I’ve been wanting to write about the eclipse this whole week, but I physically couldn’t. The six and a half hour drive back from Vermont wreaked havoc on my spine and wrists and hips and fingers. It was totally worth it.
There was no plan to see the totality. I was content to see it from Cambridge, I thought. It would be enough to be surrounded by nerds, surely.
Then on the Friday before, I met my friend, Kathryn, down from Maine for the weekend, at the Boston Public Library. I knew Jim and Margery would be doing their show live that day from the café and we could catch the end of it.
For out-of-towners who don’t know, the Jim and Margery show, formally known as Boston Public Radio, is our premier smart local news show. Jim used to host Greater Boston, our smart local TV news show on which I have occasionally appeared, sometimes with Margery. It’s all under the umbrella of WGBH, which makes it extra intellectually fancy.
So there I was at the show, and they were devoting the last segment to the coming eclipse and whether it was worth traveling to see the totality. Jim and Margery were solidly in the “it’s not worth it” camp, but some of their callers were adamant that it was. That shifted something in me.
The next day, I posted on Facebook that I was starting to regret not making a plan to go somewhere to see the totality. A friend in Vermont, a fellow school-parent when our kids were in grammar school, invited me up to her place southeast of Burlington. I accepted! The next morning, the Sunday before the event, I hit the road. Traffic was fine! The drive was glorious, sunny and pretty through the mountains.
I arrived at the house, and it was perfect, sprawling country house with a barn and chickens. Chickens! I immediately knew that I’d need to be with the chickens when totality happened.
The family I was staying with is Mormon, so I brought my own coffee. I got to make jokes about being a Unitarian-Universalist, so coffee is like my communion wine. It didn’t get that big a laugh there, but I knew I could make the joke later with fellow UU’s, and that made me happy.
A bunch of other folks came up to stay at the house, and they were all also Mormons. I was like Cher singing a Stevie Wonder medley with the Osmonds. Kind of a dream come true.
I stayed in the teenage daughters room. She slept on the screened-in porch in the world’s warmest sleeping bag. Her room had a big Shepherd Farley–style poster of Robert Downey Jr. with the word HERO at the bottom. It was the first thing I saw when I woke up the morning of the eclipse. Stirring.
I ate breakfast, learned about the LDS community, walked along the creek behind the house, greeted the chickens in passing. Then it was time.
We pulled some chairs out into the back yard. The chickens gathered around us. We donned our glasses.
I’ve seen a partial eclipse before, and it’s pretty cool. Totality, though, really is a whole other thing. It gets dark and cold and there’s a big dark glowing hole in the sky. There’s sunset all around you. Even knowing it was going to happen, and what all the science was behind it, it still felt like an omen, like a reset. I didn’t feel small looking up at the sky. I felt big and connected to everything.
The chickens had no reaction whatsoever.
Then it was over. I cooled my heels for a couple of hours hoping to avoid traffic. That proved to be possibly pointless.
When I did get on the road, it took me half an hour to go the first mile. Once I got past the stop sign that was holding everything up, I was cruising along at a regular speed. I felt confident, even as the estimated time of arrival kept getting later and later.
Then the GPS sent me over some mountains. It was hard to keep track of how many. I was going up and down and making sharp, winding turns. I went past several ski resorts. At one point I got to the top of a peak and there was a sign there that said “Pavement Ends.” “Wait, what?” I said aloud as I went over the top, and then there I was staring down at several winding miles of dirt and mud. Then pavement again. Then a quick jaunt down Lover’s Lane, which was as rocky and muddy as the name implied. On the other side, there it was, at last, I-89!
I spent the next several hours crawling down I-89 then I-93 at about 20mph. My hands were cramping, my butt was going numb. It was unpleasant, but not entirely. I liked feeling that I’d really been part of something important and memorable. I was driving alongside fellow pilgrims.
Around 11:30, I got close enough to Boston to get WGBH on the radio. They were replaying Jim and Margery from earlier in the day, just before the eclipse was going to happen. People were calling in to say where they were, how they were preparing.
Their very last call, which I heard just before midnight, was Charlotte from Pepperell. My former mother-in-law! She told them she and her husband, my former stepfather-in-law, would be listening to Moonshadow while they watched the partial eclipse from their backyard. I know that backyard well, and could picture them watching, Cat Stevens singing behind them. I really was connected to everything that day, the people in the cars next to me, my spread-out family, the Church of Latter Day Saints.
I got home at 12:30, six and a half hours after I’d left the chickens, and tucked my aching body into bed. None of it had felt like an ordeal. It all felt like an adventure, an extremely necessary adventure.
I got to experience 100% totality in 2017, and 95% totality for this one. The difference between the two is absolutely worth the drive you made.
Along not just being an amazing thing to watch (even from a parking lot at work in Framingham) it felt like a brief break from the harsh reality of 2024 which was nice.