once in a lifetime

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Solar eclipse 21 August 2017. Wiki media

A week ago the plan was simple enough: get up early, drive south on Hwy 411 to Vonore, find a place to park and wait. It was only 33 miles, we could make it in roughly 40 minutes.

Then we were given a spoonful of castor oil called reality. Thousands of out-of-state travelers were here to do much the same thing. I guess a once-in-a-lifetime total eclipse of the sun belongs to everyone. It wasn't just our eclipse or a time to be exclusionary and provincial. There's enough of that going on in the nation's capital.

This morning we quickly had to reconnoiter and devise a new plan. Returning to the totality map we realized Maryville would give us a good enough show. But could we even get there? 

Rachael Eliot and I joined the slow flow of traffic on Alcoa Highway and aimed for Foothills Mall. Instead of waiting in the hot car for hours, we did what the other half of all Americans were doing, we went shopping. Perhaps we needed more red in our wardrobe.

We arrived early enough to park in the partial shade of a chinkapin oak and met people from Alabama, Pennsylvania and even Poland around us.

The big totality show started right on time—2:33 pm—and isn't it a beautiful piece of symmetry that the moon is exactly the right size at exactly the right distance from Mother Earth to exactly snuff out the light of the sun albeit briefly. And I know using the word "exactly" three times in one sentence is a writer's no-no, but it is exactly true.

We live in a chaotic yet orderly universe: black holes and a clockwork solar system. A loving populace with hate-filled leadership. At totality, all went dark, the crowd oohed and aahed, birds started to coo and roost, scissor-grinder cicadas began to buzz. My friend John Goodall and his family saw bats at their Maryville location. Probably anything crepuscular became active. Heck, it sure looked like twilight to me. 

As the sun returned, undulating shadow bands raced across the asphalt of the parking lot, and for one brief moment the world did not seem so wackadoo but in perfect alignment. Peace and joy throughout the land. "Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya. Hallelujah. Hallelujah." 

But nature and science have always made so much more sense to me than the rest of the so called civilized world. 

Tiny holes in the tree canopy overhead created pinhole cameras.

Disbelief...

turned to twilight

turned to joy at the sun's return.

as ephemeral as the chalk that documented the site

And 21 August 2017 ended on yet another bit of immaculateness.

   

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