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Chasing The Great Eclipse: An American Road Trip

In early July, after reading Lucas Reilly’s brilliant piece on the Great American Eclipse, the fear of missing out kicked in and the wheels started turning. Within days, we had booked rooms in Kansas City and bought tailgating tickets to the eclipse and sesquicentennial festival in Lathrop, MO.

But by early Friday, the forecast was for clouds, and even rain north of Kansas City. The MidWest was shaping up to have some of the worst cloud cover in the US. So on our eight hour drive north from Plano, TX on Saturday, we began looking at alternatives, with everything contingent on Sunday’s final forecast, and whatever the radar looked like on Monday morning. We could barely sleep Sunday night.

Bright and early Monday morning we loaded up the kids, and the dogs, and drove east from our hotel in Independence, MO with a full tank of gas, a bag of biscuits from a Chick-fil-A drive through, an iced down cooler of essentials: H2O and Corona Light, and headed down I-70 toward Boonville, MO, voted No. 9 in Smithsonian magazine’s “20 Best Small Towns to Visit in 2015,” where a consistent sliver of clear skies had appeared all week on Jay Anderson’s forecast models, and right smack dab on the 2:40 minute line of totality.

The weather looked pretty good driving in. Our trusty MyRadar app showed the front and the rain to our north, moving northeasterly. We could see the cumulus clouds in the distance, but it was clear and sunny in Boonville as we rolled into town around 9:30 A.M.

The anticipation was clearly palpable on Main St. as shopkeepers and tourists and townspeople set up their tables, and tents, and telescopes. The teachers and parents in front of Laura Speed Elliot Middle School were all decked out in matching blue T-shirts, selling coffee, pulled pork sandwiches, and parking, while the Boonville Tourism and Visitor Center volunteers on foot and in golf carts, carrying walkie talkies, sported bright neon green shirts with “STAFF” screen printed in bold black letters on their backs. We saw shirts for “Totality US Tour” with lists of cities and blackout times from Oregon to South Carolina, and others with “Total Eclipse World Tour” listing future dates and countries around the globe, but they all shared one inconspicuous thing in common, the sun’s firery corona emblazoned across the chest.

It felt a lot like Super Bowl Sunday, or the Kentucky Derby, or maybe like Burning Man, like something big, really big, life changing, like the birth of a child was about to happen, and it was coming straight to you live from Las Vegas in HD on Pay Per View. On the southeast corner of Bingham and Main, two firemen stood in front of the Boonville Fire Department, their red trucks parked in formation behind giant open garage doors, presumably on the ready in case the moon accidentally caught fire. They appeared to observe, with an almost curious circumspection, all the out-of-state plates as they passed by. We made eye contact.

Twenty bucks got us into the Blackout in Boonville festival at the Jesse Viertel Memorial Airport, and four additional Rainbow Symphony paper viewing glasses, souvenirs for 2024, but T-shirts, the neon green ones, unfortunately, were already sold out. A kind lady who just loved and petted our dachshunds said we could get them at the Visitor’s Center off of Spring Street, and since our seventeen year old daughter just had to have one, we headed back downtown while we still had time to kill, and to beat any post eclipse traffic on our mad rush back home. The kids were playing hooky on their first day of school, after all.

By now the traffic downtown had picked up, the firemen had vacated their post, and the buzz was building in the atmosphere, along with the clouds. The Visitor’s Center was also sold out of the “official” T-shirts, all that remained were too small, but luckily we had seen a shop earlier on Main St., Value Plus PC, with a rack full of its own custom design. By the time we arrived, they too were almost gone. The proprietor chuckled, as he looked up bespectacled from some type of circuit board, about how many he had just sold. We gratefully paid him $10, plus tax, for a black one, even though he still had some in neon pink and green. And we could have sworn we saw a TRS-80 amongst the dusty old CRT monitors, computer cases, and cracked iPhone screens as we left that computer repair shop.

All set, we took our third and final trip down Bingham Rd. and set up camp next to the taxiway of runway 36, along with a few thousand others who had gathered at the airport. Our fifteen year old son said the grass smelled funny, and it did. They had either just fertilized, or overseeded, possibly anticipating rain.

Our first peak in the telescope was around 10:30. It was hazy. By 10:45, it was cloudy, with no clear view of the sun’s edge. The front was definitely moving to the northeast, as the southwest winds were brisk, probably 30 to 35 knots, but the front was also steadily creeping southward, right over our heads.

“Should we go somewhere else?”
“If we’re going to go, we should go now.”
“Maybe Jefferson City?”
“Your call.”

The plan had been to watch the whole thing with a big group of people, to experience the sound of hundreds of simultaneous ooh’s and ah’s. Whether or not that’s banal or romantic, at the end of the day, this trip was all business. We were there to see the thing, even if we were on the side of the road. With a final observation standing on the runway, that not only heavier clouds, but now dark clouds were headed our way, we quickly packed up, a fact noted by a few suspicious double takes: at us, up at the cloudy sky, and then back at us. Cars were still arriving as an attendant asked where we were going. “That way!” we said, pointing at the blue sky to the south.

So we took a left out of the entrance and sped down Highway 87, crossing I-70 at Exit 106. Every car leaving the interstate at that moment, in front of us and in our rear view, was heading southward, toward the blue. We raced through towns like Windsor Place and Clarks Fork, trying to outrun the clouds. By the time we reached Prairie Home close to noon, the eclipse had already begun, so we stopped on the side of the road to take a peek. We marveled at the burgeoning crescent, as the sun ate the moon like a giant Pac-Man. Totality would begin at 1:11 and the clouds were still on our tail, chasing us like ghosts in a cosmic arcade.

Traffic wasn’t that bad, despite all the predictions and DOT warnings of gridlock. Groups had gathered on front lawns, and in parking lots. A playground full of red shirted elementary school kids and teachers gazed upward, unbeknownst to their young and innocent, NASA-approved-paper-eclipse-glasses-covered-eyes, that we had driven 10 hours to get to this point, while this spectacle was right in their own backyard. We were amazed at how many groups had gathered in small cemeteries along the road, not to mention just how many small cemeteries existed in such a rural area. Generations of families and church groups unfurled their picnic tables and telescopes amongst the marble and granite gravestones.

Just south of Prairie Home, Hwy. 87 takes a hard left east towards Jamestown where it merges with 179, which runs southeast to Jefferson City. Hwy D., if you want to call it a highway, takes a right turn to the southeast toward a town called California, Missouri, and at that moment toward the only clear blue skies in sight. We began to get worried. Would we be able outrun the clouds? Or would the clouds run us too far south, right out of totality? We took our chances on Hwy. D, we soon lost cell service, and began to panic.

Not much more than one car wide and probably only ever paved once, with some pot holes repaired but mostly just bumps and ruts and undulations, Hwy. D is in the middle of what, even country people call, nowhere. A place where the fear of a flat tire, running out of gas, engine trouble, or heaven forbid, nightfall, sets in. There were a few glimpses of civilization, but mostly only fields, and woods, and dilapidated gates and fences. At the bottom of a hill on the most deserted part of the road, we came upon a clean shaven man, bald, mid-thirties, wearing sunglasses, tennis shoes, khaki shorts, and a royal blue polyester polo shirt, just casually walking down the road, as if he was on his way to his tee time. Was he aware of the eclipse? Did he live in these woods? Where was his car? Over half the sun was now gone and the clouds were still on our tail. We did not stop to ask.

Cell phone service returned somewhere before we merged with Hwy. KK, just before the intersection with Hwy. O. 2G service was just enough to pull up the totality map to see that California was roughly in line with Jefferson City, with around two and a half minutes, but not enough bandwidth to push Google Maps. We breathed deeply to calm our nerves and stave off adrenaline. We were T minus 30 minutes and could finally see sunlight and shadows. We all looked up at the crescent through the sunroof. Even the driver donned glasses for a quick glimpse upward, to shrieks of “Dad you’re going to get us all killed!”

Just outside of California, though we didn’t know how close we were at the time, we came upon a large grassy field to our left. We were frantically looking for a place to stop, as everyone was starting to pull off the road and clàim a spot, and this field looked like an ideal place to set up camp. It was, in fact, a large public composting site, a dump, if you will, for yard debris, but with a wide open view to the west. “Perfect!” we thought. And we were long overdue for a beer.

No sooner than we could let the dogs loose did a burgundy convertible Mustang pull up behind us. We waved the driver toward us, signaling all clear, as we scrambled to leash them up. The grey haired man was from Ohio, 65, recently retired, and had been traveling with his wife on a Route 66 road trip ever since, although she had stayed back in Kansas City with her girlfriends for the eclipse. He had been with a group of astronomers in the McDonald’s parking lot in Boonville, right off the interstate, and like us, had just ditched town in hot pursuit of clearer skies.

We quickly set up the telescope and offered him a look. As he peered into the eyepiece he told us about his brother, who had burned and permanently damaged his retinas during an eclipse in the seventies, and pointed out the sun spots the astronomers had just shown him, small black dots we might have otherwise mistaken for specks of dust on the lens. But before we had time to set up chairs and get comfortable, the clouds were threatening again. A truck with two men pulled up with a load full of tree limbs, seemingly unaware of, or just indifferent to, what was about to happen.

“We probably need to head on south to California.”
He looked up at sky and said, “I think you’re right. How far is it?”
“Not sure, maybe five or six miles.”

We shook hands, tossed the telescope back in the car, and arrived downtown within a minute. We topped off the tank at Casey’s General Store where two teenage boys in jeans, cowboy boots, and paper eclipse glasses were hopping in the cab of an old red Chevy pickup truck. A girl in a maroon paisley sun dress and curly hair got in with them, and they sped off laughing toward the south, like a scene from The Last Picture Show. There was suddenly a tinge in the air, something electrostatic, and things didn’t look right anymore. Everything appeared surreal, and fake, kind of like a movie set, and we realized this must be the odd crescent refraction we had read about. The shadow bands.

The excitement was now electric. We darted south through the center of town, passing the police station, the library, and the hardware store. Small crowds assembled everywhere along the road, groups of five, ten, and twenty-five. South of Russell St., a cute young couple with a few colorful tattoos sat in front of a small white house and gazed skyward from their front porch, shoulder to shoulder. Some travel hundreds if not thousands of miles, across borders, and continents, and oceans. Yet here they were, with all the random chance and long odds of Lady Luck grinning ear to ear, with front row seats, right on their doorstep.

As we passed Putnam Chevrolet to our right and crossed the bridge over Hwy. 50, with a panoramic view of the southern countryside and blue skies in the distance, becoming colorfully pastel, like at sunset, our voices began to crack.

“Oh my God I can’t believe it’s about to happen.”
“We need to find a spot.”
“Oh my God, I know, I know.”
“Now!”

The dogs began to whimper.

Somewhere down a hill on a curve to the left we saw the old man from Ohio in the burgundy Mustang parked with a few people in a large driveway to the right. We braked, but could not stop, as the hill and momentum were just too much for the moment, and we had no time. It was 1:00 PM, T minus 11 minutes, and we wanted a better vantage point of the horizon, on a hill top, with the possibility of seeing the moon’s shadow rush toward us at 1800 miles per hour.

About a mile or so down the road, we found it, right in front of a cow pasture.

There’s really no need to try to wax poetic about the next nine minutes before totality, other than to say it was chaotic: the dogs barking, if not howling, the cows in the distance on the move and mooing, the almost deafening, tinnitic din of dozens of crickets at dusk, an old married couple’s frantic but whispered argument over chugging a beer versus reassembling a telescope and priorities, almost grown teenagers squealing like little school kids snapping selfies with the sky on the ski rack, some dude doing about a hundred miles an hour in an old white Acura Legend, engine roaring, not four minutes before totality and completely unforgettable, along with everything else that’s ever been written about it: the joy and fear, the exhilaration and panic, the clamour, the gasps, the silence, and then the screams.

It is all true. Every single word.

And so is this. That moment, when you see it for the first time, that split second of nakedness when the final pin hole ray of light is fully eclipsed by the moon, disintegrating into the halo, into the glory of everything that has ever been, and everything that will ever be, is nothing short of breathtaking. It is the most beautiful, magical, and mysterious thing ever experienced. The corona burns like a ring of fire, and moves, with sparkling wisps, and flares, alive, with tongues of light like the serpent head of Medusa, in never before seen prisms of iridescent pink and purple. And we were not hallucinating.

The only apt comparison of the spectacle seems to be to that of a mythical All-Seeing Eye in the Sky, maybe of Providence, or Horus, of Ra, or of God. The moon makes a dark razor sharp pupil, the penumbra in all its otherworldly rainbows of color and haze, a fitting sclera, while the corona, the perfect firery iris.

But one thing is for certain, and there is no doubt whatsoever about it at all, that if that was an eye in the sky, all seeing or not, it certainly saw right through us.

-August, 2017