A Full Eclipse Day in the Neighborhood

Dispatches from the path of totality

I thought we were walking to a field to see the full eclipse, but it turned out we were just going to stay in the neighborhood. Why wouldn’t we? No crowds, no noise, and the view just as good. So we set up a few lawn chairs under an evergreen and waited.

It wasn’t my neighborhood. It was our friends’ neighborhood, a little corner of Dayton, Ohio where all the houses are duplexes, the lawns are hurt-your-eyes green, and the streets are lined with blossomy crab and pear trees.

I couldn’t stop staring at the trees. We have them in Michigan, I’ve just never seen a neighborhood where they were planted in every yard. Some were white, some pink. From a couple houses down across the street, white Bradford pear petals drifted our way like fantastically fat snowflakes in slow motion. Our friend told us it’s been banned in Ohio as of this year, because it’s too aggressive. I watched the petals drift and mourned a little.

The tree directly in front of us, I later found out with a little sleuthing assistance from my Twitter followers, was a fruitless crabapple called Spring Snow. The flowers were similar to the pear tree blossoms, but the trunk was shorter and twistier, had a little more character. I took a picture of the sun through its branches. Reading up the day before, I’d stumbled onto clickbait articles solemnly warning that you shouldn’t try to take pictures of the eclipse with your phone, because the sun’s rays could kill it. I mean, looking at the sun directly can hurt your eyes, ergo, pointing your phone at it will hurt your phone. It’s science!

I had my jacket with me because I knew there would be a temperature drop, but I definitely didn’t need it yet. It was the perfect temperature, the perfect sky, the perfect day. I felt sorry for friends who had traveled to Texas specifically to avoid gambling on Midwestern weather. To be fair, April snow or freezing rain is a known quantity in the Midwest. In Michigan, I have less than fond memories of green Christmases followed by white Easters. But on this particular day, while my friends in Texas looked up and fretted at the clouds, the Ohio sky decided to behave itself, just for us.

Our hostess, Sara, kept making trips to grow our little pile of snacks and drinks. She comes from North Carolina, and she took responsibility for our sustenance accordingly. We had sweet things, salty things, wheat crackers and gouda cheese cubes in a brown paper Aldi bag which also held three or four kinds of soft drink. We had a little tupperware thing full of half-moon ice cubes. We had this kind of cookie, but wait, did we have that kind? Did we have cake? We might need cake. Sara fetched it, just in case.

Her husband, Tom, said he was thinking about the stages of the eclipse like three characters in a play: Before Totality, Totality, and After Totality. “I’d hate to be the guy who has to come out and play After Totality, when everyone is walking away!”

Tom is a gentle soul, a little older than my dad. He patiently bears a hundred small ailments and chronic pains that leave him having to walk with a cane, type with a special ergonomic keyboard. With his gentleness comes a puckish sense of humor and a signature tiny smile that plays over his lips when he’s got you good. On my arrival the day before, he casually informed me that they were taking a small group of friends out to look at the full moon that night. “Oh, cool,” I said absently. “And if you believe that,” Tom continued in twinkly triumph, “you’ve forgotten why you came here!”

He proudly showed everyone his “shadow box,” which had holes drilled in one side so as to cast mini-eclipse shadows on the other if you held it just so. To me, this was cooler than the pinhole trick. Meanwhile, you could also see the feathery curved shadows rippling through the evergreen needles to play over our chairs, over the grass. Stupidly, I’d forgotten to watch for this effect and failed to snap a picture, though my sister was more foresighted and later sent me something she’d caught on a white sheet back home, not quite in the path of totality. The difference between being on the path and being just a little off the path was, of course, quite literally night and day.

On Twitter, someone had shared a meme from the 80s cult classic Ladyhawke, a medieval fantasy about a gallant knight who is cursed along with his lady love by a jealous bishop. The curse dooms them to be “always together, eternally apart,” as the knight is a man by day and a wolf by night, while his lady is a woman by night and a hawk(e) by day. The knight is told there is one and only one way the curse can be broken: The two of them must appear before the evil bishop as man and woman, which will be possible on one very specific day—a day without a night, a night without a day. The answer to the riddle is, of course, a full solar eclipse. The meme showed a rugged Rutger Hauer on his black stallion, holding his beloved ladyhawke on his wrist, with the caption “Some of us look forward to the eclipse more than others.” (Although this doesn’t accurately reflect the knight’s actual response to the prophecy, but I’ve spoiled too much already. Just watch it and thank me later.)

We weren’t waiting for a curse to be broken, but we were still looking forward to something worth driving a few hours for us, worth flying for others. To get in the mood, I’d read an essay by a writer who experienced it with a crowd in Turkey and described it in dramatically heightened terms, as a terrifying thing that made people scream, made you feel you were losing your reason. I’ve since looked up an even more famous essay by the great Annie Dillard, about her heart-stopping 1982 experience in a snowy Washington landscape. As she put it so memorably, the difference between a partial and a total solar eclipse is like the difference between kissing a man and marrying him.

But I was not waiting with a great breathless crowd in Turkey, nor was I shivering in the barren snow mountains of Washington. I was sitting in a lawn chair under a swaying spruce tree, so warm I could have dozed off where I sat, red soda pop in hand. I was waiting with my dad, and our hosts, and the few elderly people who had shuffled outside their own houses with their own lawn chairs, squinting up to see the sun put itself out just for them.

Two women approached on our side of the street. We made sure they were comfortable, my dad solicitously fetching water and chatting away with them. One was a retired nurse. Both missed their husbands.

I drank red soda to my own good health for a selfie. Then I thought I would use my chair’s cupholder, supposedly designed to hold my cup without spilling anything when I stood up. I was quickly disillusioned. “Do you need a towel?” Sara asked, anxiously coming over to peer at the little soon-to-evaporate wet spot. “I’ll get a towel.”

As the hour slipped by, the sun an ever-thinning crescent through our glasses, we all tried without success to see if we could find any way to make it show up on our phones. I had neglected to bring my Canon PowerShot, worrying that I would fiddle too much with it as I tried to get the perfect shot. But I probably could have avoided this if I’d done my research, adjusted all my settings just so, and picked one single, judicious moment. As it was, we all sporadically fiddled with our phones instead, quickly discovering like everyone else that they were more or less useless. The one clue of something a bit odd was that the little glinting sun-glare off our lenses, normally a round dot, was now also a thinning crescent. That, and the now subtly odd lighting, hard to compare to anything natural. I want to say it was a bit like when the sun briefly emerges from thick clouds after a rainstorm, but it was weirder than that, closer to the eerie wash that precedes a tornado.

Later, I learned that one of my old high school students had somehow figured out how to get a reasonably cool shot through his eclipse glasses. At the halfway point, I checked Twitter and saw that a friend’s 9-year-old daughter had done the same. I had tried the same thing, with zero luck. The kids were smarter than I was, clearly.

On the edge of totality, we still couldn’t look with the naked eye. But it was getting a little cooler. I started taking a video.

“We’re down to two minutes,” Tom said, not even noticing me. “Should be less,” my dad said. “Should be, you said oh-nine…?”

Behind me, the little old ladies were twittering away about their eyesight. “I forgot to put my glasses on, and I was driving…” “I think I’m gonna need a stronger prescription…” “Have you ever had cataract surgery?” “Yeah I have. It’s been about, like, twenty years ago…” “Oh my gracious!”

“We’re, like…yeah, 90 seconds out, 80 seconds out…”

All the neighborhood lights were winking on. It felt like that time of day when you step outside to hear the first evening crickets, grill some burgers, greet a neighbor. It was 3:08 in the afternoon.

“See, the lights are coming on!”

“Look at it, it’s just a teensy, weensy, weensy…”

Tom began to chuckle. “This is amazing!”

45 seconds. “There it goes!”

A chickadee’s little high-pitched cry began to pierce the air like a sewing needle, the call it makes to warn of a fast-moving predator. Zee zee, zee zee! Zee zee, zee zee!

“My camera’s picture is as if the sun were shrinking, it’s pretty wild…”

“I thought it would get really dark, which it hasn’t. I thought it would get like night. I don’t know why I thought that, but I did.”

“Oh, we’re not there yet, ladies. Hang on. Feel it? Feel it going?”

“A little bit more…”

I still couldn’t look without my glasses, but I could look through my phone and see a bright pinprick of light materialize, down and to the right: Venus.

Zee zee, zee zee!

Then, just like that, it was bedtime.

“Oh!” Tom exclaimed. “Oh my goodness, okay, I can look at it now! Oh…oh…oh my goodness!”

Well, if you saw it, then you know what I saw. You know how your phone tried to compensate, too light or too dark, utterly bemused by the day-night. You know how in the inadequate little picture you snapped in that moment, a little round black something had finally appeared in the center of the light, impossibly distant, like you were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Your phone was trying to tell you: It was time. Time to stop. Time to behold.

A contrail sped, spear-like, towards Venus. Mercury came out too somewhere up and left, or so they were saying. I didn’t even notice, because I couldn’t stop staring at the great black hole in the sky. Dad walked around and caught some better pictures than I did, though his were too dark, while the couple I snapped were too light. I wish I had looked around more, really noticed how everyone’s skin actually looked, how the trees actually looked, now veiled in thick shadow. But all I can really remember is the great black hole, and the ring of fire, and Venus burning at 5 o’clock.

Everyone talks about the “diamond ring,” the moment when the first gemstone of light pops out, just before you have to put your glasses back on. Naturally, I picked exactly that moment to glance away. When I glanced back, it was over.

With my glasses back on, I could barely perceive any difference. Without them, I knew day had returned, like a candle relit. I saw the neighborhood lights go out, no longer needed.

“That’s just crazy,” Tom kept murmuring. “That’s not normal.”

We didn’t stay much longer. It was like Tom had said: Who sticks around for poor After Totality?

Dad was talking about when the next one would pass this way, some time around the year 3000. Well, the neighbor ladies said, they sure wouldn’t want to be here for that. “I want to be in heaven!” said one. “I want to see my husband!” said the other.

That night, we all took a walk, going out the back door where a lilac bush was growing. I couldn’t help burying my nose in it every time I passed it. I was leaving tomorrow. I missed it already.

The sun was low now, glowing deep orange behind the Spring Snow tree. In that light, it looked like the White Tree of Gondor. And I thought as I looked that it was the most beautiful thing I had seen all day.