The minutes before totality are when your brain tells you something weird is happening. The light looks wrong. It gets dim, but not like dusk. Not like firelight. Not like stormclouds. Not like anything natural…except it is natural. The light is weak. Feeble. Pale. Like a Walmart with half the lights off to save power. Your eyes strain, but do not know why.
The partial is neat. The edge effects are fleeting. You see the crescent shrinking. If you are keen-eyed you see Baily’s beads. You think you know what is going to happen: the last fragment of the crescent will wink out and it will be the same but darker. It is not. The corona appears. From where?
Totality looks wrong. It looks like a defect in your vision. That is not the sun. It is not the moon. It is a perfectly round hole punched in the sky, bereft of detail, impossible to comprehend. The light of other worlds is leaking out around it. It is awesome and awful. You don’t know what you’re seeing; it is outside your experience.
Third contact, the end of totality, is a disappointment and a relief. How was it over so fast? The incredible beauty of totality is gone and you cannot get it back. No power on earth can give it to you. But the part of your brain that revolted against totality is joyed for the return of the sun, for the comforting familiarity.
The waxing of the sun is strange. The first partial eclipse, the waning, was anticipatory. There was excitement. Fingers pointing, reminders to watch for the shadow effects, to listen for the birds, to not miss anything. The second partial is the same but in reverse; surely you have as much to observe here as before? But after the astonishment of totality, it feels…not less marvelous, but less emotionally weighted. Climbing the first hill of a roller coaster is exciting because of what is about to come. If the climb came at the end of the ride instead of the beginning, it would be a time to catch your breath, not hold your breath. That’s the second partial. Intellectually interesting but it cannot hold your attention. Nobody counts back up to ten after the New Year.
I will never forget what it was like. I am already forgetting what it was like.
