“Whip-poor-will! Whip-poor-will! Whip-poor-will!” The call was raspy and insistent, catching my attention and the dogs’ when we stepped outside around 5:30am yesterday. Often heard in the woodsy darkness but only rarely seen, this eastern whip-poor-will was coming to the end of his waking hours as we began ours.
Long ago I made the conscious choice to approach each morning with the wonder it deserves. Truth is, every day is a big deal to me, simply because I’m alive to see it. Yesterday would be bigger than most, considering that it’d bring me the only total solar eclipse I’m likely ever to experience.
And so I prepared for extraordinary wonder. I anticipated profound joy.
Honestly, I feel bad for folks who’ve lost their sense of wonder, whether it’s at the song of a night bird, a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event or anything else. I’ve said before that it does us humans good to feel “dwarfed” now and then — standing in the shadow of Devils Tower, or surrounded by the high peaks of Glacier, or gazing up at the bluffs at Buffalo Point — and what would unfold in the Ozarkansas sky yesterday was on the grandest stage of all.
I can’t imagine blowing that off, y’know? To be so hardened, so shallow, so divorced from wonder is something I can’t comprehend.
It was a brisk start to the day, still 40°F when I walked up to The Amphitheater to set up a couple of tripods. On one I placed our GoPro, tethered to an Anker power station so I wouldn’t have to swap batteries in the middle of the long “TimeWarp” (time lapse) video I intended to record. I tested the connection between my phone and the camera to confirm that I could operate it remotely.
On a much smaller ‘pod I mounted our handheld anemometer. I calibrated its elevation setting and dialed it to display still-air temperature.
My objective wasn’t to spend the whole eclipse geeked-out on technology — quite the opposite. I configured the gizmos so that I could largely ignore them and use my senses.
Deb put together a basket of food and drink and joined me at our perch in front of The Amphitheater. When the partial solar eclipse began at 12:35pm CDT, I initiated the GoPro time lapse and took a photo of the anemometer display.
The temperature was 86°F.
Soon thereafter we moved our chairs to where our view of the sun was unobstructed. We donned eclipse glasses and marveled at the sight of the moon creeping across the face of the fiery orb.
The show wasn’t limited to the sky, however. Over the next hundred minutes, I was struck by the solar phenomenon’s effect on colors — nothing at all like a sunset or a cloudy day, hues dimmed and muted in what I can describe only as an other-worldly way.
I was wearing a hat with a couple of holes in the brim for a chin cord. At one point I looked down at my shadow and noticed that the partially eclipsed sun shining through those round holes threw crescents of light on the ground. (Essentially, I had a twin-lens pinhole camera on my head.)
As totality approached, the air cooled. The breeze stilled. Birds fell silent. The sky grew dark, the stars came out and then, at 12:52pm CDT, we took off our protective glasses and looked directly at the sun.
For the first time — and probably the one and only time in my life — I saw the corona with my own eyes. I was moved by the sight.
When totality ended exactly three minutes later and the sun began to re-emerge — the so-called “diamond ring” effect — it was like an impossibly powerful spotlight suddenly shone down on The Mountain. I basked in the glow for a short while, then walked over to the anemometer.
The temperature had fallen to 72°F. Totality, preceded by the partial eclipse of the sun, cooled the air by 14°F.
And then a FedEx truck rolled up the driveway.
The young driver brought us a boxed bag of dog food. We talked about the eclipse, of course, and about the strangeness of totality. His own eclipse glasses had blown off of his truck’s dashboard and out the window before he could look at the spectacle, so we gave him a spare pair of ours and enjoyed the waning partial together.
It was a good moment.
Before I say anything else, I want to bow to Deb’s photography. All images of the eclipsed sun that you see here are hers. For shots of the partial eclipse, she held one lens of her protective glasses against the lens of her phone (a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, just like mine).
Without her skills and ingenuity, we wouldn’t have those photos.
Also, I’m posting this today because both my computer and my Internet connection were gritty and abysmally slow last night. I didn’t feel like fighting with either one.
Look, I waited almost 67 years to see a total solar eclipse. I could easily wait one more day to blog about it.
And I want y’all to know that it’s gonna take me a while to process what happened here yesterday. I’m totally not kidding about that. It was so far outside my experience that I’m having trouble finding a place for it.
If you know, you know.
One thing I can say for sure, though — totality matters.
We stuck to our plan to stick to The Mountain yesterday, so I can’t offer an eyewitness report on what “eclipse tourism” looked like in the area. Social media, however, was full of stories and images about what ultimately transpired in Ozarkansas.
Here, for example, are a few photos of traffic on US Route 65 southbound (and an intersecting county road) in and around Harrison yesterday morning.
Mountain Home reportedly wasn’t stacked-up at all, probably because of where it’s situated. US 65 is the primary north-south route in this neck of the woods, and those traveling into totality basically had to take it.
We had another kind of traffic yesterday, too, one we could hear and see from The Mountain. Beginning shortly after dawn and continuing well past noon, the Ozarkansas sky was full of private aircraft looking for a place to light and take in the eclipse. Here are two screenshots from flight-tracking software, grabbed mid-morning — the first is ours, the second (a wider view) was shared by Boone County Regional Airport (HRO) in Harrison.
General aviation basically took over the skies. It was remarkable.
Here in The Land of Totality, whether or not you believe that the eclipse was a big draw depends on where you looked. Campgrounds and hotels were full. Major travel routes and choke points were jammed. But most of the “crowd,” such as it was, dispersed to parking lots, pickle parks, and quiet little places like AGFC’s Fred Berry Crooked Creek Nature Center here in Yellville.
The gathering at The Fred was modest, judging by the photos — but the folks who showed up there came from 21 states (counting Arkansas, 22). I mean, they traveled from as far away as South Dakota, Montana and Washington state. That had me chuckling.
This morning, Deb and I scrolled through the eclipse pages we’ve been following. We saw countless posts and comments from people who came to Arkansas from elsewhere, expressing gratitude for (and in some cases amazement at) the warm welcome they received.
Southern hospitality is alive and well. We’re glad to call this place Home.
To close this out, here (via Rumble) is the GoPro time-lapse video I shot yesterday afternoon. It doesn’t include the sun itself — that was intentional — but captures instead the effect of a total solar eclipse passing over our homestead and the landscape to our west.
It opens with the beginning of the partial eclipse and ends not long after totality, during the second partial eclipse. That friendly FedEx driver has a cameo.
If you want to skip ahead to near-totality, go to about the 4:40 mark.
Notice that the sky toward the northwest horizon never darkened completely, even during totality over The Mountain. That brighter sky is beyond the northern extreme of the path of totality. Anyone underneath it saw a 95% eclipse, maybe even 99%.
Repeat after me: totality matters. If you have a choice, don’t settle for less.
Oh, one more thing — I set up both of our trailcams to snap their daily test images at 13:54 CDT, maximum totality.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB
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