think it was pretty cool, but they had a different set of
costs for the experience.
Why did I write this?
Gametrodon is technically my longest running project. In some ways, it’s not very successful. In other ways, it has done some of what I intended.
Ultimately, it’s a very abstract thing. It’s way of displaying text in a manner that could theoretically be seen by anyone in the world who wants to read it, to a world that doesn’t know or care that it exists.
All of that text is about self imposed little worlds; little places where we make up rules about how things work, and I write about how those rules feel.
Most days I’m okay with that.
The eclipse, and the totality was in some ways the opposite of that. It’s a reminder that what I actually am is a single lump of chemicals that lives on a small rock, surrounded by a slightly smaller rock, circling a ball of fire. And sometimes those rocks line up just right.
Those rocks will outlive the memory of anything I have ever written, anything anyone alive right now has written, and perhaps the idea of writing itself.
The next continental eclipse will apparently be happening in 2045 or so, by which point I’ll be over 50. Statistically, I’ll probably have lived most of my life by then.
Will this site still be up? I don’t know.
Will I remember seeing the last eclipse? I suspect the answer is no.
My memory isn’t very good. At some point, maybe in a week, maybe a month, maybe a year, I’ll forget.
I’ll forget what it’s like to look up at the sky, and see the sun with a hole punched through it, and a shimmering white crown around its edges. I’ll forget the quiet, the darkness, the cold, and all the little reminders that my existence is the result of good fortune whose odds are so incredibly low that I cannot perceive them. I’ll forget that I live on a rock, in the middle of infinite nothing, next to a ball of fire.
Hopefully when I do, I find this post.
And I’ll be briefly reminded.