There Goes the Sun

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, what is man that You are mindful of him, the son of man, that you care for him?  (Psalm 8:3-4)

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We're back.  Jenn and I spent Sunday and Monday on a quick, but intense pilgrimage to the Zone of Totality - in our case, Princeton, KY - to view the Great American Eclipse.  And what a great time. . .

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We left OurTown around noon on Sunday, and drove down to Evansville, IN, where we stayed with old friends. How many of you remember FTN?  He and his wife (she was Autumn in his blog, back in the day) and their two teenage children were our hosts, and took wonderful care of us Sunday evening and Monday morning.  We had been concerned about the traffic we would encounter, but honestly, traffic on the way down was pretty much a  non-issue for us (aside from the fact that the State of Indiana had about ten separate construction zones on I-69 between Michigan and Kentucky; I am not exaggerating).

We got up early on Monday, and headed across the Ohio River and into Kentucky.  Our initial plan had been to go to Hopkinsville, but at the last minute, we decided to go to Princeton (about 20 miles west) instead, looking for a smaller, more low-key setting.  As it turns out, we're glad we did (more on that to follow).  We got to Princeton (a town of about 6000 souls), around 8:30 AM, and found a group of folks settling into a parking lot that wasn't yet full, between the courthouse and the police station.  So we pulled in and joined them.  We all reasoned that, if the local authorities didn't want us there, well, we were right where they could see us, and they could tell us where they'd rather have us.

I can't say enough about the hospitality of the good folks of Princeton, KY.  They were invariably friendly to us, and eager to see to it that our stay with them, however brief, was a pleasant one.  The offices in the courthouse were closed (figuring that nobody would really want to be at work during the eclipse, I suppose), but there were a few gracious folks who showed up to keep the courthouse doors open, so we visitors could use the public restrooms in the courthouse.  We had arrived in Princeton more than three hours before the beginning of the eclipse, and five hours before the totality, so we spent our morning walking around, seeing the sights of the lovely little town, with its late-19th century buildings, and a beautiful cave, out of which issued an underground stream.  A few small shops were open, selling antiques, t-shirts, and whatnot, and there was a little artisan bakery selling some really spectacular cupcakes.

Our main concern had been the weather.  The forecasts for western Kentucky had been, um, unstable and somewhat ambiguous in the days leading up to the weekend.  But the closer we got to our go/no-go decision point, the trends were mostly promising.  When we got to Princeton, the weather was hot.  REALLY hot.  Probably around 95F, with humidity to match.  And most importantly, the sky was clear.  There was a thin layer of high haze in the morning, but as the day wore on, it virtually disappeared.  There were some clouds off to our west, but it became apparent that the prevailing breezes aloft were southerly; such clouds as there were bypassed us, and the skies over Princeton were beautifully clear all day.

With the heat and bright morning sun, a large part of our morning free time was spent in a search for shade.  There was a gap between a couple of the buildings on the main street, in which had been built a sort-of stairway park down to the cave and stream.  Jenn and I ended up settling there for a half-hour or so, chatting with a few other folks who were enjoying the shade as much as we were.

Folks continued to trickle into Princeton all through the morning (I'd guess a few hundred altogether, by the time the totality hit), even after the eclipse had begun, and us early-birds were already peering through our glasses at the gradually-diminishing crescent sun.  Some had come from Hopkinsville, up the road, with tales of being charged $50 to park (one enterprising Hopkinsvillian was charging folks $100 to sleep in their cars on his property), and by mid-morning Monday, the Hopkinsville authorities were refusing anyone new from setting up camp in their town, and so some of them were making their way to Princeton.

The little group of eclipse-chasers in our parking lot (about 20 carloads; maybe 40-50 folks in all) came from a variety of directions - several of us from Michigan (we spoke with people from Grand Rapids and the Detroit suburbs), Ohio (we had folks from Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Dayton) and Indiana, as well as a group from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and one gentleman who was there with his teenaged son from the UK (they had planned a two-week tour of the US, with the eclipse as the centerpiece).

We had a couple of friends from OurTown who were on similar pilgrimages to ours - one on the bluffs above the Missisippi river in southern Illinois, and another in a park in northwest Missouri (I have no idea why they chose those locations; we chose Princeton because it was about the shortest travel distance for us).  Through the morning, we were trading texts with each other, describing our respective travels, and our viewing locations.

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The eclipse itself began at 11:55 AM, at which point we could just see a little wrinkle of less-than-perfect roundness in one quadrant of the sun's disk.  For the next hour or so, we wandered around from one car-group to the next, talking about our past eclipsian experiences, the sundry travel experiences that had brought us to Princeton that morning, or just talking about the weather or our families, in between pausing every few minutes to take another look at the steadily shrinking solar crescent.  Jenn and I were parked next to Pete and Marie from Cincinnati, a couple about our age with six children, and their youngest in high school, so we had some common ground to talk about.

By about an hour into the eclipse, the moon was covering about 70-80% of the sun's disk, and it was noticeable that the ambient light was significantly dimmer than normal.  Not long after that, we began to notice that the temperature, which had begun the day at an oppressive level, was positively comfortable.  With five minutes to go until totality, the sun was a thin sliver in the sky, and the ambient light was like the dusk just after sunset.

As it got closer and closer to the moment of totality, we could almost see the thin sliver of sunlight visibly shrinking, until, at the last instant, we saw the brilliant 'diamond ring' as the sun's corona became visible, and the last sparkle of sunlight made a bright flare, looking just like a diamond on a ring.  And then, an instant later, the sun went out.

(I didn't take this, but it was taken yesterday, and is basically what we saw)

Annie Dillard, in a wonderful essay in the Atlantic, about the 1979 eclipse in Yakima, Washington, wrote about an onrushing wall of shadow as the eclipse overtook her.  We didn't see anything like that.  For us, the last moments of sunlight were like someone wringing the last bits of light out of the air.  One moment, we were standing there, seeing each other's faces, and an instant later, it was dark.

A joyful shout went up all through the town for maybe ten seconds or so, and then it became quiet for the rest of the totality, as we all strained to absorb the entire experience.  The sky became deep blue, not quite black.  The street lights came on, but were not in the least an impediment to viewing the eclipse.  Venus shone brightly to the west of the sun.  I took a quick scan of the sky to see if any other stars were visible, but Venus was the only one we saw (we consulted an online star chart on our way home, and it indicated that a few others should have been visible; but from the chart, it seems they may have been hidden from our view by the courthouse).

And dominating the sky, directly above the courthouse, like something out of Back to the Future, was the black circle of the moon blotting out the sun, with the thin white ring of the solar corona surrounding it.  It's a little embarrassing, but to be perfectly, brutally candid, I've seen enough 'simulated' eclipse videos in my life, that it was a little hard at first to grasp that the celestial wonder I was witnessing was actually real.  But it was. Oh, yes; it was definitely real.

Two minutes and forty seconds after the sun disappeared, suddenly we had another brilliant 'diamond ring' flash, and then the sequence of the last seconds before totality was reprised, in reverse.  The group gave another round of applause to the sun, the dusky light returned, and it began to get warmer again.  We spent a few minutes watching the crescent sun growing back, as the moon slowly moved on, uncovering the sun and allowing it to shine once again.  Our little parking-lot community circulated around, shaking hands and thanking each other for sharing the experience, wishing each other a safe trip home.  And within a remarkably short time, folks had packed their cars back up, and the community of eclipse-watchers morphed into a line of cars heading out of town, back toward the freeway, and back, in a hundred directions, to their homes.

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Our trip home was a good deal more, uh, gruelling than our trip down had been.  On the inbound journey, we were all coming at different times, and stopping at different places along the way.  But we were all leaving at basically the same time.  And, for those of us headed north across the Ohio River, there are only a limited number of bridges by which to cross the river, and they're mostly in cities.  It took us an hour to travel the last five miles to the bridge back into Evansville (and there was even construction on the bridge itself).  So we arrived home almost two hours later than we'd planned.

But we had seen the total eclipse; we had seen the moon blot out the sun, and darkness at mid-day.  We had seen the spectacular black orb, and the diamond ring; all of it.  The wonder of God's creation.  Awesome, magnificent, once-in-a-lifetime; it took our breath away. . .

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There will be another total eclipse in the US in 2024, and even closer to us, passing through Indianapolis, Cleveland and Buffalo.  It should only take us 2-3 hours to drive into the Path of Totality for that one.  But you know, it's not guaranteed that I'll still be here in seven years (I hope and  even expect to be, but it is not guaranteed), and if I am, it's not guaranteed that the weather will co-operate then, either.  So, I am glad to have seen this one. Totally, totally worth it (you see what I did there. . .)

Thanks again to our wonderfully gracious hosts in Princeton, KY.  You all went above and beyond the call of duty, and I am grateful. . .