Total Eclipse: A Rearview Review of Rhythms

Before: the sense of everyone gathering for some cosmic event, like the landing of an alien spaceship (maybe like those people waiting for the spaceship they thought was traveling in the tail of the Comet Hale-Bop?).

During: a sense of the world gone horribly wrong—the most fundamental things about the world out of whack—the light, the colors, the seasons, especially day and night….

But setting out from Chicago, the ‘During’ was yet to come. Following the cycles laid down by planetary motions as our solar system developed, there’s a total solar eclipse somewhere on Earth every 18 months. And we’ve all seen images of them. Most look like they were taken with scientific intent, with filters, and magnification. But none of those images can compare to the total eclipse as an all-enveloping experience from horizon to horizon, and nadir to zenith. No picture can capture the experience of being in the artificiality of the light, the surreal nature of the scene, a black orb suddenly taking the place of the sun. Also, there’s the abruptness of it, the twilight that proceeds it comes on as though the sun is on a dimmer switch, but there’s no reddening of the sky as at sun set; the shadows don’t become long. In fact, the sun barely moves.

What moves is a wall of shadow coming at you—at 1,800 miles an hour, I later learned. People scream as if they are about to be engulfed by a tsunami, only the scream is one of both joy and fear. In her description of an eclipse in 2017, Annie Dillard recalled that in 840, the emperor of Bavaria died of fright at the sight. Even though we know better, the speed and scale of the landscape being engulfed in a shadow, whose hard edge you can see coming at you, is unsettling at best, and is, to be honest, scary. Still, mixed in with the fear is shared happiness—like watching the ball drop at New Year’s Eve—joy to be alive—and not just the joy of realizing you’ve lived to see another year, but joy to be here at this particular place and now at this particular time to see it—especially after a year’s buildup of getting the dark glasses needed for the partial part of the eclipse, driving the hours to get to the zone of totality, the constant monitoring of the weather in the fear that a single cloud will obscure the event.

Leaving Chicago, we’d thought of viewing the eclipse from Cahokia, the site of a pre-Columbian city of enormous, pyramid-like earthen mounds near St. Louis that at its height had a larger population than the contemporaneous London. The city’s population mysteriously vanished around 1350 CE, possibly becoming the plains Indians of Illinois who turned to hunting buffalo. But about 800 CE, the settlers of Cahokia began building a city of earthen mounds like the pyramids built by the Aztecs or the Mayans, another 1,000 miles south. It’s easy to see why someone would build a mound here. While mile-high glaciers were plowing their way down North America, the immense force of their weight planed the middle of the continent flat as a board. So any rise, even a hump in the road, elevates you enough to see enemies, or friends, or prey, miles away. Realizing this, the Native Americans who built these mounds probably just kept going, higher and higher. The view of the sky from them is total: 360° of blue dome that could easily inspire a conception of sky as an inverted bowl. Living here, one would have regularly seen the sun set in the west at the same moment that a full moon broke the horizon, rising in the east as if in perfect balance—the scales of heaven, as Dante put it. Maybe this view and the entire dome of a starry night sky slowly rotating is what inspired these mound builders to also erect cedar posts, like telephone poles, in a circular pattern, the posts spaced out like the numbers on a clock face with a diameter of about 400’. Modern archaeologists named it Woodhenge when they discovered that it was used as an astronomical calendar, like Stonehenge, and like its namesake aligned to predict equinoxes, solstices, the phases of the moon, and eclipses. But on this day, Cahokia was at the edge of totality, so we pressed on to the banks of the Ohio River, near Metropolis (which the Illinois State Legislature declared in 1972 to be the official hometown of Superman).

There, on a ridge overlooking a landscape that included Paducah Bridge and Kentucky on the other side of the river, we watched the moon move between the Earth and the sun. We’re used to seeing the sun and the moon move all the time, of course. But without any points of reference, the size of these bodies doesn’t come across. Just as a rising harvest moon can look much larger than it does when high in the sky—even enormous when juxtaposed against the recognizably human scale of trees and buildings—the enormity of these planet-sized bodies comes home in a visceral way as they begin to slide across each other. As they do, one of the most unexpected reactions to seeing this drama play out on a stage as wide as the sky itself is a piercing sense of insignificance: how small each of us seems against the scale of this cosmic demonstration; how invincible its power; how small the entire Earth appears in the cosmic scheme of things. A witness to this display understands in their guts how there is absolutely nothing anyone could do should the orbits of celestial bodies, say that of a life-extinguishing meteor, intersect with the orbit of the Earth.

In a matter of minutes, the day is noticeably dimmer, as it might be when clouds begin to move in. Then it’s cooler and you realize—the total eclipse is actually happening!

There’s that shadow that the emperor of Bavaria thought was so terrifying, coming straight at you, swallowing everything in its path. As the light rapidly fades, streetlights, come on like a string of lit beads across the Paducah Bridge and into the valley beyond. Only the fading light is more different than similar from that of a sunset: as it rapidly fades it becomes slightly greenish; everyone around you looks like you’re in one of those old Kodachrome photos. Shadows sharpen (because the light is coming from a sliver instead of a disk). Then it goes dark, as if the dimmer switch suddenly shut off the light. But the sky is still blue—indigo, not the black of night—and the stars are out; Jupiter is bright in the western sky; all around the sky and landscape are bathed in a deep blue with the intensity of twilight; unlike a sunset which takes much longer to unfold, the clouds are all in the exact same place as they were a moment ago. You feel you are in a sci-fi landscape on a planet with a double sun; but it’s even more eerie than that as the trees, silhouetted black against the indigo sky, the river, and the other features of the land below are familiar as the Earth you once knew. Annie Dillard could have been writing about this uncanny valley that you’ve been thrust into, describing the total eclipse she once saw:

The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on Earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a 19th-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were fine-spun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.

The temperature drops, a breeze picks up—like a sea breeze that rises as the temperature of the land is suddenly hotter than the sea, though we are nowhere near the sea—the wind rising as quickly as the night fell. It’s night on the ground, though blue in the sky. Swallows take flight as they do at sunset. Crickets and other night insects start their songs. Bats come out. The yellow dots of house lights become more numerous on the far side of the Ohio River; you can see the red taillights of cars driving across the bridge (and for a moment astonishment enters your mind at the number of people who didn’t bother to get out of their cars to look up and see the world around them change).

Most surreal of all, there’s a black disk in the sky where the sun used to be. It’s impossible to imagine the perfection of it, the utter velvety blackness of this disk, like a lens cap that had been snapped over the sun. I tried to find photos online of what the sun looked like, what the landscape looked like. (I tried to not waste the precious moments that the experience lasts by looking through a camera, and the camera on my phone kept adjusting for the changing light anyway. Though I did manage to prop it on a fence and just let it run.) A view like this one:

Then, dawn breaks, immediately, there’s no coming dawn, no alba moment. The light has been switched back on, and grows in intensity—for an instant the sun looks like a diamond ring—like a ring of light with a piercing welder’s arc brightness at one edge that forces you to use smoked glasses again. Dawn lasts a couple of minutes. Crickets. Chimney swallows, other night birds are still going at it. The temperature continues to fall before climbing again. Then it’s over. This surreal night that had occurred in the middle of the afternoon only lasted 2 minutes. And you are standing there in the same spot you were when it began, back in the mundane light of day. Some people began leaving, though up above, there was still a 90% partial eclipse that was amazing and rare in its own right. Someone turned on a radio that was loudly playing a commercial for Midas Mufflers. We are back in the work-a-day world.

We did not realize that the epic scale, the feeling of being in a sci-fi film would continue for the next 14 hours: heading back to Chicago, we joined a traffic jam of proportions normally created by CGI for disaster movies when everyone is fleeing a city; except this was a great migration to the city, the largest migration on a single day in North America, we heard on the radio: from Carbondale, IL the epicenter of the eclipse, i.e., the point on earth where the eclipse was longest, to Chicago, the largest population ever to move in the U.S. at the same time was moving at glacial speed and we were stuck in it, being carried along by the pulsing rhythm of its stop-and-go flow. On hindsight, the return trip had the ingredients for a perfect storm: the third largest city in the U.S. within driving distance to the epicenter of a total eclipse; the plethora of wealthy suburbs to the northwest of the city—the very sort of place likely to breed astronomy clubs; and people with the ability and means to take the day off and drive a few hundred miles. They came over several days. Now that it was over, everyone was leaving at the same time. The drive was supposed to take 5 hours, but 12 hours later, we were still in bumper-to-bumper traffic with no end in sight.

Google Maps kept sending us to alternate routes, and at first we took its advice—as would the hundreds of others who received the same advice. We crawled down stretches of blacktop ribbons between seas of corn, waiting for hours to get through the single traffic light of one little town after another. In one, the local firefighters sat outside their station hooting at the traffic crawling past, and holding up signs: “How was the eclipse?” The massive traffic jam put the lie to any hope of a real evacuation, if there had been, say, a real alien spaceship instead of an eclipse. No one was scared, no one was fleeing for their lives. It was as orderly as could be hoped for. Everyone was just tired. Any real evacuation, with everyone fleeing a cloud of gas, radiation or zombie apocalypse, would be over as soon as it began with the first crash putting an end to any chance of escape.

But still there was The Hope of ART!: Alongside one dark country road, a man stood on the shoulder, holding up the hunting scene he had carved out of a sheet of metal with a blowtorch, and was hoping to sell. And Literature!: A string of teenage girls sat on the shoulder beside their broken-down car, each of them reading by the light of the headlights of the cars crawling by. Google Maps kept posting a new accident every few minutes, and judging from that, I figured the nearest tow truck was probably 3 hours away. Signs began popping up at gas stations along the route: EMPTY. A car that ran out of gas blocked traffic until the drivers stuck behind it got out of their own cars to help push it to the side. How many times was this same scene being enacted up ahead? Back in the crawl along I-57, the robotic voice of Google Maps kept announcing, “There is a slowdown up ahead that is adding, 8 minutes.” “There is a slowdown up ahead that is adding 25 minutes.” “There is a slowdown up ahead….”

Before leaving Metropolis, I had consulted a paper map, and considered driving an hour out of our way to avoid what I’d supposed would be the most direct, and most crowded, route back to Chicago. But I dismissed the idea because when we set out, Google Maps only announced one slow down. (I didn’t stop to think that during a trip from California to New York, the algorithms that Google Maps uses wouldn’t notify you of an accident in Ohio, assuming it would have haven cleared up long before you reached Montana. But when the accidents are so many, and it takes the tow trucks so long to clear the road, if they can even reach them, both the logic of the algorithms and of the highway system break down simultaneously.)

And so it went, Google Maps adding additional delays for the first half hour of our trip, then the second half hour, then the third, every half hour for the next 14 hours.

The last alternate route I was stupid enough to take was supposed to save us 31 minutes by sending us zigzagging down dark country roads. Around midnight, the sun by now shining on the exact opposite side of the Earth, it was sublime: lightning flashes on the horizon lit up the undersides of clouds. Then an enormous wind turbine seemed to leap out of the darkness. It was right beside the road—a stark, white giant, illuminated by a lightning flash, its enormous blade turning like the blade of a fan lit by a strobe light. We were in the wind farm we had seen in the distance while on the expressway to the eclipse, only now it was all around; we were on some service road that the map had sent us down. Pitch black. Each towering turbine had a red light at its top, and they were synced to flash at the same instant— a rhythmic flash of red lights for what seemed like hundreds of square miles, that reminded me of the way lightening bugs along the Amazon River will sometime flash in unison. Then a tremendous thunderstorm broke, the rain so dense it was impossible to see beyond the front of the car; marble-sized hail pinged off the windshield, the downpour slashing the light of the headlights….

The next morning, back in our normal life: a new moon was setting, and it looked uncannily like a reverse image of the sun during the total eclipse: the moon a dark silhouette of itself with just the thinnest sliver of a crescent giving it away, and bringing to mind the Muslim holy month of Ramadan which begins with a new moon’s first sighting, and the announcement of the transition of night to day when the light is first strong enough to distinguish a white from black thread. The sky was the same azure as it had been as the light dimmed, trees were black silhouettes against it, and the crickets and insects had begun buzzing. It was a total eclipse of the moon, though we don’t call it that, the moon completely within the Earth’s shadow, as it was once every month… The odds that these radically different-size bodies—the sun and the moon—would appear to be the exact same size from Earth are freakishly small, an apparent size that is itself smaller than a dime when held at arm’s length (an area of the sky, it’s worth noting, that contains about 5,000,000 galaxies, each galaxy consisting of about 100 billion stars). Yet this coincidence may have shaped human history more than any other physical feature when you consider how many of our concepts like good and evil, or night and day, may have arisen out of this binary.

Looking at the moon, I remembered the famous Earthrise photograph, and how it had altered human consciousness about the planet we live on. Everyone knew intellectually that we were on a finite island in an infinite darkness. But it wasn’t until humans got back far enough from Earth to see it as a globe, and take a selfie of our collective humanity, that we understood what that meant: That we were earthlings on spaceship Earth, humans first, and whatever other allegiances we might have second, and there was no getting off or alternate place to go to if we mucked it up. The astronauts hadn’t been sent into orbit around the moon to take that photo. They were busily shooting photos of the lunar surface, mapping potential sites for the first moon landing that would come in the following year, when almost by accident, they happened to see the Earth rise from the moon’s horizon in the window of their capsule and turned their cameras on it. Of all the hundreds of scientific photographs taken that day, that almost accidental photo may have had the most impact on human thought. Or as Dennis Overbye said of it 50 years later: “The residents of the only known inhabited planet in the universe would “know the place for the first time” (to borrow from T.S. Eliot). Sent to examine the moon, Major Anders later said, humans instead discovered Earth.” By “discover,” Anders probably meant ‘recognize the Earth’s place in a larger cosmos,’ a thing that humans have been re-discovering again and again since earliest times: the astronomical calendar at Cahokia, like Stonehenge, was probably used to sync daily life, with its agricultural and religious cycles, to the cycles of the cosmos. And today, standing at the top of Cahokia’s main pyramid you can look across their cosmic calendar and see the St. Louis Arch, rising out of the tree line miles away like a chrome rainbow, giving you the sense of looking across time, from an ancient city to a titanium future: a modern city built at the same point on the Mississippi River for the same reason the builders of Cahokia must have chosen the spot—resources and trade routes created by a prehistoric flood caused by melting glaciers. The confluence of movements that allow the past to re-emerge are too complex to understand. But those who take the elevator to the top of the arch would have the same perspective that thousands had labored to achieve by building the mound we stood on, hauling baskets of dirt to shape their world just as construction workers laying down millions miles of highway in the U.S., electricians installing innumerable traffic lights, or anonymous programmers, writing billions of lines of code, have shaped ours.

The mound builders must have realized that by rising higher, they were not only able to see further, but understand more deeply the fabric of life they were part of. Using Google EarthPro we can get a intimation of why they revered the bird, soaring above them at 38°39'33.64"N 90°04'27.69"W.

But instead of just looking at the pictures, look at the Pro data that makes this view possible: Imagery Date 3/13/2022 38°39'33.64"N 90°04'27.69"W elev 0 ft eye alt 3281 ft Image © 2024 Airbus. 3D View; Cache; Touring; Navigation; General; Display Show tooltips, Building Highlights; Usage Statistics; Send usage statistics to Google; KML Error Handling: Silently accept all unrecognized data, Abort file load on any error; Place mark balloons: Allow access to local files and personal data; Cookies: Save cookies to disk. Texture Colors: True Color (32 bit); Map Size: Small – Large; Zoom Relation: infinity…. These are our preferences.

Of course, we are unable to see the actual, underlying code that Google has kept hidden beneath the surface… If you ignore the layers of data that are visible, though, you can get a sense of the mounds as a bird sees them; and by sliding your fingers you can soar even higher, the mounds shrinking as they gather together, the camera rising higher and higher, the individual mounds merging to become the grassy area that was once a pre-Columbian city, now bisected by a highway with its traffic lights; the grid of the modern suburb that some of the mounds were bulldozed to make way for comes into view as the camera continues to pull back, then even St. Louis shrinks to a point that is subsumed into the patterns that make up this image of Earth—the green Midwest with its Great Lakes—blue puddles left by melting glaciers—the brown desert in the west just before the mountains, then ocean. So much ocean. Keep zooming out and you can hold the whole blue Earth in the palm of your hands, against a field of stars.

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