Personal essays
When close enough isn’t close enough
80%
Seven years ago we were able to see a solar eclipse in Cleveland.
In 2017, 80% of the sun was blocked by the moon and it was pretty cool.
I remember leaving a gym after a workout and several staff members were outside with glasses they were letting members use. I didn’t see what the big deal was. Looking around everything looked the same.
But I borrowed a pair of the glasses and looked up at the sun and my jaw dropped open.
“Wow.”
You could see the moon obscuring just over half of the sun at the time that I looked.
I passed the glasses on to someone else, got in my car, and drove home.
I’d just seen something really cool, but everything around me was basically the same.
I never noticed the eclipse peeking at 80% and didn’t really notice it going back to normal.
Total
Yesterday was an eclipse where Cleveland was on the path of totality. It would be just like 2017, except the moon would continue to obscure more and more of the sun until we had a total eclipse for over three minutes.
Choose any percent you want between 10% and 70%. It turns out the difference between that and 20% more is fairly insignificant.
But the difference between 80% and a total eclipse is mind blowing.
Without glasses - without looking up at the sun, it would have been difficult to detect the little changes that happened as the moon began it’s path between us and the sun.
But if you paid attention, there were hints all around us.
I’m not sure at what percent we began to notice the sky darkening and the colors around us appearing more vivid.
The temperatures dipped. Someone said 10 degrees - it felt like more.
Five of us sat in my front yard looking up at the sun through special glasses every couple of minutes and looking around at the changing world around us.
It was amazing.
The corona
When the moon completely blocked out the sun and the corona appeared, we heard people cheering from houses away.
We couldn’t see the corona through our glasses so we took them off and looked up at the sky.
If I’d seen it in a movie, I would have dismissed it as being fake or a special effect.
The sky was so dark that the street lights started to come on automatically.
I took the same picture that everyone took of the corona but in low light in a hand that shook during the long exposure the picture was not a great one.
But it was a moment in time.
Less than four minutes after the sun had disappeared it reappeared. We put our glasses on, looked up and saw the tiniest smidge of the sun peeking out from behind the moon.
The difference between 0% and 1% or 2% was amazing. The corona disappeared, the sky lit up.
Another 10% and the temperatures started to return.
The bigger story
Fox News had somehow found an immigration/border crisis story in the eclipse, with co-host Bill Hemmer warning that the higher eclipse related traffic is “a real opportunity for smugglers and cartels and migrants to come right in.”
Their man on the ground reported that there were people in dark clothing near the border looking to take advantage of the eclipse to sneak across the border during the less than four minutes of darkness.
Fox must have a pitch room filled with writers throwing out ideas like a sit com’s writers room.
I guess I wouldn’t be good at that sort of thing.
To me the drop in temperature, the change in colors, the behavior changes in animals would have been a great time to remind us of how important and powerful the sun is and that we might want to think about how we treat the earth in the face of global warming and …
“Oh Daniel, you’re such a party-pooper.”
I suppose.
The total eclipse and the glimpse at the corona was an awesome moment.
Most people on earth didn’t get to see it.
It depended on the position of the sun, the moon, and me.
It was one of those moments where you feel part of something so much bigger.
It was one of those rare moments, where I used the word “awesome” correctly.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 211. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe