Totality
A reflection on the recent total eclipse in dialogue with Annie Dillard. All italicized passages are from her essay, “Total Eclipse.”
Last week I came to my cabin at the edge of the wild forest in the Adirondack mountains to witness my first ever total eclipse. I heard last fall the path of totality would pass directly overhead there, and I was determined to go to witness it despite the challenges of a boat access cabin and fickle mountain weather; in early April lakes here are often still frozen, though not safe enough to cross, and the three-mile hike around the lake would be a slushy, semi-frozen, muddy mess.
A call to the nearby park and recreation department brought good news. The lake was clear of ice, and even the spring mountain weather looked promising.
I first encountered the power and wonder of a total eclipse years earlier, though not through a lived experience, but through the astoundingly lovely essay, “Total Eclipse,” by Annie Dillard. I was using her collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk, for a nature writing course early in my college teaching career. I had selected the book for the two essays I knew in it, “Living Like Weasels,” and a wildly experimental essay grounded in a history of polar exploration, “An Expedition to the Poles”—an essay that often embarks on unexpected “expeditions” of its own. I so love the steady, uncompromising pressure Dillard applies to her essays—how she always works to make surprising, illuminating discoveries; her essays always provoke and never accept merely being descriptive or lyrical, which they always are.
Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.
So. There I was mid-lake in my small boat with a few good friends looking upward through impossibly dark glasses to where the moon had cut a small corner out of one side of the sun. And there was Dillard’s essay fresh in my mind.
I knew if I ever were to write about what I would soon encounter, I would have to humbly follow in her immense footsteps. So here I am writing about it finally after a week of delay and false starts.
I’ve returned to the cabin and am writing long hand in bright warm sun that will not be turned off by the moon today—and not send me into a barrage of untamed emotion, except through conjuring the already fast fading memory. Dillard waited several years to write about her experience, but I don’t want to wait any longer. I figured coming here would help stir the energy needed to write something that might help me approximate the enormity of the experience in words.
What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know.
The sky is deep blue. If you look closely, you can see the slender, light green leaf buds of the beeches, the ochre glow of black cherry buds. I’m annoyed that a neighbor has arrived and is now pounding a hammer against something. He’s always tinkering, forever making his “cabin” bigger, fancier, less a humble structure at the boundary of human constructs and wildness, more a replica of a normal, posh, excessive, distinctly American—“civilized”—abode. Despite this, a few minutes’ walk can take me deep into the heart of human-free quietude, and I take a break from writing to bushwhack my way up a small stream to a large clearing where last fall I sat on an outcropping of rock and suddenly realized a ten-point buck was camouflaged not 50 feet in front of me, calmly sipping from the stream. It was my own Dillard-“Living-Like-Weasels”-moment, where you suddenly find yourself face to face with a creature who, unlike us humans, interacts with the world just as it always has.
When I was here a week ago, there were still 4-5 inches of spring-heavy snow covering the ground, more in the shady places or up beneath the fantastic tangle of roots of yellow birches. A walk with a friend through the slushy snow allowed us to follow a set of fresh, large coyote tracks, which led us to a picked-over deer spine and rear haunches, reduced to reddish bone. The raven and vulture foot prints surrounding it told another part of the story, and on our return trip, we spooked one of the largest ravens I’ve ever seen hunting for one last scrap.
I realize now that the solitude and wildness here, still at the edge of winter, and seeing the eclipse in a place with which I am so deeply familiar, were integral to the emotional impact of the experience. Dillard traveled far for her eclipse, scaled unfamiliar hills, and looked down upon an already unfamiliar landscape before encountering that mesmerizing re-shaping (re-configuration) of normal human perception/experience. I realize now that I had the advantage of familiarity—to witness the familiar become suddenly recast into something somehow utterly new—which was more jarring still.
We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we were in a strange place – a hotel in central Washington, in a town near Yakima. The eclipse we had traveled here to see would occur early in the next morning…It was dawn when we found a highway out of town and drove into the unfamiliar countryside.
When talking about the event a week or so later with an old friend, I found myself mostly trying to describe the light—the cold-pewter-LED-like cast of it, and how it seemed like something both light and somehow more than light all at once, a substance holding you aloft, more like water.
At my lake I have seen all manner of light: numerous sunrises and sunsets, black storm clouds rushing across the mountains as the first big storm drops fall unexpectedly, half the sky still blue and sun still on the far shore. I’ve fished late at night with a big moon turning everything pale-grey-white, fished in the all-dark of a new moon with just the lights of camps and cottages tracing yellowish broken lines across the corrugated, black surface. I could catalog a thousand different varieties of light and shadow….and none of them were anything like that sliver of coronal light the moon let slip around its edges to transform the so familiar into something altogether new.
Now the sky to the west deepened to indigo, a color never seen. A dark sky usually loses color. This was a saturated, deep indigo….The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded.
When the sun rises or sets it casts reds and oranges and yellows and pinks up from a singular point on the horizon, but as the moon slipped into place and the rush of darkness careened across the near mountains toward us mid-lake, the whole of the horizon, all 360 degrees of it, became a new kind of sunset or sunrise—the glow of clouds reflecting the light of the world outside this path barely changed at all despite the moon shielding 95% of the sun’s light.
The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed – 1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight – you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it
Dillard describes the sounds of human voices cheering and screaming across the Washington hills as the moment of totality strikes. On my lake a crowd had gathered, too, and you heard a collective gasp, followed by a tremendous cheer, a standing ovation for the sun and moon crossing paths across unfathomable distance, reminding us that we reside on a spinning sphere cascading through endless nothingness.
At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world.
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Beautifully written!