A Total Solar Eclipse

As I shuffle my feet along the dry gravel, I notice the dead grass underneath has given the ground an almost sponge-like feel to it. The earth is a mix of browns and greys and yellows and looking out across the paddock in front of me, the colour scheme continues off and over the rise, in stark contrast with the bright blue skyline. There are small, green shrubs wilting in the morning summer sun but barely any reaching above head height. From what I have seen, this landscape is pretty much uniform across most of Oregon's terrain east of the Cascade mountain range.

It's about 9 o'clock in the morning, but already the blistering desert heat is beginning to set in and the warm breeze will not bring any relief to the fifty or so people that are here, out in the middle-of-nowhere with me. We are all strangers to one another, but we are all out here for the same reason. To view the total solar eclipse.

Although solar eclipses happen roughly every two years, this one has been unofficially proclaimed as 'The Great American Solar Eclipse', and not just because of America's grand assessment of self-worth, but because this one in particular will span all the way from the United State's Pacific north-west all the way to the other side of the continent and finish in South Carolina. What initially began as an interesting celestial event quickly turned into an outbreak of pandemonium as the whole country came down with solar eclipse fever. With me caught in the middle of it all.

A year ago, I had briefly seen a tweet by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson mentioning a total solar eclipse due to pass over most of America on August 21st 2017. Interested, I researched a little more about where it was due to pass over and saw that it was expected to make landfall on the Oregon shoreline at a small coastal town called Lincoln City, just south of Portland. It had always been my intention of seeing the United States, and Portland in particular for various reasons, so the next day I applied for annual leave covering the time of the solar eclipse. Fast-forward a while later, and my annual leave had been approved and was now faced with the realisation that I now actually had to sit down and start planning.

The problem I was now faced with was the possibility of not finding any sort of accommodation in the path of the totality, as most of the hotels and motels in the small country towns had been booked out for months, if not years, in advance. And the places that did have availability, had rooms going for astronomical prices (pun intended). If I couldn't stay anywhere in the path of totality, I would have to approach this problem from a different angle, quite literally. So I decided I had to bite the bullet and hire a car.

Driving on the right hand side of the road was not unfamiliar territory to me, as I had done some driving on a quad bike on the Greek island of Naxos a couple of years prior, but there was no doubt in my mind that this was going to be a whole different feat altogether. Considering I have only been driving for about 6 years back home, admittedly a late bloomer, driving in a foreign country with different road rules and a country still using the imperial system, this was going to be a challenging task. So with meticulous planning, I organised to pick up the rental car from a depot in Oakland near San Francisco that was far away out enough of the main city and away from the traffic. This way I could give myself plenty of time to switch my brain to driving on the other side of the road and get used to the new dimensions of the vehicle. I managed to pick up the driving element pretty quickly but it was the controls inside the car that continued to catch me out. Even after about a week of driving, I would still reach for the seat belt with my left hand across to my right shoulder, automatically reach for the gear shift with my left hand and end up smacking it into the driver's side window, and accidently activating my windshield wipers when attempting to indicate.

After driving up the coast, I eventually reached Portland, where I found a motel for a reasonable price and planned to stay there from the Saturday to Tuesday, meaning I was in a decent enough position for the solar eclipse if I planned it correctly. Up until this point, the solar eclipse fever had reached epidemic levels and even trying to find solar eclipse glasses had become an impossible task. It was
like the entire country was preparing for an 'end-of-the-world' event. I had thought that maybe finding a pair might be difficult but I had not anticipated - and obviously neither had the market - the demand for such a cheaply manufactured item. About a week before the solar eclipse, Amazon had issued a recall of many thousands of glasses because they did not meet the international safety standards and so this in turn meant there was now a frantic race to find every last one. Some people with excess glasses, probably foreseeing such exponential demand, began selling them online for hundreds of dollars, an item that cost less than a dollar to make.

So after exhausting all my options, and with no solar eclipse glasses to show for it, I had to come up with a different plan. Back when America had it's last solar eclipse in 1979, many people made their own solar viewing or pinhole projectors. This was done by using a cardboard box and making one pin hole at one end and another view hole at the other. Pointed at the sun, the incoming light will pass through the pin hole and be projected on the other side of the inside of the box, creating a miniature 'camera obscura'.

The name 'camera obscura' has it's origins in Latin and means "dark room". I remember my first experience with an unintentional camera obscura when I was younger, probably about 16 years old. I was lying in bed and it was the weekend so I was making the most of my sleep in. I had the venetian blinds on the window closed all the way, but one of the slats had snapped at the end, so a little bit of light came beaming into the room. As I stared up at my white bedroom wall, I noticed the light that was shining on the wall looked similar to a white picket fence. And I could also see what looked like a footpath and the end of a car. But this image was upside down. Then I saw a woman with shopping bags cross from one side of the image to the other. I remember just watching this inverted image on my bedroom wall, imagining if I was a caveman, seeing this projection for the first time, maybe seeing some passing herd of wildebeest and feeling inspired to paint the image onto a cave wall.

So it looked like I would have to create my own projector to view the eclipse safely. But then it occurred to me - why would I need to craft my own camera when I have a perfectly good one built into my smartphone? Research into the idea had brought up some concern that the solar activity could damage the sensitive instruments behind the camera lens, while others were convinced that it would have no affect at all. I decided that this was going to be my method of viewing the solar eclipse, but to play it safe, I would only take photos of the eclipse periodically until totality.

So here I was, standing out in the middle of the Oregon desert, sporadically kneeling down on a tuft of grass in front of me to protect my exposed knee from the hard gravel. I had experimented the day before with the settings on my smartphone's camera to limit the exposure level. Using these settings now, the phone's screen was awash with white, tentacle-like rays of light. But I began to notice that pointing the camera lens directly at the sun would produce a reflected image on the screen. Looking closely, I noticed that it was an unobscured image of the moon passing in front of the sun. I could safely view the eclipse, without glasses, by positioning the camera at the just right angle with the added benefit of having photographic evidence of the event.

As I stood there in my front row position along the fence line of a neighbouring paddock, the number of cars and people at this little turn-off on the side of the highway began to slowly increase. Trying to pick the perfect location for viewing the solar eclipse was down to mostly guess work. With a rental car I was no longer limited to railroads or bus routes, but there were a few criteria that I needed to tick off. Welcome to the insight of my methodical mind at work.

Number one was weather. There would be no point me travelling halfway across the globe to view a 'once in a life time' event, only for the event to be blocked by a few pesky clouds. I would need somewhere with clear skies for the event.

Number two was traffic. The prediction was that the amount of people hoping to see the solar eclipse would make it one of the worst days of traffic in recent US history. I would have to pick somewhere that was the least populous and easy enough to get to and from my base in Portland.

Number three was distance. I wanted to find a place that was far away from as many people as possible but I did not want to drive too far. With the large amount of people out on the road, it was also predicted that food and, more importantly, petrol would be in short supply, particularly in the smaller towns. I needed to find a place I could drive to and back from on a single tank.

Number four was availability. This was going to be the biggest deciding factor. Yes, I would want to find a place that had great views while I wait for the passing of the moon, but the more well-known the location, the more likely I would struggle to find a place to safely park the car. It was predicted most national and state parks in the path of totality would be full of eager campers in their huge, ugly RVs, some even a week before the big event.

So I sat down and formulated a plan. Smith Rock State Park, just south of a town called Madras, was going to be near dead centre of the totality path and is known for a beautiful canyon that runs through the middle of the park, with plenty of rock climbing and hiking trails. My only concern about this location was that it was a long distance from Portland, close to 4 hours driving, and Madras was considered a prime viewing location, where authorities were expecting around 100,000 to descend on the small country town.

North-east of Madras is the John Day River basin and home to the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, named after an early 19th century fur trader John Day. The National Monument is actually divided into three separate units; Sheep Rock, Painted Hills and Clarno. Out of the three locations, Clarno was the closest and home to the Hancock Field Station, a research station used by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) for students to learn about geology. Only a 3 hour drive from Portland and more easily accessible, this was going to be my new priority location.

As an after thought, I decided that having a back-up plan wasn't such a terrible idea. So I jumped on Google maps and began searching for any place on the side of the highway I could use just in case the picnic and parking area at the Hancock Field Station was already full by the time I arrived. I randomly picked a few places on the highway between two towns, Shaniko and Antelope, and almost instantly found a highway turn off that had a large open area with a nice view of the valley below. I decided to leave early at 3am from Portland to beat the traffic and follow the interstate freeway 84 along the Columbia River as far east as possible. I figured most people would be travelling in a north-south direction, so I would want to limit my driving in that direction as much as possible. I would drive to Biggs Junction, a small town on the Columbia River and an important stop on the Union Pacific Railroad, and then drive directly south and into the path of totality.

I'm normally a very good sleeper. The majority of my life as a 20-something year old has been spent doing shift work, so I can usually fall asleep anywhere, at anytime, with ease. But for some reason, this night I struggled. I don't know if it was my excitement or my nervous thoughts that I might sleep through my alarm or the fact that I was going to be striking off into the darkness on unfamiliar roads with no real idea of where I was going. What if I got lost? What if my rental car decided this was going to be the perfect time to break down?

My drive was not without incident, if only a minor one. Luckily the motel I was staying at in Portland was just next to the freeway, so navigating to the on-ramp was relatively easy. But it wasn't until I began my drive down the freeway that one of the car's dashboard alarms illuminated through the darkness. Low tyre pressure in my rear left wheel. I had received the same warning light a few days before and so at the next gas station I found the air pump and inflated the tyre to a bit above the standard pressure of 36 PSI. Now only a few days later, the same alarm was going to cause me a bit of a problem. There must be a small puncture in the tyre, I figured, causing it to lose pressure, which was not going to be ideal for driving out into the middle of the Oregon desert. Seeing how I was already on the freeway and didn't want to get off and subsequently lost trying to find a gas station with an air pump, I decided to monitor the pressure displayed on the dashboard. If it began to drop, I would have to stop and figure out what to do before it became a flat tyre and ruin my whole trip. Thankfully it stayed steady at 27 PSI and about 2 hours along the darkness of the i84 along the Columbia River, I came along one of the larger towns out east of Portland called the Dalles, and was the last town before Biggs Junction and my planned turn off. Here, at the Dalles, at about 5 in the morning, I found myself crawling down a dead quiet main street looking for a gas station. The first one I found thankfully had an air pump. Although it looked like an old machine, the light was on and it was making a soft mechanical hum. It only accepted quarters, and thankfully I had a handful in the car. So I put four of them into the machine to start it up, and...nothing. Just the faint hum from the machine but no air through the nozzle. It was probably broken and because it was 5am, there were no attendants to ask for help. In fact there was not a single soul around and deathly quiet. My dilemma now was, do I try again and let this thieving machine steal another dollar off me, or find another gas station? I only had enough quarters for one more attempt, so I decided my precious silver coins would be better used elsewhere. Thankfully, I found a second gas station with an air pump that accepted credit cards! Oh, welcome to the future!

With a properly inflated tyre, I set back off on the freeway again, until I reached Biggs Junction. It was about half past five now, and the black sky was starting to give way to that rich, dark blue colour just before the sun begins to rise. The drive along the freeway was relatively traffic-free, but making the turn off at Biggs Junction, I realised how many people had the same idea as me. It wasn't too busy, but along the highway south from here I could see maybe about twenty other cars in front of me, not including the cars that were following behind me. It was a solar eclipse convoy.

It was at this point, I decided to abandon my plans of getting to any of the state parks, and head directly to the highway pull-out stop I had picked out the night before. I figured that if there were this many people out on the road before first light, I can't imagine how full these car parks must already be. The drive along the state highway 97 was quite a relaxing one, despite the traffic. No one was driving aggressively or tail gating. We all seemed to have this unspoken comradery, that we were all out here, at this hour, to witness the same cosmic event and we were all going to get to our destination, there was nothing getting in our way now.

The road wound its way around sharp bends and through shallow troughs, the bleak but beautifully ominous cliff faces of the Oregon hills slowly gave way as we reached the plateau above the Columbia River valley. Looking out over the grassy hills to my left, behind the tall, white wind turbines that covered the ridge, I could see the sky slowly shift from the dark, rich blue to deep purple with a tinge of orange. Like a heavy-weight boxer on the day of the big fight, the sun was ready to makes its presence known to all that had come to watch it. Now we just had to wait for its more humble opponent, the moon, to join the stage, in a classic David and Goliath duel.

So after passing through the small, country towns of Grass Valley and Kent, each lined with their typical grand barn yard homesteads and accompanying tin windmills, I finally reached the turn off from the 97 highway at Shaniko. From here, it was only about ten minutes down the narrow country road until I reached my intended target. The pull-out stop was hard to miss. There were already large RVs and family 4x4s parked along the fence-line by the time I arrived. Thankfully, this area was much larger than what appeared on Google street-view and there were even a few keen campers with pitched tents on the far end of the enclosure, over-looking the valley below. I pulled the car in, right near the entrance. The ground beneath was made of loose stones, and the tyres crunched over them, as I parked up against the barbed-wire fence. At the centre of the enclosed area was a large, wide pile of the same loose stones that paved the ground, but was flattened off at the top, where some people had already picked the perfect viewing position with foldable their deck-chairs.

Just as I got out of the car to have a quick look around, the sun finally rose above the horizon, with a glorious array of sunlight. The day of the sun and moon's big dance had finally come. After a few quick snaps with my camera, I jumped back in the car, reclined my seat and decided after an eventful 3 hours of driving through unfamiliar terrain and in almost pitch darkness, I had earned myself a quick nap.

My nap did not last for long however. With the sun rising, so did the temperature, and the car quickly became hot and stuffy. Winding down the window brought little relief and only made the noise from the slowly stirring campers and the children climbing up and down the large stone pyramid more noticeable. More and more cars arrived and the previously near empty enclosure was now beginning to fill near capacity. In front of me, a large white RV pulled up in front of the orderly line of cars and stopped. An elderly woman, probably in her 60s stepped down to survey the area. There was now very limited room, especially for the juggernaut of metal and rubber they just pulled in with. I assume she figured that no one was really going to be leaving any time soon, so she walked back up to the driver's side window and told her husband to turn the ignition off. This is where they were going to make camp, double-parking about 5 other cars. This little highway stop was officially at capacity.

The moon's path was not due to begin passing over the sun until about 9am. So after a quick snack of jam and bread for my breakfast, washed down with a few swigs of apple juice, I got out of the car to find an appropriate viewing spot. I walked out of the enclosure and down the side of the highway for a short distance, away from crowd perched up on top of the stone pyramid. On the other side of the road, the string of power-lines disappear into the distance and just behind them, on the horizon, the snow-capped Mount Hood and the other smaller surrounding hills that make up the Cascade Volcanic Arc of northern Oregon are easily visible in the morning light.

 

Cars have now started pulling off and parking on the side of the road. Two young guys stop their black SUV in front of me, take their deck-chairs out from the trunk and set up on the dry gravel. One of them puts on his solar eclipse glasses and exclaims to his friend, "Wow, that is so cool. You can see the moon in front of the sun now. Wow!" I grabbed my phone and aimed the camera at the sun, and checked out the reflected image. Indeed the moon had started its path across the sun. The eclipse had begun.

The path of totality is due to hit this part of the state at 10:19am, so I spend the next hour crouching with my camera pointed at the sun, watching as the sun is slowly swallowed by the moon. The sun started to resemble more like a crescent moon at night than the usual hot ball of gas. I am so focused at getting some good photos of the eclipse, that when I stand back up again from my crouching position and look around, I notice that my immediate surroundings are starting to get eerily dark. Even the mountain ranges on the horizon are getting harder to make out as the sky begins to reverse the order of sunrise colours I had witnessed earlier. It is now a bit after 10am, and the moon is now covering about 90 per cent of the sun. But the amount of sunlight still radiating down towards us is unrecognisable from an unobscured sun. At this moment I can appreciate the vast amount of energy that the sun rains down on the Earth constantly, that even this amount can be blinding to the naked eye.

From the stone hill top I can still hear the constant murmur of the crowd rise in volume as the level of excitement begins to grow. A little girls yells out to her father, "Only 6 more minutes to go!" Looking around, there seems to be a long shadow covering the nearby paddocks as the light level begins to drop dramatically. Along with visible light, I first begin to feel the temperature begin to fall too. There are no other words to describe this feeling other than 'eerie' and 'other-worldly'.

Almost in an instant, a false 'sunset' is cast across the landscape. It gets dark. It gets cold. The primal feeling of a coming apocalypse washes over me and I can't help but let out a chuckle of disbelief. I look back at the sun just in time to see the very last remnants of sunlight snuffed out by the black sphere of the moon. A great cheer goes up from the crowd. For the first time today, I can look up with my own eyes and gaze at the beauty of this celestial moment. Coincidentally, the size of the moon is almost the perfect size to completely block all of the sun, so that all I can see is a ring of light from the sun's corona encircling the black disc of the moon.

(last image courtesy of NASA)

The event itself only lasts for a little more than two minutes. But it's two minutes of emotionally charged awe and bewilderment. I had heard of people being brought to tears while witnessing a total solar eclipse and thought of it as a bit silly. But now I fully understand their emotional release. Although I wasn't brought to tears myself, I most likely had the biggest grin on my face, like a child that had been given free reign of a candy store. To think I got to experience both the aurora borealis and a total solar eclipse in the same year was amazing. Earlier, in March, I had travelled up above the Arctic Circle in Norway to hunt down the Northern Lights, with much success. Thankfully I was able to witness these wonders of the solar system at our cosmic doorstep first-hand. It really makes you appreciate our tiny involvement in such a grand and chaotic universe but the fact that we can explain and predict such wonders through science speaks volumes of how far we have come as a species, and how much more we have to learn.

And then, just as suddenly as it had disappeared, the first rays of light escape the blanket of the moon and I can instantly feel the warmth of the sun's glow again. Like switching on a household light, the darkness quickly recedes and the surrounding hills and valleys are returned to the bright yellows and greens they had been before. A woman a few metres over to my right turns to me and says, "How amazing was that?". Still processing what I had seen, I can only muster a reply of "Not bad". What an understatement!

Almost without a second thought, most of the crowd flocked straight to their over-sized pickup trucks and SUVs and took off, followed by a cloud of dust, as they tried to beat the impending traffic mayhem that was predicted to follow. Instead, I returned to my car, and sat there flicking through my photos as I digested the moments of the event. I figured we'd all be stuck in traffic either way, and I was in no rush to return just yet. After about half an hour, I started the car up and headed back out onto the highway. The trip back to Biggs Junction took about twice as long, maybe close to 2 hours, but after stopping by the banks of the Columbia River to have lunch, my trip back into Portland was a relative breeze, driving for about another two hours, possibly less. Watching the news later that day, reports of people being stuck in traffic for up to four hours or more had me appreciating how well executed my plan had played out. But the best part was seeing the endless stories of other people's eclipse experiences. Something of which I had been apart. I thought to myself, "I need to document today's experiences", and so I got out my pen and notebook and began to write.