Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (33 page)

When Marnie announces that it’s time for Ray’s talk to begin, he nervously stands up. He doesn’t much like speaking in front of crowds, and he’s anxious about giving his talk without his standard PowerPoint presentation. His fears don’t subside until it’s pointed out that he’ll be speaking directly under the actual constellations those photographs represent.

 • • • 

Around 3 a.m., I start to regret that I supported Chris when he said he’d stay up all night if it would ensure clear skies. Sleep is, to me, sacred. And our tents are too close to one another.

I have a cot. It came with a mint and a tiny pillow, but the tent reminds me of the ones I slept in as a teenager trekking across Australia. The desert air was so dry that breaking down camp always left me with bloody knuckles. One night, during that long-ago adventure, a pack of dingoes brushed up against my tent. Tonight, I would trade this cacophony of snorers for a lion pride.

I lie awake for the next few hours, listening to cars move down a nearby paved road searching for the right spot to witness the eclipse. With them, my mind races to last night, when I was standing in line for bush fare. I’d been chattering away to Jennifer about the effect of my great adventures on Archer, when she turned to me and said: “You’re not doing it for him, you know, you’re doing it for you. You’re doing it to become a fully realized person. There is no guilt in that.”

She’s right, of course. When we follow curiosity, when we admit to faith in something greater than ourselves—whatever that might be—we are not closing doors for others, we’re opening them. I’ve been fanning Archer’s sense of wonder by giving oxygen to my own.

Jennifer was a foreign correspondent until Connor was eight. “I have no guilt,” she told me. Her schedule changed when her husband revealed that he needed her to be around more. “It was his turn,” she said, “and that was okay. It’s give and take.”

In her life, this meant career mobility for her husband, who other tour goers have breathlessly explained is an equally famous broadcaster in Australia. In mine, it means it will soon be time for a puppy, basketball goal, an upgrade to our basement home brewery.

From somewhere in the blue morning, a lone bird screams:
whohohe.

I watch light creep on the horizon. There is an ochre-orange cloud on the line between land and earth. In the growing light, a whole river of stars presses against the horizon like an earthen dam. The camp generator begins to grind. I hear footsteps.

Cahoo
, another, singular, bird sings.

The limbs of surrounding eucalyptus trees look like lace held against the coming light. I leave my canvas cocoon and wait with a growing number of campers clustered around a silver hot water dispenser. When I have my turn, I balance tea in a rattling porcelain cup and saucer and head up to the lookout area.

Behind me, a bus-horn-turned-bush-alarm-clock blares.

Jennifer and Connor are already on the hill, stationed in chairs. I join them, and we all leisurely put on our eclipse shades.

The entire coastline—visible beyond a distant range of hills—is covered in froth. But the sky in front of us is crystalline. Well, except for that impending dark, circular thing.

“Is that a cloud?” Jennifer asks.

“It’s happening!” I scream.

The moon’s advance is turning the sun—which has taken on a sherbet hue through our glasses—into an orange slice. This shape is obvious, expected, but there is no anticipating what it feels like to see a crescent sun. The sky—our understanding of day and night—has been turned inside out.

“It is just so bright! It is just so good!” Jennifer exclaims.

“Just wait till the diamond ring stage!” Connor says.

“Don’t jump to the destination,” Jennifer warns, never breaking her gaze. She shakes her head: “It just eats away.”

It does look as if the entire sky—which is increasingly dark—is chomping at the sun with perfect teeth. Each minute, a little more of the morning light is devoured. It is clear why, in China, eclipses have traditionally been viewed as a dragon eating the sun.

“It’s going to be very weird,” Connor says.

“It already is!” I exclaim.

“I was told the birds would be quiet, and I expect them to be quiet. If they’re not, I will complain!” Jennifer jokes. But the birds have already stopped their morning chattering. It’s as if a gray satin sheet is being pulled over our shared cage.

Jennifer walks over to talk to Fred, who has set up a telescope, leaving Connor and me alone. The teenager is well-versed in eclipse mythology. He tells me that, historically, eclipses tended to wreak havoc. “Under every light soul there is a heart of darkness,” he says. “But, in modern times, eclipses don’t cause panic. They unite people. We’re here for a common cause. Civil wars also unite people, but they have a destructive outcome. Uniting people can be very beneficial or very detrimental.”

Together, he purports, we can make the light brighter, or turn the darkness darker.

“Eclipses could have brought out the worst in humans. When people believe they’re going to die, that’s when they reveal who they truly are. But there is hope in it, too. Some people are natural Machiavellis. Some don’t choose to be benevolent and caring, but so many do. There is an ability to be destructive, but they chose to make a concerted effort to create the best in their own worlds and in other peoples’. The hope is that, even though it’s there in every one of us, in most people, darkness is locked away.”

Though he has an academic bent to his speech, a beyond-his-years intellectualism to his demeanor, he’s thinking of taking a year off before heading to college. He says he’d really like to explore the philosophical balance of light and dark. But how will he do this outside of the academy? It’s a path laid by the stories of his mother, former international correspondent, world wanderer.

“I think I’d like to travel,” he tells me.

 • • • 

In the blue-lined journal I filled during my youthful adventures in Australia, I wrote: “So many of the things I’ve seen here seem unreal, like they’re in a movie.” This tendency to feel removed from the most splendid parts of what I’m experiencing is something I have battled—and observed in the comments of other travelers—again and again.

I think of this when Connor and I join Jennifer to take turns looking at the sun through Fred’s filtered telescope. When I hover above the eyepiece, I can see what looks like a force field around the sun. When it’s Connor’s turn, he says, “It looks like it’s alive!”

Fred interjects to let us know that what we’re actually seeing is the atmosphere shimmering. But it appears, to our very eyes, that the sun itself is quivering like living coral. “It’s seriously cool, anyway,” Connor says. “It’s like the eclipse: I’ve read about it, but it’s just
surreal
when you’re seeing it.”

I know what he means. Surreal:
unbelievable, dreamlike, fantastical
.

It is a word I have used, in the face of wonder, over and over. Because, in Western culture, we tend to keep nature at arm’s length. Nature is not only new life, it is decay. And to us mortals that is, well, scary. When we experience nature’s greatest mysteries with our own senses—when we actually bear witness—we tend to say
It’s like we’re in a movie.

When experiencing the messy emotions of awe and wonder, we retreat to the symbols we’ve been taught to trust. We see the documentary as more reliable than the real thing. The symbol more consistent than the scene. This reliance on controlled understanding tends to get in the way of wonder, by tricking us into thinking that life is something outside of what we are—at any moment—viscerally feeling. But films and charts and diagrams are only there as intermediaries. They are only storylines that might serve to show us where we actually need to be. Sure, we can sometimes fall prey to illusions, but most of the time, is there anything more real than what we are—with all our senses firing at full speed—actually experiencing?

Above us, the moon continues to chomp away. Connor adjusts his squared eclipse glasses, and says, “In most societies the sun is the service of life. The Incans and the Egyptians, they were all for the sun god. The Greeks had Helios.”

There’s a coolness to the air now. The breath of life is being taken away.

“It’s just irresistible!” Jennifer exclaims, snapping a photo. “Look at all this color!”

I prop my eclipse glasses on my head to look around, careful to keep my eyes lowered. We have a 360-degree view of the horizon, and it is entirely filled with the varied shades of Australia’s ochre. In the clouds, earth and sky are meeting to stoke a wildfire that seems to be burning brighter as the dome above us darkens.

Suddenly, a wind rushes toward us from the direction of the moon. It is strong and sudden, as if a planet-size blanket has just been unfurled to disturb the air. I pull my arms close in an attempt to warm myself against the eclipse-born breeze.

It looks like twilight now. The reds are muting to pink, and there are hints of the blue dawn returning. Behind me, someone shouts, “Keep an eye on the time!”

The irony of this, of course, is that clocks are just approximations of the sun’s location. Standardized time is just a construct that was created to regulate the cycles of trains. High noon is different for every spot on earth. Totality is to occur here at 6:38 a.m. But there’s no need to keep an eye on the time.
We are staring at its source.

Below us, down toward the coast, clouds are gathering. They look like sea foam pushed against mountains by an unseen tide. There is barely a sliver of orange rind left in the sky when Fred shouts: “Shadow bands!”

I turn to look at a white sheet that’s been hung from the roof of a four-wheel-drive vehicle to provide a canvas. And there they are, shadow bands, lines running horizontal to the horizon, dark, shimmering shadows surrounded by fainter ones. They look like heat rising from the hood of a hot car in summer, the wavy air that hovers over a raging barbecue.

Fred explains the bands as a rippling of the earth’s atmosphere, visible turbulence. This is the latest in a string of theories that have arisen since shadow bands first appeared in the lines of ancient Norse poetry. Earlier theories suggested that the bands were a diffraction of the sun’s rays around the moon. And there are still other ideas. Astrophysicist Stuart Eves thinks they might actually be the result of infrasound that’s been—in the supersonic shadow of the moon—transformed into a visible shock wave.

This sounds too fantastical to be true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. After all, nature has all sorts of players in its silent symphony. Throughout my journey, infrasound has reminded me that no matter how far I travel—like Mark Twain standing on the edge of Halema‘uma‘u—I can see only the tip of things. But, when I’m deeply witnessing, I’m able to sense more.

When I look around, I notice that the light has taken on a silvery quality. Even my own shadow has a soft edge, like I’m standing in the midst of a still-being-developed black-and-white silver gelatin photographic print.

“It’s freezing!” I say, my shadow somehow a reminder of the morning’s lost warmth.

A nearby astronomer explains, “The temperature is dropping faster than the light. Infrared still comes through at sunset. But here, the whole lot’s been chopped off!”

Everything around us has dulled to gray. The sun above is only a sliver of color, fading fast. The left side of the moon overhangs, bleeding into darkness. And so it goes that I’m standing on a mountaintop—on the edge of light and dark, life and death—when the sun finally turns to a thin-lipped smile.

Just as it seems all light will be lost, an eclipse feature known as a diamond ring appears as a brilliant flash of light shining through a valley of the moon. I can see the features of its face, backlit and fine-featured as shadow art, craggy and cool. Also visible are bits of the sneezing sun, bright solar flares erupting and curving. It is absolutely spark-of-life dazzling. Then, it’s not.

The moon slips into place with a visible
click.

The light is suddenly and completely gone.

For reasons I cannot explain, I hold my breath. I can’t see anything through my paper shades.

Instinctively, immediately, I take them off.

I am flinging myself on the mercy of the universe. I am fully exposed, totally and completely open to whatever is to come. We have reached the moment of totality, the only time when it is possible to see the sun with naked eyes.

Slowly, the plasma that has been hidden in the sun’s harshest rays begins to push out from the center of the moon, like iridescent petals blooming in darkness. Before me, the corona cries out in streamers of light. The face of the sun is white as stars, lilies, snow. It expands until it is a ring of pure light pulsating in the sky. Its edges have the same twinkling as those pale fingers that play music in the solar winds.

I am part of a pin-point perfect cosmic alignment.

The mountaintop is as quiet as a forest in winter, and it appears to be covered in metallic ash. In the sun’s sudden absence, time has stopped. I have a strange sensation of the ground disappearing beneath my feet. I am suspended in a sea of silver, ethereal light.

It’s not unusual to hear people referring to a total eclipse as “The Eye of God.” And it does look like an eye, the deep black of a pupil, the radiant lines that appear in an iris. It’s as if the universe has taken me aloft, naked-eyed as I am, to stare into its soul.

Everything is silent and still. I can feel the heat of realization rising from my gut: Nothing is a given. Not the regularity of the sun rising and setting. Not even gravity. I am right side up. I am upside down. Without permission, my throat pushes out a guttural, not-quite-screaming sound.

My heart
thum-thum-thumps
, trying to escape the prison of my chest. I am not afraid. I am inconceivably alive. I am wholly present in this perfect moment. And this moment is all there is.

My eyes well with tears, born of something beyond my conscious mind. I release the pen I’ve been holding and press its barrel against a notebook. There is nothing to add. I unabashedly bask in the magnified glory of all my sensory gifts. I laugh. I cry. I am a madwoman in love with the universe.