Like maybe a million (or a few million!) people on August 21, 2017, we made our pilgrimage into the path of the totality. It was a long road, even though we only came from Seattle. We drove down to Portland, and spent the night there on the previous Saturday and Sunday.
Heeding all the traffic advisories, we started early from Portland on Monday. By 5 a.m. we were checked out and on our way. To our surprise, it was a smooth run aside from a couple of minor bottlenecks,. We even had time for breakfast at a diner that announced it opened at 6 a.m. The place was packed with eclipse watchers, probably headed into Salem.
We, instead, decided to go to the small town of Aumsville. By 7 a.m. we had checked the place out, and settled into a small park with a few other eclipsians. The park was perfect. There were picnic tables, a pretty creek running along the bottom, trees to cast the crescent-shaped shadows, and a clear view of the sun. We’d come armed with cardboard eclipse glasses, as well as binoculars with taped-on filters.
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Enough others had come to make it a fun group event, but not so many that it was overwhelming. People had the cardboard glasses, but also light-boxes like this one to throw an image of the eclipsing sun onto a sheet of paper.
The eclipse started, and I got some pictures.
Trellising my fingers yielded crescent shapes as the spaces acted like a pinhole.
And here’s what the sun looked like:
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I’ve seen solar eclipses before – several partial ones, and one very brief totality in India in the 1990s. This was different. It lasted long enough to register what I was seeing with my naked eye. It looked like a black sun, floating in a pinkish corona, just hanging there like a completely alien and awe-inspiring object.
And then, too quickly, the moon moved on and the “diamond ring” appeared. I put my eclipse glasses back on, and watched as the moon slid down across the sun.
After the eclipse, we made our way back to Seattle, stopping along the way and hoping to avoid the traffic. It didn’t matter. All roads were clogged. The traffic advisories didn’t cover the departures, and everyone was leaving in the same 2-3 hours.
We got back to Seattle after 2 a.m.
But what an amazing experience!
KEYAN BOWES 