Notes, Outside the Path of Totality
The eclipse was pretty cool. It was also a reminder of the human experience, and how beautiful it can be.
For how doomed the world feels at times—especially for a young person trying to do things like save money and own goods—there are moments that are cleansing, like an iPhone factory reset. Life is absurd and so are we who live it. But so are the cosmos. Much like man’s natural inclination to fire and water, celestial events have a unique way of bringing people together.
I work with people in northeastern Ohio for my day job, and they were in the path of totality for Monday’s solar eclipse, meaning that around 3pm their world went momentarily dark. The next place in America that will have the chance to experience such a phenomenon will be in Montana in 2044—further away and less populated. The workday stopped and the awe from my peers was understandable for such a visually moving event, but I felt something profound in Baltimore, on the fringes of totality.
The Baltimore area had 89% coverage, which sounds only slightly less than Cleveland’s total coverage, but it was a big difference. It didn’t look like nighttime outside, and without glasses, the sun looked exceedingly… normal. Nonetheless, there were some changes. Between about 2:45pm and 3:15pm, during the peak of the cosmic ballet, the sky cast a sepia-toned light on the city. It looked like a hazy summer dusk, a childhood chill that recalled pilgrimages back inside for family dinner, and felt out of place for a previously warm, bright, spring afternoon in Maryland. The temperature dropped significantly and the animals noticed differences too; once the sky darkened and the temperature fell, dogs began to bark and pigeons began to circle old wooden telephone poles.
Further, people were outside talking to each other. Before the eclipse took hold I walked to a liquor store and an employee whom I’d never spoken to nor seen before offered me a momentary look through her eclipse goggles. She even gave me a nod and a “be safe!” as I left (to which I answered, of course, “no promises,” as someone who was definitely going to look at the eclipse without glasses.)
Nearer to 3pm, I sat on my stoop with my bewildered cat gazing at the sky along with neighbors and a pair of teens from a moving company helping a couple down the street pack their belongings. We sat in mostly comfortable silence wondering what we were to see. During this time, an Amazon delivery driver happened to drop off a package at the house next door and offered up her glasses, given to her by another house she recently delivered at. Together we stood—a deadbeat 26 year-old, strapping moving company teens, a middle-aged weary Amazon driver, two aging Baltimoreans with an unserious accent, and a confused feline—in deafening silence, watching the sky glaze itself in a unique shade and turn the world yellow, only to silently retreat back into our homes and our cars and our trucks and our condos to resume the mundanities of normal life like nothing happened. But for that moment, we were outside, and we were together, and we were a community of people like I imagine the world once was, starstruck and moved by the entropy of the universe and the power of what lies beyond, a fleeting but palpable thankfulness for life and its many incantations.
the real eclipse was the friends we made along the way