Karen and I travelled to Kingston, Ontario, for the total solar eclipse on April 8.
We had a few clouds, but not enough to spoil this glorious mindbending event. I found it deeply moving, every bit as much as the perfectly clear Oregon eclipse of 2017. This is now my third total solar eclipse, each one a mountaintop experience. My blog this week is a story I wrote following that first eclipse in Manitoba on January 26, 1979. Be warned that this is a fictionalized, rather zany account, and it’s a fair bit longer than my usual posts. But I think you’ll find the ending worthwhile.
“Detailed View of a Solar Eclipse Corona” by Phil Hart (https://philhart.com/exmouth-eclipse).
“Look, Jake, it’s happening!” cries Jasper. “The darn thing is really happening!”
Jasper and I stand with arms draped over each other’s shoulders and our heads nearly touching to peer through the little pane of No. 14 welder’s glass. And there, up in the clear mid-morning sky over Brandon, Manitoba, a first black tooth of moon has bitten off a zillion or two rays from the fiery flesh of the sun.
My brother and I have driven through the night, rising at two in beclouded Saskatoon and rolling down the Yellowhead like a pinball in Jasper’s silver VW Bug, stopping just once for brekkie at the Eggsellant Café in Yorkton, and now we’re here with scads of other cosmic trekkers to see this crazy thing, to watch the heavens dance their way out of this world.
Just to tease us, it stayed overcast nearly all the way, till finally at Foxwarren—thanks, Foxy!—we see a star, one lonesome diamond like a beacon piercing fog, and Jasper leans on the horn and for the next ten miles we yell our way through the prairie night with that horn blaring and Sammy the Samoyed barking in the back seat as more and more stars come out to see what all the fuss is about, till just past the border of Friendly Manitoba we’ve honked and cheered and barked every darn cloud away and over us hangs a black sky bright as a peacock’s tail with stars, as the poor benighted weatherman on our radio like a purblind rooster is still calling the eclipse on account of clouds.
We knew it would be clear, felt for sure the universe would come through for us, though it’s still a big surprise and a bigger relief to be pulling into this Brandon morning wide-eyed at the pink and azure daylight as the day gazes back at us new and cloudless as a baby’s bum.
It’s exactly zero degrees Fahrenheit in this prairie town and after seeing that electronic sign with its big cipher raised to the power of a little cipher we start seeing zeros and O’s everywhere, the whole world seeming to announce impending nullification. All morning we’ve walked the streets watching the place wake up and the buildings and sidewalks and people’s faces flushed with first light. We’ve taken fixes on the height and arc and brightness of earth’s own star and studied the diverse shades of sunlight as it rests on various planes of snow—flat snow in yards, sloped snow in banks, cubistic congeries of snow in piles—and speculated on where precisely the invisible Lady Luna might be hiding right now whilst plotting her spectacular highjack of bright Sister Sol. Tuning our minds into the wavelengths of those celestial wheels and trying to get a feel for their mass, motion, equipoise. Getting our heads used to holding hands with light.
All in vain, naturally. There’s no way to prepare for this thing. No way to position your mind to have an enema. Who could know that the high we’ll get from this spectacle will last days, weeks—nay, lifetimes—days in which fountains of cleansing energy will course through us, bubbling over in a profusion of riotous feelings, our moods swelling into the fantastic shapes of mythical beasts, tranquility and boisterousness joined to a single neck, reverence and hilarity wings on the same delicately brawny body.
Soon now, with the satiny black cheek of the moon’s hull serenely launched on its voyage across desert sun, Jasper and I are back in the Bug heading a little ways west, then north, out of the city, with Sammy this time perched impossibly in the front between us, so excited he’s trembling. On our way into town we picked out a nice spot on a lonely stretch of road to watch from—a quiet empty place with a good long view of horizon all around like a fat man’s belt, except where it buckles into one little hill that we might or might not climb to get even closer to the big event. Even driving, we’re passing the No. 14 back and forth because the darn thing keeps happening, really happening, the ancient globes just hanging up there and sliding into each other clean as mating pendulums, and already we’re sensing beautiful distortions in time and space. All time is slowing down, stopping, holding its breath for this deepspace lovemaking in the dazzling blue bed of sky, and as we turn onto our gravel road—the road we’re both convinced is the right road to the last North American total solar eclipse of the millennium—ahead of us a thin brown strip from the moon’s own hide rolls out over the snow like a welcome carpet for aliens and already there’s a deepening of shadows all around and a dullish pearly glow to the air as if we’re driving inside a pair of opera glasses.
And just as we’re remarking on this, googly-eyeing the weird light and the bending of spacetime, we spot a hitchhiker. There, barely a mile down this lunamoth road on the bald white pate of prairie, real and unreal as everything else in this eerie, empty ethereality, real as nothing and looking for all the world like an apparition, stands a hiker. Surprise enough to encounter anyone at all out here on the backside of underneath, let alone a galactic vagabond cum interstellar thumb-bum. Jasper’s eyes shoot giant lunar arches at me, a phalanx of moonmen standing tiptoe on his eyebrows and hollering questions, but he says nary a word, just slows down the Bug till we’re close enough to the roadside pilgrim to get our next surprise.
She’s a chick. And right away I think, Uh-oh, this dame’s gonna wreck our eclipse—OUR eclipse, the one meant just for Jasper and Sammy and me and the sunmoonearth. But I know that’s not what Jasper’s thinking; he’s thinking maybe the chick will be interesting, maybe she’s even the reason we drove all through the night to get to this spirit-saturated patch of prairie, that maybe she’ll even make this eclipse for us. As if there’s not plenty too much to think about already without mixing it up with a grrrl. But Jasper is so crazy complex that you can add a skillion new factors to any situation, pile idiocy upon insanity, and his mind will just keep clicking along with it, assimilating.
Stella. What can I say about Stella except that everything about her is dreamy? She has dreamy long brown hair, and eyes like the eyes of a fawn lowering its head to drink from a dark pool in a dream. Stella’s about as tall as a dream is long and her breasts, even in that snug vermilion ski jacket, are shaped like whatever kind of fruit might grow on dusk-colored trees in a rich misty orchard of dreams. When Stella slides into the back seat of our car she moves the way a cloud might move getting into a spaceship in a dream.
For a minute nobody speaks. Then—“What the hell …?” chokes Jasper, the rest of the sentence vanishing down his throat. Then—“I mean, where the hell you headed way out here?”
Says Stella, “Where else—to the eclipse,” flashing a soft deery smile that lights her face like the magic blurry border that’s always there at the edge of a dream.
“The eclipse!” yells Jasper. “Baby, you’re there! You’re here! It’s happening right now!”
He holds up the pane of welder’s glass as if proffering a piece of the moon itself. She just nods and says she knows all about it. Her name is Stella, she says, and adds that she got her boyfriend—that hateful word—to drive her out here and drop her because she wanted to be all alone out in the country to experience the show. But when the light began to change so dramatically she felt—well, she wasn’t sure—but seeing our car, she thought it might be best to be with people.
Jasper and I exchange doubtful glances, because actually we know she’s lying. We know that in reality Stella is a lost angel of the sun who’s had a falling out with some solar prominence or other and is just trying to make her way home. But hey, so what if she’s a mooncalf of a spacechick—it’s no business of ours—except here she is dreaming away in our back seat and meanwhile the darn eclipse is still happening, still the black shutter of moon closing relentless as an hour hand across the sun. Jasper drives a few miles further to our spot near the little hill, well away from other roads or farmyards, then stops and we all get out as if arriving on some new planet after a long space journey, and Sammy too tumbles out and stretches and sniffs around for something to eat or roll in and finally gives the all clear by taking a leak in the alien snow. We stroll a ways down the road, and just glancing back at the Bug it suddenly looks like an actual bug, a half-mechanical once-living thing that has flown us lightyears into the future and now before our eyes is rapidly aging into a hopelessly outmoded hunk of spacejunk. Stella may be lost, and now so are we, and none of us will ever get home.
But who cares? Unlike the Bug we’re all growing younger, years of Sturm-und-Drang shucking off us like corn husks and we’re lovelier—even Stella, if possible—and more intelligent and innocent than human beings are accustomed to being. Our hands and heads move slow and wondering like the wise ageless leaves of plants as we smell and explore the atmosphere of this strange new world. To me the air here is coral, to Jasper it’s lavender, Stella says it’s a blend of saffron and cinnamon. The shadows are a mix of all those hues, only darker, and there are thousands of shadows, millions of tiny shadows accentuating each tiny imperfection in the endlessly perfect snow, all splayed over the flat whiteness like long spilled nostrils and ears and mouths of giant fallen spreadeagled beings. Every chip of road gravel has its own unearthly shadow, each like a skin flying from a flagpole and each more real than the gravel itself, every bump and lick and wave and curl of this otherworldly landscape sporting its own darkly radiant comet tail of shadow. At 10:34 a.m., midwinter, just shy of fifty degrees latitude north, even approaching noon the sun is still as low in the sky as on a summer’s eve, and this whole flat empty land is nothing but contrasts between light and dark, between shadows rich and mauve as a mulch of rainbows and light frailly luminous as the lining of a conch shell, and this eclipse is drawing the two together, gently shoving light into dark like a baby’s hand into a black leather glove.
Sammy, sitting near Jasper’s feet in this weird non-light, is white as a phantom, white as the winter vapor leaking from her muzzle. Stella has walked a fair ways down the road ahead of us, and for a second I feel like calling out to her, calling her back before she tumbles off the edge of everything known. Yet she looks so gorgeous out there, so immaculately alone afloat at the fringe of space, lovely as a single note of music that holds all others. And all at once she breaks into a run! What …?
She’s off the road now, heading for the little hill to our right. She’ll sink in the snow, I think, until I see that there’s a beaten path running straight up the hillside—a toboggan track starting at the top and reaching as far as the road. The hill is just high enough to give prairie kids a bit of a thrill, and now a tobogganless Stella is dashing up that track like a young rabbit, making for the summit.
Meanwhile, back at No. 14, the sun’s disk is nearly gone, just a thin shaved crescent of blazing gold left, and already a chilly ghostly wind has picked up out of nowhere and blows straight at us as if the road we’re on is a tunnel with its far end up among the dark mountains of the moon. And all at once the sun isn’t a nail paring any more but just a single cluster of beams shooting out from one side, the famed diamond ring worn fleetingly on the moon’s black finger, and then from the southeast we sense—more feel than see—the giant freight-train laser sweep of lunar shadow racing toward us as up on the hilltop Stella lifts her arms and shouts, “A star!” and all our hearts stop, all of our blood spews out of our bodies and freezes in ectoplasmic coronas, transforming us into pure spirits pendant there in the sudden night—the night of outer space itself, incandescently dark, a white night like the merest patina of frost on ebony—while all around us the horizon is one 360-degree sunset-sunrise of pure orange fading up through pink and pale blue into black—neither night nor day, neither dawn nor dusk, but another phenomenon entirely, out of some other dimension.
And now we can look upon the sun with naked eye, only it’s not the same old sun anymore but a transcendent silver-red halo of bloodshot liquid light that bestows halos on all of us who see it, blessing, sanctifying through its spidery angel-hair filaments spun out from the omphalos of the cosmos that opens like a rose at this moment. Jasper, I think, says something but I don’t hear it, all I see is the great rose blossoming from his mouth, and I look at my hands and they are rosy and there are roses growing out of the stones and roses opening in the snow. What happened to our clothes? They don’t exist, they’ve melted away in this uncanny radiation, not even bodies exist as our skins quiver and glow and are seen as they are, the tenuous membranes of souls. Nothing moves or breathes except the wind, coming from nowhere and going nowhere; everything moves and breathes and is perfectly still; everything turns in a calm as still as held breath. All is transformed and seen in spirit as it truly is; the rosy heart of all floats to the surface and flowers inside out, spilling petals everywhere, and everything is petals and nothing else—a petal for joy, a petal for wonder, a petal for dread, petals for all that remains unnameable. Not merely the sunmoonearth but everything now is aligned on a single plane, everything perfectly equal and balanced, and you can look straight along that plane as though peering between all worlds and see into the mansions beyond.
Despite the preternatural grandeur of this moment, indeed because of its grand cathedralic gravity, you know it can’t last, you can feel it not lasting even as it lasts. Yet when the far rim of the sun finally blares out again from beneath the moon’s sliding lid, that first burst of fresh yellow rays is so warm and welcome that you’re not immediately aware of having lost something irretrievable, in fact you cannot resist the impulse to cheer and jump and applaud and that’s just what we do, hugging each other and dancing around, and Jasper does cartwheels, his long legs and arms turning straightly like a tumbleweed with spokes, and now he’s cartwheeled up to the toboggan track, and now he’s upright and sprinting up the track, flying like a winged god, and when he gets to where Stella is he throws his spokes around her and smacks her a big wet kiss right on the mouth. And from where I stand, it looks like she kisses him back. And then they stand apart, and he looks kind of sheepish, and even from here I can see that she’s crying.
And then, stillness. For some time after the passing of the total phase we all stand around in the still-pearly light, dazed and contemplative, savoring the hallucinatory depth of the landscape, so empty, so etched with detail, along with the corresponding profundity that has opened within ourselves, until eventually Jasper drifts down the hill, and Stella after him a bit later, and finally, acting together on some obscure cue, we all turn and walk slowly back to the car, slowly and shyly as though transfigured and inhabiting new bodies.
And so we head back to town, still silent a while, until Stella pipes up from the back, “Did you see the shadow—the lunar umbra? Amazing! Do you know it races across the land at over two thousand miles an hour? I read that the best place to see it is from the top of a hill with a clear view to the horizon. This place was perfect!”
And then, with the passion of mystics who have seen visions, we all wildly share our impressions, in the course of which Jasper comments, “So you watched the eclipse alone after all.”
“Yes,” says Stella, “and no. Everything was perfect.”
After a moment’s pause Jasper ventures, “That boyfriend of yours—how serious are you about him?”
“Pretty.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning about as serious as I get.”
This answer wouldn’t have done for me, but Jasper is smiling.
As we reach the outskirts of town, Jasper asks Stella if she’ll join us for lunch. She declines, and indicates where she wants to be dropped.
When we come to the place, Jasper turns around in his seat and says, “I know this is a bit sudden—but can I see you again? Can we have coffee?”
Again she declines, and is about to exit when Jasper says, “What if I told you I snapped a picture of you up on that hill with the eclipse happening right over your shoulder?”
Even dreams, sometimes, can be nonplussed.
“You did? That’s … incredible!”
“Yeah. It’s a really great shot. And it’s all yours if you’ll have coffee with me. I mean, it’ll take a day or two to get it developed. Can’t wait to see it myself. So how about Wednesday? I’ll pick you up right here, we’ll go for coffee, I’ll give you the print, and that’ll be it.”
Stella demurs, but in the end she agrees. And so we leave her, a spacey vermilion beauty vanishing into a gloomy rooming house that looks like the kind of place where a movie star might live before she’s made it big.
Over lunch at The Garden of Eatin’, I comment that I hadn’t noticed Jasper taking any pictures of the eclipse.
“I didn’t,” he admits.
“So you lied.”
“Not exactly. I took a picture in my mind.”
“Humph! Stella will be tee’d off when she finds there’s no picture.”
“That’s okay. I can deal with tee’d off. Indifference is another thing. With girls you want to arouse their passions. What those passions are is irrelevant.”
Jasper has some interesting theories about the fairer sex, not all of which always work out.
“I suppose you think you’re in love with her.”
Jasper considers a while before answering, “About as in love as I get.”
That smile of his—like a slice of pure sunshine.
As for myself, recalling my own mental image of Stella up on the hill with her arms raised as though to pluck the veiled sun like a flower out of the air, there was a moment when she was no longer just a pretty girl but something even prettier—a radiant human being—the most glorious thing in this whole gobsmacking creation—who with red jacket and long brown hair put me in mind of another figure on a lonely hilltop, two thousand years ago, arms outspread, nailed to the sky, on another day when the sun went dark.
• • • • •
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