THE NATURALIST Gob-smacked by the shadow of the moon in Vermont
On Sunday morning, April 7th, the Naturalist did something uncharacteristic. Instead of spending at least part of what was forecast to be a chilly but dry day on or about the ridge to explore more sections of local, natural real estate in deeper and deeper detail, your faithful documentarian, aided and abetted by his “eyes,” also known as his son and fellow photographer Noah, and his wife Pam, loaded all manner of observational and capture technology, along with a far smaller amount of clothing, into the car and politely asked our direction-finding assistant to navigate north to central Vermont.
Our destination was the charming town of Brandon, where, last summer, my stepdaughter Kirsten had wisely found a large and, it turned our, equally charming home to rent for several memorable days. While the area in he vicinity of the Green Mountains had received more than a foot of early spring snow, we brought neither cross-country skis nor snowshoes. And while most of my kids and grandkids were assembled together, this wasn’t intended to be a family reunion. (I’m blessed by having most of the clan close by.)
You know, of course, why we gathered in Brandon. It was not, I reluctantly admit, to explore the enticing Goshen and Cape Lookout mountains, which loom east of our hideaway, nor were we there to discover what lived in the nearby Joseph Battell Wilderness, the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area, Satan’s Kingdom, or any of the other intriguing places at our beck and call in the area. However tempting, they’d have to wait for another trip.
This time, we were on a mission, to say nothing of the tightest of schedules. We didn’t know exactly where we needed to be the following day, but by precisely 3:26 in the afternoon of April 8th, we knew we had to be at least 50 miles north of Brandon to be smack dab in the heart of darkness, well, an eerie semi-darkness, that is part and parcel of one of the rarest events on heaven and earth: a total solar eclipse.
Heart disease and a looming round of major cardiac surgeries had prevented me from making the trip to coastal South Carolina in August of 2017 to see the last total solar eclipse at the home of my wife’s sister Wendy, who lived in the path of that miraculous event, but I wasn’t going to let ongoing heart ailments and yet more upcoming operations keep me confined to quarters for this eclipse. To be sure, the next occasion of the moon’s orbit taking it to the exact spot where it briefly covers all but the
outer edge of the sun is only a couple of years away, but I’m not sure whether the family budget will permit a family trip to Spain, Iceland, Greenland, or any the other locales in totality’s path in 2026, and although it’s tempting to envision going to Egypt in 2027 to witness an eclipse and the pyramids together, that’s even less likely. There’ll be total eclipses visible in small parts of the United States in 2044 and 2045, but I might be too elderly to travel west and south, respectively, by then, and as for the events forecast for 2078 and 2099, well, do I really expect to live to be 128 and 149? Of course I do, but still...
So at noon on the 8th, off we went north and east, our route crafted to keep us clear of both the crowds and the clouds in the forecast. We had concluded that the area around the town of Huntington, which featured a spectacular natural locale called the Huntington Gorge, would be a suitable, off-the-beaten path viewing spot, and as we pulled off the highway for a “shortcut” called Texas Hill Road—a dirt pathway that was Texas in hilliness and “road” in someone’s imagination—we were definitely clear of tourist traffic. We survived, reemerged in something approaching civilization, and spotted the welcome signs at the Green Mountain Audubon Center, where a small crowd was gathering in a wide-open field between snow-capped mountains. In the company of kindred spirits, we found a perfect spot to set up the gear.
No sooner did the special Daystar filters, assembled in place with origami techniques, go over the camera lenses than we learned that the moon, its shadow racing toward us from the southeast at nearly 3,000 miles per hour, was beginning to nibble away at the sun. We watched the celestial ballet in awe through the eye-protecting filters and our solar sunglasses, and looked in envy at a gentleman who had donned a welder’s helmet, which provided a much more panoramic view of the proceedings.
As predicted, it grew steadily darker and cooler. Just before 3:26, a rainbow-colored ring appeared around the sun, whose light diminished to a tiny crescent and then, in a sight more beautiful and mesmerizing than anything I’d ever seen, there was nothing. That, however, wasn’t quite right either.
I’d been told the world would go dark, but instead, it went into nightlight mode. With totality upon us, we could take off our eclipse glasses and the solar filters on the cameras and try to capture the eeriness of a sun that wore a black hole in its center, a ring of fire around its edge, and a brilliant halo, known as the solar corona, that trailed off into space. Normally, the sun is too bright to see the corona, and if you tried to look, you’d damage your eyes, but with the moon as a shield, you could bear witness to solar geography you couldn’t otherwise view.
I was, in a word, stunned at the otherworldly scene in front of me, the heavens turned upside down. In a situation that harkened back to two others—being there at the moment my son Noah entered the world, and the time, post heart-surgery, when I departed briefly from this life—I couldn’t find the right words to describe was I was observing. That, in itself, was a rarity for your humble and veteran wordsmith.
I wasn’t alone. After an initial round of amazed oohs and aahs from the assembled when the moon abruptly turned down the solar dimmer switch, we all went into a reverential silence, the only sound the sweet voice in the dimly lit woods of a songbird tricked by the eclipse into dawn chorus mode.
I tried to capture images of the lunar-solar pas de deux, but in tutorials about how to photograph an eclipse, every teacher I consulted issued the sternest of warnings to, during totality, pull your eye away from the viewfinder and LCD screen and just watch this, the greatest natural show on Earth. I’m glad I was paying attention in eclipse class.
And then, as suddenly as the lights went out, a diamond ring flare erupted from the lower right corner of sun and early evening turned back to mid-afternoon as the moon’s shadow raced off to the northeast into New Hampshire, Maine, and Canada.
My images, I would soon discover, did not even come close to representing what I’d seen, and as this reality emerged, I felt deflated and depressed. After all, how many more chances would I get? But I’d perceived the eclipse with my own eyes and felt it with my soul, so, as long as I had working memory cells, I could deposit those impressions into my cerebral filing cabinet for recall. Besides, pictures, as any visual artist knows, don’t tell the whole story, and while I wasn’t up to the technical challenges of eclipse photography, I helped my kids and grandkids capture the spectacle in ways that worked for them.
God and my heart team willing, maybe I’ll do better in the photo department the next time around. That would be nice. But perhaps most heartening and uplifting of all, we were there together in a Vermont field to witness, actually witness, something that has dazzled members of our species since we were we. That reality counters any ennui over over-exposure, lessthan-tack-sharp focusing, and those shots not taken.