Confessions of an Umbraphile

Sounds dirty, right? But mostly, it's just dark. Briefly. WRITTEN & PHOTOGRAPHED (!) by PETER MOORE

JUST AFTER WE MOVED TO COLORADO, in 2017, excitement began building toward the next Great Eclipse. That August we drove in early-morning darkness, and pre-eclipse traffic jams, to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument in Nebraska, and climbed a butte as the sun rose. When we reached the top we found an Englishman, a Hollywood producer, and a rattlesnake, which sounds like the beginning of a joke, but isn’t. [Feel free to write and share one, in the comments.] Together, we enjoyed the astral shenanigans. Who knew it would be that thrilling to sit in the dark for two minutes and thirty seconds?

The rattler wasn’t too impressed. It was gone when the light returned. But I was hooked! I was now an umbraphile, which translates to “shadow lover” in Latin.

I vowed that I would drive to any eclipse within a reasonable distance, without bothering to define “reasonable.”

Now I have grounds for saying: Eclipse? 740 miles away? Bring it!

Care to join me?

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SATURDAY, APRIL 6

It was a glorious day, as I roared out of Denver at 8AM (Bye Claire! I love you!) and not stopping until Clayton, New Mexico, for gas. My next stop was at Cadillac Ranch, the nutty art-piece of a millionaire rancher, who decided to bury a dozen cars nose-down in a farm field outside of Amarillo, Texas. Now visitors are welcome 24/7 and they are encouraged to bring cans of spray paint to graffiti them up. But I didn’t know that, so I missed the chance to promote petermoore.substack.com on the hulking ruins of mid-70s gas-guzzlers.

Based on a a flurry of texts I sent out from the car burial ground, I learned about Palo Duro State Park—the best place for a dose of nature in Amarillo. It turned out to be the Grand Canyon of the Texas panhandle, and I had a ball hiking down, then back up, the CCC trail, which took me through eons of geologic history. It also took entirely too much present-day time, as the sun was setting when I reached my car.

And have I mentioned the wind storm?

It was blowing a gale all the way from Denver to the Texas Panhandle, which is in fact famous for its windiness, even on a “normal” day. Not to repeat stereotypes of Texas, and Texans, or anything, but the gale was like LBJ’s famous finger jabs—pushing me here and there, against my puny will.

I arrived at the Big Texan RV Ranch after sunset, with the wind howling at about 35mph. It was time to erect my tent, which was like setting the sails in a schooner during a hurricane. My neighbor at the RV park, who had the good sense to arrive in a vehicle he could sleep in, witnessed my no-doubt comical efforts to build a 7’-tall tent, and offered to help. And that made it all the more embarrassing that, well, this was only the second time I’d set the thing up. Did I even know how to do it?

SUNDAY, JUNE 7

At dawn in the RV park, I was surprised to awaken well-rested, despite the highway noise and train noise and flappity-flap-flap-FLAPPING of my tent all night long. I dismantled the whole campsite by sunrise, and I was off for breakfast at the Cattleman Cafe, which was highly rated on Google.

You have to have coffee somewhere, right? Maybe people’s critical facilities weren’t quite awake yet?

On the way, I drove past a 200’-tall hill of scrap metal, and heard lots of plaintive mooing from nearby stockyards. Then I parked in front of the cafe, which had a sign that had been painted in 1972 and not touched since.

I watched from my car as a couple, who had also had a rough night by the looks of it, pulled out cigarettes, lit them, and walked into the restaurant.

Texas: Land of free-range cancer risks.

I went in anyway, and tried to find a seat far away from the smokers. It was a fool’s errand, because even the waitresses were smoking. But my charcoal-filtered server was a sweetie, welcoming me to the restaurant, quick with the coffee refills, and dropping an enormous sausage-and-egg biscuit on the table right when I needed it.

It was interesting to witness the spectacle of of early morning alimentation on a Saturday in Amarillo. An interracial couple left the joint as I was mid-feast, and a pair of Black laborers, caked in dirt, arrived for breakfast—perhaps after the early shift in the stockyards. Plus lots of surly-looking old people, who evidently couldn’t find the Denny’s. And I thought: This is a democratic (small d) organization. Everybody, including invasive Coloradans, is welcome.

Maybe that’s how the joint earned 4.2 stars.

ECLIPSE DAY, JUNE 8

I had been anxiously watching the weather forecasts for Dallas, and it didn’t look good for clear skies. Nonetheless, I registered to watch the eclipse with the astronomer and physicist (and accused sexual assaulter) Neil deGrasse Tyson, at the Cotton Bowl (capacity 92,100). But as I approached Dallas a dark shelf of clouds arose on the horizon and moved into place over my head. And I received a notification that, naturally, Neil deGrasse Tyson had decided to watch the eclipse elsewhere.

Really? I drove twelve hours, for this!

I called my friend Mark, who was in town to enjoy mid-afternoon nighttime with extended family, and shouted expletives into the phone over bad visibility. After I was done swearing he told me: “You’re on speaker phone, and yes, my grandkids are listening.”

F#*%!

He invited me to join his family viewing party, anyway, with the idea that, if we weren’t going to actually see the sun and moon do their dance, at least we could hang out in the Dallas Arboretum, which was hosting its own eclipse party. Enwrapped in good family vibes and optimism, and swearing off further expletives, I arrived two-hours pre-eclipse, and the gardens were already filled with activity and excitement. NASA had sent a contingent of scientists to explain it all to us, including a guy who had spent 600 hours in outer space and knew the moon personally—Astronaut Alvin Drew.

Who needs Neil deCancelled Tyson? Had he ever taken a spacewalk? No!

We found an open spot on a lawn overlooking White Rock Lake and settled in for the astral show (if any). The clouds teased us all morning, swinging from a heavy grey layer, to occasional glimmers of sunlight, to full-on bursts of bright promise, which kept our hopes alive.

By 12:35, when the moon first started darkening the disc of the sun, there was a mixed sky of fluffy clouds and blue promise. The buzz in the crowd grew as the sunlight slowly faded and the air cooled. At 1:15—twenty-five minutes before totality—the clouds formed a giant diamond shape in the sky, perfectly surrounding the dimming sun.

It was going to happen! And we were going to see it!

When totality struck, at 1:40, the crowd released a sigh that sounded like a cheer, or a cheer that sounded like a sigh, and we were darkened and enlightened at the same time: The “Great Cosmic Coincidence” was upon us!

That phrase came from a NASA administrator who actually showed up for the occasion. She noted that it’s pretty incredible that the shape of the moon, and its distance from earth, allowed it to precisely cover the disc of the sun, during eclipses. And so it did, for four-and-a-half mind-bending minutes, when night interrupted day, the moon mastered the sun, and we craned our necks until they hurt.

Tears started in my eyes…at the beauty of it, at the merry band of celebrants around me, at the happy realization that I had driven twelve hours and been rewarded. I removed my eclipse glasses so I could wipe tears with my sleeve.

And, after an eternity, but also very suddenly, it was over.

A starburst of sunlight appeared at one edge of the blackened disc, and it grew and calmed into a crescent sun.

With all of this focus on shifting sunlight, my mind turned one of my favorite novels: The Waves, by Virginia Woolf. In her visionary and poetic book, she’s tracking the progress of the sun through the sky, and the progress of a group of friends through their lives.

She writes: “The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers revealed themselves upheld by streaks of light. Tables and chairs rose to the surface as if they had been sunk under water and rose, filmed with red, orange, purple like the bloom on the skin of ripe fruit. The veins on the glaze of the china, the grain of the wood, the fibres of the matting became more and more finely engraved. Everything was without shadow. A jar was so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet. Then shapes took on mass and edge. Here was the boss of a chair; here the bulk of a cupboard. And as the light increased, flocks of shadow were driven before it and conglomerated and hung in many-pleated folds in the background.”

I wonder if Woolf ever saw an eclipse. Because she nailed the aftermath.

On our way out, we stopped to meet Alvin Drew, the astronaut. I asked him if he’d ever written a book about his experiences in space and on earth. “I haven’t,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to do another version of that book we’ve all read, with the roar of the rocket engines and the silence of space. If I wrote a book, it would have to be fiction, to take it all in.”

Isn’t that spot-on?

The earth, the moon, the sun—too perfect and too complex to be accounted for in mere factual prose. You have to write the legend, or the poem, to encompass it all.

The next day, I drove 700 miles, on my way back to Colorado. The sun glow, the moon shadow, remain with me.

See you in Egypt!

“I waited two or three moments: then looked up; [the priest] was standing there petrified. With a common impulse the multitude rose slowly up and stared into the sky. I followed their eyes; as sure as guns, there was my eclipse beginning! The life went boiling through my veins; I was a new man! The rim of black spread slowly into the sun’s disk, my heart beat higher and higher, and still the assemblage and the priest stared into the sky, motionless. I knew that this gaze would be turned upon me, next. When it was, I was ready. I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun. It was a noble effect. ‘Name any terms, reverend sir,’ [said the priest,] ‘even to the halving of my kingdom; but banish this calamity, spare the sun!’" My fortune was made.

—Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court