In light of (get it?) the solar eclipse coming to North America tomorrow, 4/8/2024, I thought I’d share a short essay/description of my own solar eclipse viewing when I travelled from Salt Lake City, Utah to Rexburg Idaho in 2017 with my friend Lucas. It really was a spiritual experience and I wish I would have made plans to travel to Texas or New York this year to see it again. Back then all we had were dogs and no children and I notice in re-reading this how purposeless my life felt at the time, adrift without the anchor of kids. So forgive the self-deprecating parts of the me from seven years ago, but enjoy the rest.
Spending hours in traffic or being surrounded by thousands of people is not exactly my idea of a fun time; but, despite the massive hordes of peoples and swarms of cars I would most likely be encountering, I felt compelled to go to Rexburg, Idaho, just west of Idaho Falls, and watch the solar eclipse. I left with my friend Lucas at eleven a.m. on Sunday, August 20th. It was hot and dry in Salt Lake as we drove north up I-15. The sky was a bright, cobalt blue streaked with wisps of white clouds. We had two black dogs with us—my dog, Amelie, a black-lab-pit mix named after the French movie, and Lucas’s new dog, Dele, a black lab-shepherd-cattle dog mix named after a Tottenham Spurs player.
After a couple quick stops at a rest area and lunch in Pocatello, we made it to our “campsite.” Essentially, a large green field that was part of a larger farm. The people who owned the farm had nicknamed it “Camp Idaho” and it was from this field that we would watch the solar eclipse. We passed many other similar camps. Large fields off I-15 containing huge hay bales spray-painted with words like “Camp and RV Parking.” The most ideal locations seemed to be situated alongside lakes and reservoirs, and while I would have liked to watch the Eclipse from atop the Grand Teton in Teton National Park, I had just made up my mind to come to Idaho five days ago and so Camp Idaho it was.
We drove along the grass as a multitude of RV’s, tents, campers, and cars were either in the process of setting up or already established. Most of the license plates were from California and Utah, though there was the occasional one from Nevada, Arizona, and even British Colombia.
Camp Idaho, we soon realized, was quite the make-shift campground. What at first sight appeared to a be a plain and overcrowded green field in the middle of nowhere, soon revealed itself to be teeming with fire pits, beverage and snack stands, a plenitude of bathrooms and trash stations, and even a blow up projector screen so the kids could watch a nightly movie. The camp owners cooked up burgers and hot dogs on a grill not far away. It reminded one of a state fair. We met Howie, whose twin, ten-year old sons Noah and Nate ran up to the car to greet us. Howie and Lucas were both big Real Salt Lake fans and I noticed Howie’s license plate was a custom RSL fan plate that read “Kikit.”
After we set up, Lucas and I decided to take the dogs to a park or a river as the son was hot and brutal at four o’ clock in the August afternoon. We ended up taking the dogs to a branch of the Snake River and threw a tennis ball for them, watched as they bounded through the shallow bank, splashing and shaking their black fur. We headed back to the campsite where I cooked carne asada and we sat around the table drinking and chatting with the neighbors. The air hummed with excitement across Camp Idaho. People tossed Frisbees and played spike ball. Kids and dogs ran amuck.
The next morning I woke up early and had to use the bathroom. I unzipped the tent and took Amelie with me as the dark blue dawn slowly emerged. My stomach churned and bubbled from all the whiskey I drank the night before. My esophagus slowly retching up acid and bile. I didn’t think I’d drank that much, but the amount still left in the bottle of Buffalo Trace, a few ounces, said otherwise. There’s always something about sitting around campfire that makes the whiskey go down faster. For the last couple years I’d been in a constant haze and cycle of depression. I’d feel good for a few days—exercise, eat salads, etc.,—and then I would get tired and my life would devolve into too much booze, cigarettes, and pizza. Start the cycle all over again on Monday. I had no motivation to truly change and was fairly hopeless that my life could truly look any different in the future.
The eclipse began at 10:33. It was hard to put into words. I’m not a professional photographer, so I have no amazing photos from the event and Annie Dillard’s essay on the eclipse will remain as untouchable as the sun, so I will not try to replicate the experience in language as she did. The best I can do is to say that the feeling, the feeling of everything as it began to turn—the air metallic, blueish-grey, and yes, platinum, some weird-eerie-haze, the temperature dropping twenty degrees, the wind quieting, the sun looking like PAC-MAN through my glasses, then like a banana, then like a fingernail, and then there was this split second where everything went pitch black … and then pop! the corona appeared, that diamond ring circling the moon, black-on-white, the flares of the sun like electric white hair, a tiny ring of silver highlighting a pitch-black moon, a three-hundred and sixty degree sunset all around, all viewed in a field in Rexburg, Idaho, people shouting, screaming, cheering, gaping—well, that was a cool feeling. And over too fast. The whole thing was surreal, dream-like, and short, way too short. I had no time to pay attention. There was too much happening as I tried to view the combined elements of the sun, the moon, the grass, and the three-hundred and sixty degree sunset as they occurred simultaneously for two and a half minutes. My head swiveled. Turning left, right, up, down. My pupils dilated. I couldn’t keep still and kept walking around in a tiny circle. Holy crap. Holy shit. Oh man. Oh man. Such were the poetic words I put to such celestial magnificence. I felt joy, happiness, awe. All in two minutes. But the light returned. The temperature slowly rose. Soon people began to leave as if time froze and then melted.
Lucas and I were one of the first to leave and we were met with traffic as soon as we entered the highway. Ten miles took almost one hour. Then another hour and another. Five hours later we had barely made it to Pocatello. Our original drive taking us a mere three and a half hours. I made it through almost an entire New Yorker in the traffic back to Salt Lake City while Lucas listened to soccer podcasts. Amelie panted out the window. Dele slept.
The next day, Tuesday, August 22nd, 2017, I felt glum. I don’t know if I was tired or still hung-over from whiskey and eating terrible gas-station-junk-food while sitting in a car for eight hours, but I was slightly miserable and in my same old existential funk. The stunning, surreal eclipse of yesterday was now gone and I had experienced no profound spiritual epiphany, no miracle. While the two minutes of the total solar eclipse and the thirty or so minutes leading up the eclipse were like nothing I had ever experienced, they were also fleeting and ephemeral, and I was disappointed that I would not get a chance to view such a sight again for some time. What was I looking for in Idaho? I don’t know. But I’m always looking for something to change me in a profound way and am always frustrated or disappointed when I wake up the next day feeling the exact same.
That night I thought of the moon and the sun and the darkness. The cycle of planets and stars and suns. How darkness and shadows were a necessary part of the cycle of light—rising, falling, setting, cresting. Dawn. Dusk. The occasional and unparalleled solar eclipse. I thought about how I was tiny man in a large universe, whose existential anxieties and selfish struggles were small and insignificant compared to the rate at which the universe moves and expands, the struggle of others on planet earth. I then thought about depression—how it eclipses all feeling of life itself—and I thought of how much further I would need to travel in time and space to deal with my own darkness. How I was so tired of writing about the same damn things. I wondered when, if ever, I would be able to get outside my own head—evolve, grow, change, progress—or if I was doomed to one day self-destruct, burn out like a red giant star.
The sun is currently moving away from the earth in centimeters, at an approximate rate of 1.5 centimeters every year, which means in the year 2024, the year of the next great American Solar Eclipse, the sun will be 10.5 cm further from the earth. I hope, as if I am about to go up to heaven and meet God, that I will be worthy to see such a sight again. Maybe by then, I, like the sun, will also be a few centimeters further along.