EXPERIENCING THE ECLIPSE FROM THE PATH OF TOTALITY
Traffic was worth unforgettable event
MONTPELIER, VT >> I can’t count the number of times in my life that I have been driving to or from something and found myself regretting leaving my house at all because I became a part of bumper-to-bumper traffic that doubles how long it takes to get home.
On Monday evening I found myself in those familiar circumstances when myself and my significant other, Caitlin, were driving south from Montpelier, alongside what seemed like half the entire population of New England. What our GPS assured us at first was a two-and-a-half hour trip back home turned into more than five hours, but I am sure there is nobody in mine or any of the thousands of other vehicles who regretted their trip.
Seeing a total solar eclipse had been on my theoretical bucket list for a long time, and when I learned that one would take a path relatively close to where I live, I had hoped to make the trip to see it for myself. A little more than a month before the day of the eclipse, a group of close friends and I secured an Airbnb in Killington with the plan of driving at least an hour north to be in the path of totality as it passed through Vermont.
The rest of the group arrived at our lodging Saturday, while the two of us had to join them on Sunday thanks to a certain pair of towns that both had their local elections on Saturday, which needed coverage from The Sun. We met surprisingly little traffic on the way up, having left shortly after noon, but just a couple hours after our arrival we saw headlines of traffic backups on the same route we had just traveled, and we knew traffic would be a different beast the next day.
Our group’s original plan had been to drive two hours from Killington to St. Albans, which is near the Canadian border and closer to the middle of the
path of totality. After thinking about how much time it would take to get there and back, on Monday morning we switched gears and decided on a shorter drive to Montpelier, which would have a shorter period of totality, but would save us a lot of misery on the road.
Caitlin and I left a little before the rest of the group, and before we hit the highway there was not enough traffic to slow us down, but still clearly more people on the road than rural Vermont is used to. Once we hit I-89, the heavy traffic we were anticipating revealed itself to us, with the license plates of our fellow travelers primarily being from New England states. Despite the heavy traffic, getting into Montpelier was relatively smooth.
After finding that our original destination’s parking lot was full, as we often found ourselves doing for this trip, we moved to plan B, which was just up the hill at the green of the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
With a few hours to go before the moon began its path across the sun, we had found our spot, laid down our blankets and chairs, ordered from the nearby food trucks and watched as the grass around us began to fill with hundreds of people all there to see the same thing. We had been worried about a forecast of mostly clouds, but the perfectly clear skies only relented to a thin layer of wispy clouds. They did nothing to obstruct the show, and in fact they may have enhanced it by creating a rainbow halo effect around the sun before and after totality.
Just after the clock struck 2:14 p.m. everyone began putting on their glasses and looking at the sun. A short time later, I could see the tiniest sliver of the moon transiting in front of the sun from the bottom right.
For about 45 minutes, we would periodically put the glasses on and take a look to see how far along it was, and every time less and less of the sun was visible, looking very much like a bright yellow version of the moon in its crescent phases.
As the majority of the sun was covered, we began to notice changes around us. It was starting to get noticeably colder, after many of us had opted to take the sweatshirts off on what was the first real nice day of the spring. Soon after we began to notice that the light around us was changing, and it appeared almost like dusk, but in a way where the light and the shadows just felt wrong, in a way. In all directions the horizon appeared to look like a sunset.
Through our glasses we could see less and less of the sun, and as that tiny sliver finally disappeared, we felt safe to remove the glasses to reveal what I can only describe as the most alien thing I have ever seen. I have seen countless images of total solar eclipses, all of which are stunning in their own right, but I know now that none of them have truly done justice to the experience of seeing it in person.
As expected, the world around us went dark, appearing almost completely as night time with visible stars and planets just before 3:30 in the afternoon. The moon was visible only as a completely black void, around it surrounded by the silvery, wavy light of the sun’s corona behind it. Interspersed randomly around the sphere were red flares, perfectly visible to the naked eye.
Those red flares, as we would later learn, are known as solar prominences, which are outbursts of stellar plasma that occur with greater frequency when the sun is nearing its solar maximum phase. While they appeared as a speck on the edge of the moon to viewers of the eclipse, the large looping flare on the bottom of most images of totality is many times larger than Earth.
While taking the entire scene in, I had nearly forgotten that I had my camera set up on my tripod and with a telephoto lens to hopefully capture an image of totality. I rushed over to my camera, with only about a minute-and-a-half of totality to work with, fumbled off my lens cap, and ended up having to manually tilt my whole tripod up when I realized I wouldn’t be able to get the right angle. In my eagerness, I knocked over one of my friend’s phones when she was taking a time-lapse video while leaning it against the leg of my tripod. Once again, my bad, Becca.
I managed to get several shots off, and despite not having a solar filter to focus my shot beforehand, I got a few that were reasonably in focus, given the circumstances. I then stepped back next to Caitlin and just took the rest of it in.
The scene in front of us looked like something that should not be occurring on Earth, and yet it is something that is believed to possibly be exclusive to Earth thanks to the unique positioning and size of the moon and sun. I almost understand now why these moments of cosmic luck throughout history may have spurred many who had no way to know better to believe that the world was ending, or that their gods were unhappy and were in need of appeasing.
As totality waned, a bright spec of light from the sun peeked back out from behind the moon, creating an effect where there appears to be a “diamond ring.” This marked general callouts for hundreds of people to put their eclipse glasses back on or to look away from the sun, and the show’s climax had concluded. As we stood in awe of what we had just witnessed, that same, wrong-feeling dusk returned, but slowly gave way to a more normal-looking late afternoon sunlight as the air temperature rose again.
While we had been advised to wait around for a while before leaving, so that we would not have to sit in traffic, we were both eager to be back in Greater Lowell sooner, so about half an hour after totality ended, we departed from the rest of our group. This, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, led to us sitting in almost completely stopped traffic in Montpelier for about an hour after we got in our car.
Despite the effort it took to see the eclipse, and the number of hours I spent at the wheel over the past three days, I would do it all again if given the chance.
The next solar eclipse to hit North America will not be until 2044, when the path of totality will travel down through Canada to Montana and North Dakota. If you ever get the chance to be in the path of totality, do it. It is simply one of the most cerebral, alien and surreal things I have ever experienced, and it is something that videos, pictures or words simply cannot do justice.