Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (34 page)

I am also, of course, a mother. And a martyr. But not in the socially expected way. No, a while back I decided that if I was going to hear and talk about motherhood as martyrdom, I’d better look into it.

As it turns out, the word martyr comes from the Greek
martys
.

It means “to witness.”

It was originally used in secular as well as religious spheres, in the way a notary public might be used today. Being a martyr, as the term was originally intended, did not require sacrificing one’s life. It was the term for a professional-grade observer. Some martyrs were given golden crowns for their service as witnesses. This practice is thought to be a possible origin for the religious iconography of halos.

And I think it might be time to take the term back.

It has taken some serious legwork for me to recognize the personal fallout of living in a culture that values the data and images of the abstract theoretical over sensory, direct, visceral witnessing. This sort of symbolic thinking has led to many fine, life-bettering, life-sustaining inventions and discoveries that I wouldn’t want to give up. It is, in fact, the sort of thinking that allows for the precise eclipse predictions that have brought me here. But it almost had me tricked into thinking that my sense of wonder could somehow survive without my fully alert, physical presence. That it could live—as if on life support—through gizmos and gadgets and nature videos on YouTube.

But it can’t.

I have to be the on-site, expert witness of my own life.

Even so, I’m not necessarily very good when it comes to relaying what I’ve seen when put on the stand, questioned by friends and family. When I attempt to share this primal experience a few weeks from now, on request, I will bungle my words. Ultimately, I’ll do an odd little hula-style dance that ends with me pushing my hands—fingers spread like rays—into the air. And when I get to that embodied moment of totality, when I get to the part where I see the face of the sun for the first time in my life, I will spontaneously make an
ahhhh
sound.

It will be operatic, the sound of revelation, the last syllable of alo
ha
. And, from this day forward, the white-gold glow of this eclipse’s halo will be the image that arises in my mind whenever I hear someone singing:
Hallelujah.
Because to experience totality is to viscerally witness the grand privilege of being alive. To even attempt to experience it is to exhibit body and soul gratitude for the lucky opportunity that is life’s light. And I can see how it could become addictive.

In Kate’s book, when asked about what drives him to chase eclipses, James explains: “To witness for ourselves the splendor of the corona, that solar wind made manifest to our sense for those few moments . . . is like witnessing your own birth, the birth of our species, the birth of planets, the birth of physics and time, the birth of all that is knowable and unknowable. This is a powerful revelation of the true nature of the universe compacted into a few minutes that might otherwise take a lifetime of searching and study to realize.”

Interestingly, my compacted minutes of revelation are being spent with people who
have
spent a lifetime studying the sky. Along with tens of thousands of other onlookers—transfixed, with possibly retina-burned eyes—we are channeling our attention to a white-gold ring in the sky. But—whereas I’ve gotten lost in the sensory magnitude of the experience—some of my companions appear to have kept a focus on known names and numbers.

“Venus!” David says, spontaneously appearing to my left as my dream-state meeting with the universe dissolves under his voice. He points to the morning star, which is vibrating like the head of a muffled drum. “Look at it!”

A woman’s voice calls: “Thirty seconds!” Is this intended as a warning? A subconscious, failed attempt to slow down the oh-so-temporary phenomenon?

I, for one, am reveling in this rare privilege of witnessing beauty powerful enough to inspire entire armies to retreat from war. So, I’m startled when another, somewhat trembling voice behind me vocalizes something I didn’t even realize I’d been struggling with somewhere deep within: “It’s real!”

It’s real.

The stories have come to pass.

It’s all there. The sun. The moon. The alignment. It’s not just an abstract theory. It’s not an experiment, or a picture in a book, or the dangling of a Styrofoam solar system set. The universe is real. Totality is one of the realest things I have ever experienced. Today, the breath of life—the origin of solar winds, the whispers of the Greek god Helios, of all the sun gods and goddesses of cultures around the world—is a tangible, visible thing.

What I’m witnessing
seems
impossible. What I’m witnessing
feels
real.

The moon is a marble gliding through space. And it does glide—smoothly, serenely, and faster than I would have guessed. I don’t just
know
this, I have
seen
this. I don’t have to
imagine
where I am in the universe, I can
sense
it.

I am a voyager in the inconceivable grandeur of the cosmos. The sublime—greatness beyond measure, calculation, imitation—is immersive during an eclipse. And two minutes of treading in it is a very long time.

We fumble to get our glasses back on as another diamond ring appears, on the opposite side from the last, the moon’s crater-pocked face once again revealed through streams of light, as brilliant as a carbon-pressed gem. Within seconds of this gasp-producing sight, the corona is gone, its ever-flowering glory masked by its own brilliance.

The group begins to clap. Life will go on. The cycle will continue. The moon’s movements will pull the tides. The sun will continue to coax seeds to life, promising light to those willing to travel through the depth of soil’s darkness.

We draw deep breaths of relief. Tears of joy mingle with those of sorrow, and not just on my own tear-tattooed face. It is frozen in a wild expression that Kate calls “awe face.” Fred looks similarly stunned. I walk over to him. “What did you think of it?” I ask.

“It’ s an astonishing event, really,” he says. “The symmetry! Suddenly, the universe has a third dimension! It’s a three-dimensional experience! It was a perfect eclipse, wasn’t it? I was moved as a scientist. I find the whole thing about eclipses really special. We have this phenomenal, incredible coincidence.”

“So, you were moved as a scientist,” I say. “But what about personally, as a human? Do you really believe that was a coincidence?”

I’m sort of pressing him. Maybe it’s because he’s here with his son—an exceptionally tall child who once, in a storm, asked his father to make the lightning strike again, as if he had the power of clouds in his hands. Maybe it’s because I want to know how it feels to become acquainted—for the very first time—with something you’ve been considered an expert on for all your adult life.

Finally, Fred lets down his guard. His arms, which have been crossed, fall to his sides like tree limbs loosened by strong wind. “I think the universe is telling us something, but I don’t know what it is,” he says. “I think it’s the providence of science to try to figure it out.”

I suppose this is, in the end, what it comes down to: Some people think it’s the providence of science. Some, the providence of religion. Some don’t think that there’s anything to be unraveled. Some have faith that there is. There are also, of course, a few people who have never given a thought to this kind of thing in their lives. But who among us has not experienced fleeting, extraordinary glimpses of something that left us groping for rational explanations in the quicksand of all-encompassing wonder, muttering:
What are the chances?

So, what
are
the chances for what we’ve just experienced?

Herein lies the eclipse’s great kicker:
Its
probability cannot be calculated.

No one has the information necessary to figure out the chances of earth being privy to what we’ve just witnessed. Because no one knows how many universes there are. Subsequently, no one knows how many planets have suns. It is absolutely beyond our reach to calculate probability.

Still, because we come from a culture of control, we call it a coincidence. Because, in a mechanical way of looking at the world, mystery doesn’t easily compute. We live according to a mythology based on predictions, data, statistics. And, when it comes to the probability of eclipses—which seem, on the surface, to be so very well understood—these metaphors melt down.

But, today, instead of cowering in the face of the unknown, we’re celebrating it. The cattle station has erupted with the delicate clinking of circulated champagne glasses. Marnie is elated. Everyone around her is shouting, “Congratulations!” It’s as if she is a wedding planner and we’ve just witnessed the bride and groom—the sun and moon—having their first dance.

She pulls a couple from the back of the crowd and calls for everyone’s attention. The man is wearing a woolen hat and a shirt with unbuttoned pocket flaps. The woman is dressed nearly the same, the front of her pants covered in dirt. They are owners of the land on which we stand.

“Let’s thank them for sharing this site with us,” Marnie says, clapping.

The normally reserved group suddenly breaks into hoot-and-hollering applause. The couple looks embarrassed, too shy to speak. They lower their heads for a minute as the crowd showers them with gratitude. Maybe I’m just emotional from this whole bearing-witness-to-the-three-dimensional-universe thing—or maybe it’s some lingering effect of those anecdotal shadow bands’ unproven infrasound—but I start to tear up at the sight of them.

These ranchers spend their days running gold prospectors off this property. For generations, they have resisted the extraction of material wealth to hold this land together. When Marnie called and asked permission to camp here, they could have said no. They could have chased us away from this precious landscape to which they hold the deed.

Totality will not be visible from this place for more than three hundred years, and they had the legal right to keep its precious diamond ring for themselves. But they didn’t. When asked to share their wealth of wonder, they unlocked privacy gates to let us in.

 • • • 

We loiter on the brush-cleared cow paddock for a long time after the cosmic event, as if we’re theatergoers in a reception recounting the show.

“Thanks for inviting me,” Connor says, embracing his mother.

“Thanks for coming,” she says.

When Ray and Cilla wander over, Jennifer tells them, “You know, it doesn’t really matter if we find all the answers.”

“It matters to me,” Ray says.

Jennifer shrugs. “I just like to marvel.”

She casually runs a hand through her hair. Unwashed, it stands on end. But she’s glamorous without a stitch of makeup, even though her spunky straw touring hat has been left in her tent. She surveys the group and says, “I love being around people who are looking into this kind of stuff. They don’t talk about crap.”

“Well, we do talk about crap.”

“But it’s interesting crap.”

This seems, to Ray, an invitation to broach aboriginal astronomy again. But Jennifer—maybe concerned that, in the face of all this wonder she’s gone soft on rationality and reason—says: “I still don’t believe in
pyramid power
.”

This mention of pyramids sparks Connor’s imagination, which reaches around the world to Mexico’s Teotihuacan, home of the pyramid of the sun and the moon, birthplace of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. The feathered serpent was traditionally considered organizer of the cosmos, a creator and a destroyer. He was son of a virgin goddess. Bringer of culture. Patron of both arts and science. God not just of Venus, but also dawn and wind. Quetzalcoatl, symbol of death and resurrection, was—as the story goes—among those who ensured a return of light after a tiger-like paw plunged earth into darkness by abruptly knocking the sun from the sky.

Connor says, “I suppose those guys at Teotihuacan weren’t that different from us.”

Ray smiles. “They were doing science in their own terms. They conceived of a harmony we don’t see now.”

But maybe we could.

According to the late anthropologist Loren Eiseley, “Man was a reader before he became a writer, a reader of what Coleridge once called the mighty alphabet of the universe. There is an instruction hidden in the storm or dancing in auroral fires. The future can be invoked by the pictures impressed on a cave wall or in the cracks interpreted by a shaman on the incinerated shoulder blade of a hare. The very flight of birds is a writing waiting to be read. Thoreau strove for its interpretation on his pond, as Darwin, in his way, sought equally to read the messages written in the beaks of Galapagos finches. But the messages, like all the messages in the universe, are elusive.”

Still, we hunger for them. We bear witness to what the universe brings. And our interpretations of its messages become our mythologies.

 • • • 

Eggs sizzle under the camp’s mess tent. I take up residence in a folding chair across from Ray, who has told me that, among the Yolngu, the moon is often referred to as Ngalindi, or Moon-man, a characteristically fat and lazy character. As we break bread, Ray recalls a trip he took a few years back to Arnhem Land to view a lunar eclipse. While he was there, a group of children came upon him strolling a red-dirt road. To his delight, they began to shout: “Ngalindi! Ngalindi!”

He thought to himself:
Fantastic that they are so excited about astronomy!

“But then,” he says, “I realized they were pointing at
me
!”

Some people might take offense at being taunted this way, but Ray laughs joyfully when he tells the story. It serves as proof that the astronomical stories of the Yolngu are thriving. They are being passed on not just to curious visitors, but to children who will develop their worldview with these stories as part of them.

Not long after he became known as the Moon-man, Ray was holding a lecture for local elementary students when he noticed a little girl in the back of the group shifting in her chair. Ray flops around and rolls his eyes, mimicking her actions. He recalls: “I was saying the sun is just a star.”