It’s 3:00 am and alarms go off all over the room (I made everyone set their alarm. Just to be safe.) Google Maps indicates clear sailing all the way to Salem, which presents a minor decision-making difficulty. Our initial plan was to go only as far as Woodburn, park in the outlet mall lot and watch the 1-minute eclipse. Open roads, however, make Salem and the 2-minute eclipse a realistic destination. Ultimately, we pick a box-store mall in Keizer, just at the north end of Salem, where there is a Starbucks for our coffee and bathroom needs.
The drive to Salem is surprisingly easy. The roads are busy for this time of day but there are no slow-downs at all. Jan predicted this and wins a dollar from Jeff. We select the mostly-empty Lowe’s parking lot for our little viewing party and get the cars parked. At 4:00 am, the Starbucks in Keizer is hopping! Parking at that end of the mall is quite full, but our end of the mall will remain strangely barren.
Things to do when you are settled in and have 5 hours to kill until the start of an eclipse:
- set a timer for 5 hours
- take a nap in a field behind the Michael’s
- read a book
- eat the survival food you brought in case you had to watch the eclipse from a farmer’s field
- test your high-tech pinhole camera, made with two craps of hotel room notepaper
- drink Starbucks coffee
- make a second bathroom run
At 9:05, with our viewers ready, the eclipse has started!!! The moon made the tiniest nip out of the sun, and we could see it happening! For the next hour and 12 minutes, the moon will continue to encroach on the sun, it’s path visible only through the safety of our solar viewers.
Every 15 minutes or so we’d use the scrap-paper pinhole camera to see how things looked from that perspective (until I accidentally leaned on the car window, which we were using to secure the camera in place, and the whole thing slid down into the door frame). At about 9:40, I wandered around the parking lot until I found a place where the leaves of a tree were acting as natural pinhole cameras, casting eclipse shadows on the pavement, and gathered the group to take a took. Once everyone was convinced that they were actually seeing the shadow-eclipse, we starting finding them everywhere! The best example was shadows cast on the car parked right behind us.
At about 9:50, Jan noticed that the light was different. It was true that we didn’t need our sunglasses anymore against the glare from the tarmac. Around 10:00 it was noticeably cooler. Where it had been around 30 degress, you could now easily have worn a jacket. From about 10:10 on, things happened more quickly. It started getting weirdly crepuscular. Shadows disappeared. Parking lot lights started to turn on. We were glued to our viewers as the crescent of the sun got thinner and thinner, so there are probably some interesting effects that we missed. For example, I barely noticed as an eerie silence descended.
The last 30 seconds before totality were stunning. Darkness descended surprisingly quickly, as he last tiny glimmer of the sun disappeared in the viewers. Totality was instant. One second the sun was still too bright to look at and the next second it was gone. Throughout the area we heard gasps of amazement as people glimpsed the eclipse, and a magnificently enormous corona appeared in the sky around a pitch black hole. We all jumped to our feet, as if sitting didn’t do justice to what we were seeing. We had 2 minutes to try to take it all in. The 360 degrees of sunset around the horizon. Venus shining brightly at the zenith of the sky. The Corona!! Tiny red beads of light around the edge of the moon as the eclipse was nearing it’s end. One last look at the corona before it was all over! Then a glimmer of sun from the upper right and suddenly it was over.
Viewers back on, we watched as the moon started to move away from the sun and things happened in reverse. It got lighter, and the birds started flying and making noise again. We sat for the hour post-eclipse watching the sun reappear and talking about what this would have been like for people in ancient times who had no idea what was going on. After the fact, we realized that we had expecting (and dreading) that people would start playing music and honking car horns when the eclipse started but in fact all we heard were utterances of appreciation. I think everyone was too amazed to remember their noise-making plans. What a thing to have seen! Worth every minute and every dollar we spent to get here.
Failing to do justice
I’ll wrap up just by saying that all our predictions for the traffic jam expected on the way down to Salem were encountered 10-fold on the trip back. The 40 mile trip took about 4 hours of very slow but extremely polite traffic. Jeff predicted this and wins a dollar back from Jan.
Disclaimer: I am going from memory on all of the times mentioned in this post, and I may be off on some. However the emotions are spot-on.
What a great description of the event itself! Great writing Risa, awesome trip. Don’t forget about the wine bar. Let’s go get tattoos!
My third pen draft is exactly what I want! I’m ready!!
I’m not almost there. Mine is getting larger and larger.
This was fantastic to read Risa! All I experienced was the darkening and cooling dusk-like conditions. So cool to read about the totality awesomeness 🙂
Thanks Erin! 🙂