A total lunar eclipse viewable in a swath of the northeast occurred on Monday, April 8th, Barb's birthday. Almost a year prior, in preparation, she booked an Air B&B in Kent, NY, on the shore of Lake Ontario. Even a year ahead, there were few choices. Still, Barb found a wonderful little cottage right in the middle of the eclipse's path of totality.
We arrived Saturday morning. Jen came out from Buffalo, Nicole (known as Nikki until recently) came up from Brockport, and Cheryl and Kyle came in from Syracuse. Eric, Eileen (6mo pregnant with the child we now know as Joan), and my grandson Alfie came up from New Jersey (the day after their earthquake). So, on Saturday evening, we had the whole gang together. I cherish the times when I have everyone under one roof. We sat together on the large front porch into the evening, talking and laughing. It reminded me a little of the stories my grandmother used to tell me of when all the kids would come home with their spouses or significant others. My great-grandmother would wheel the piano onto the front porch, and great-grandpa Gremminger would pull out the fiddle, and there would be dancing into the twilight hours.
Eventually, it began to get late, and Jen wanted to head back to Buffalo (an hour's drive), and Nikki wanted to head back to campus (20 minutes away). Everyone wanted to get into place before the big event on Monday. The cautions from news reports on the potential for terrible traffic on Sunday and particularly on Mondy had everyone a little spooked. By Saturday night, without incident, everyone was settled into place.
Sunday was a beautiful day, uneventful and relaxing, if a little cool. It was a sunny day, though the prospects for Monday were looking cloudy, perhaps overcast. The discussion about the relative advantages of being in "totality" in a cloudy place versus seeing something short of "totality" on a clear day continued most of the day. We came to the conclusion that all anyone knows is that being in the "totality" is way cooler than not, regardless of the cloud cover.
 |
| Sunrise on Eclipse Day |
As I began to write the outline for this essay on Monday morning of Eclipse Day, I found it interesting to think about the celestial bodies, huge things, things I have little knowledge about, barreling through space at over 2,000 miles an hour aligning for about 4 minutes (a measurement that itself is derived from their movement) and continuing their predictable path not to line up the same way again in my lifetime. I had no expectations of the event. I heard stories of the last eclipse, but they didn't stir my curiosity.
Monday morning was cold, cloudy, and breezy. It even started to drizzle slightly. Since it was not conducive to picnicking, I was hopeful that there would be fewer potential crowds.
Early in the day, people were milling around, but not as many as I expected. Some cars were parked along the road, but no more than the previous day. This seemed to be enough of an out-of-the-way place to reduce the number of people.
I sat on the front porch and relaxed. After a while, I noticed more vehicles begin to arrive. A parking lot for the boat launch was a short block away, and it started filling up, but not as quickly as I expected. From the parking lot, there was a clear view of the horizon and a small park, so I expected a crowd. It was chilly, and a damp breeze blew over the lake onto the shore. Since we could walk to the parking lot, we took our time getting ready to walk over to our best vantage point. Since it was cold, hats, gloves, and heavy jackets were the uniform of the day. Ten or twenty people were hanging around by the time we walked over, but it was nothing like the crowd I expected.
The sun was somewhere in the sky, but was hidden by dreary gray, overcast clouds. There was not a sky in the clouds, as my mother would have said. It was a disappointment, but all accounts I read suggested that experiencing totality under overcast conditions would be more fascinating than witnessing it in near totality on a clear day. We noticed the sky begin to darken, and when we looked up to the clouds, we caught a quick glimpse of the early crescent, but the clouds quickly swallowed it up.
 |
| Alfie was not impressed |
We stood on a little fishing deck at the water's edge in the harbor, trying to stay warm, wondering how this would play out. Just a little before 3:20pm, the light began to fade quickly. We didn't notice any difference in the temperature, as we were already cold. The darkness descending in the area was unmistakable and eerie. We could see the light on the horizon beyond the edge of the moon's shadow on the Earth. Where we stood, it got dark, much more so than I had expected. Suddenly, it was like night. Even though the cloud cover mostly blocked the view of the moon and sun interacting, the darkness was remarkable. A few minutes later, it was daylight again.
One of the most surprising things to me was that I felt like I had pulled an all-nighter for the rest of the day. My mind kept telling me that there had been a cycle of day to night to dawn, and I had not slept. The fact that the "sunrise" was in a different place wasn't relevant to the equation. I wasn't even that physically tired, but I had the same endorphin high that comes with dawn after working all night on a project or seeing the sunrise after being up all night with a sick child.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Don't be shy, I'm curious about your thoughts.