I’m not superstitious by nature, I’m too much of a rational materialist for that sort of thing.  Math and science have more impact on my mind than rabbit’s feet and black cats. I was born on a Friday the 13th (November 1959) so I tend to think of it as my lucky day. But luck is like beauty as it’s in the eye of the beholder. If wildfires wipe out your neighborhood but leave your house standing, that’s good luck for you and bad luck for your neighbors. So I prefer to think in terms of random variation.

If you hit .400 for a month you stand a good chance of hitting .200 in a different month. Guys don’t hit .400 for a season very often and they don’t hit .200 for a season very often, either. They tend to swing back-and-forth between those extremes and even out somewhere north or (mostly) south of .300 for the year. That’s random variation. If you bat ten times in any weekend series and hit five balls as hard as you can you might wind up with five hits or five outs. It’s not entirely up to you or your skill level. Once the ball leaves the bat you have no control over it and the baseball gods take over. That’s random variation.

We don’t like random variation. We like to think we make our own luck. That’s true to some degree. A batter has to practice and keep improving his skills, and he has to make good decisions in the games he plays. He has to swing at pitches he can hit and he has to make solid contact. But he can do all that and still go 0-for-10 and be the goat.

In America if you are down on your luck you don’t get much sympathy. Poor people are considered weak and foolish. Their lot is their own doing and has nothing to do with luck. If they were just smarter or worked harder they would see their lives improve. The American success ethic has no place for randomness. You are a winner or you are a loser and that’s that.

But nature is not like that. And we humans are as much a part of nature as the birds and the fishes and the trees. When a volcano erupts and spews gas and lava over the landscape some living things get buried and some escape. That’s mostly a random phenomenon. The village or forest that gets immolated is not lacking in courage, fortitude, brains, or heart. It’s just unlucky. Your genetic package is not under your control. The assortment you get from your parents is the result of random variation, the outcome is not anyone’s doing.

With so much randomness around you’d think we’d be more focused on process and less focused on outcomes. But we are an outcome-oriented people. We like to assign credit and blame for things even if those things are too big for any one person to get the credit or the blame. Presidents get credit for a good economy or blame for a poor one but they may have nothing to do with it either way. Economies are very big systems with a lot of inputs and despite all the Nobel Prizes folks really don’t understand them. It’s not science as you can’t run proper experiments and thus you can’t test your hypotheses. And when economists get tangled up with politicians all bets are off. Politics is about as irrational a business as humans can come up with and people who are good at it know that feelings and attitudes are way more important than facts.

Facts are over-rated anyway. We are believing and doubting creatures. We believe some things and doubt others and most of the time it has little to do with actual events. We are products of our upbringing and environment and it is really hard to see the world in any other way but the way we’ve always seen the world. Prejudice, or perhaps I should say bias, is more important than objectivity. In fact objectivity is impossible for humans, as no matter how hard we try at least some of our preconceived notions will be part of our world view.

So what is one to do? I think the key is to recognize our inability to see the facts in a situation and accept that we are opinionated as hell. What we can do is try on some of those other opinions and try to see where they come from. They come from somewhere, they are not entirely random or without foundation. If you put yourself in someone else’s shoes you might see the world a little differently than you did before and that is, in my mind, progress. I think the most beautiful thing in the world is empathy. When you can feel what another person might be feeling even if you’ve not had the experiences of that other person you become a larger version of yourself. You enrich your own humanity.

Empathy can only come about through humility. We have to recognize our own weaknesses and limitations. We have to accept that sometimes it is luck that gave us what we have and not our checklist of virtuous behavior. The mystic believes that god is in everyone and that anyone who accepts that fact cannot hate another person or be indifferent to their suffering because that would be an affront to god. I think that might be the hardest thing in the world, to see god in everyone. Too hard for most of us I expect.

For us ordinary mortals, those of us without the necessary spiritual equipment to see god everywhere, we could try something a little easier. How about seeing that the process is more important than the outcome? That random variation doesn’t discriminate and thus we are all subject to it. That bad luck could be just around the corner no matter who you are, and that most of us don’t “deserve” it when it happens. How about letting go of opinions? That’s all they are, opinions. They aren’t universal truths or bits of wisdom or guidelines for ethical living. They are just opinions. We love our opinions and think they define us. They don’t. They come and they go and we change our minds and then we rail at others for changing theirs. Seems pretty stupid, don’t you think?

One thing I know is true: we are all the same. Forty-six chromosomes made out of the same stuff, DNA. We are different, the DNA says that too, but the differences are not as great as the similarities. That’s one of those things worth keeping: what divides us is a lot less than what we have in common. That’s biology, man, and you can’t argue with that.

That’s what the concrete truck—technically an in-transit mixer—brought today. We had three yards poured yesterday and we’ll get three more yards on Friday. Eight cubic yards is 216 cubic feet. That helps, doesn’t it? If you can imagine a block, a cube actually, two yards (six feet) on a side, you’ll get the idea. (Two cubed is eight, six cubed is 216.) I don’t want a cube of course, I want a driveway. Yesterday we got our new sidewalk, curb, and gutter. (You have to pay for these things even though they are used by the public. Your tax dollars NOT at work!) Friday we’ll get the walkway that connects to the porch. That’s the last of the concrete projects.

Bare ground doesn’t stay bare long. The plants come in whether you want them to or not. So you have to do something with the ground. Decorative gravel and stepping stones. Drought-tolerant ground cover. Perhaps a garden.  Or maybe a lawn. But you have to manage the space or you’ll have dust, mud, and thickets of hardy weeds. A weed is just the name we give to a plant we don’t like. If we liked dandelions and wanted them around they wouldn’t be weeds.

Around my neighborhood we have lots of cats. Not the kind of cats that live inside but the kind of cats that roam. They like my big back yard because I don’t have a dog. They see my open space and think “now THAT’S a litter box!” They see my wife’s beautifully tended raised beds and think “LUXURY litter box!” If a dog craps in your yard you go talk to the owner and say “hey please keep your dog in your yard” and they (mostly) say “OK, sorry, will do.” But you can’t use that argument with cats. I used to have a bird feeder. Lots of finches, man. Very cool. But the neighborhood cats would all gather in my back yard watching the feeder, hoping one of the little fellows would fall. If one did they’d pounce on the poor bugger and make a sort of meal of it. Really they’d just kill the bird and maybe gnaw on it but these were well-fed cats. They didn’t do it out of hunger. I know a cat is natural-born killer so I didn’t hold it against them, they were just doing the cat-carnivore thing. Perfectly natural. But I did not put up the feeder to provide cats with recreational hunting opportunities so I got rid of it.

My neighbors, I’ve no doubt, are salivating over my new driveway. They need a place to turn around, after all. This big wide slab of new concrete will beckon them. They won’t use their own driveways and they won’t go the other way on the street. No, they have to turn around in front of my house. I don’t understand it. I can go west on my street and get to where I’m going or I can go east on my street and get to where I’m going. I can enter my property whether I’m going west on my street or I’m going east. That does not seem possible for my neighbors. They have to turn around in my driveway.

I don’t think the city will be happy if I put in one of those tire-puncture devices along the edge of my new driveway. You remember these things from the drive-in movie theaters. Fee-based parking lots have them, too. You can drive one way over them but not the other. Obviously I’d have to get a retractable one, and just my luck I’d forget and drive my vehicle over them and get four ugly flats in one fell swoop. So I guess that’s out. There’s always a gate. They have these cool remote-controlled solar-powered gates that will swing open for you and close behind you like a garage door. But I’ll be broke after this project and I can’t afford that. Plus it seems like a lot of expense and hassle just to express irritation at my neighbors. I’ll probably just park one of my vehicles in the driveway and that will discourage them. My fancy new concrete cost a lot of money—if they want to chip in I will change my tune.

Last night a couple of dogs nearly ran on to the still-wet freshly-poured sidewalk. I did not want dog prints in my sidewalk. It isn’t really my sidewalk, I have to let other people walk on it. But I paid for it so I wanted it free of rocks, initials, falling leaves, hoof prints, foot prints, or shoe prints. We had barriers and cones up to warn people but dogs don’t read. One of my neighbors lets her dog out to run around freely and he nearly left his mark. But we chased him away. The other dog was unknown to me. Someone on a nearby street also lets their dog out to run freely. Doesn’t seem like very responsible dog ownership, but what do I know? I was worried that the deer that march with impunity down our street on a regular basis might step in the pour. I sat outside at twilight but I didn’t see them come by. They have a much bigger target this evening, but they seem a little spooked by the barriers and the yellow caution tape.

My new driveway will cut down on a lot of mud, dust, and weeds. But I’ve still got lots of bare dirt. You can’t concrete everything, unfortunately. Some of it you have to manage. I don’t like lawns so those are out. The cats don’t like lava rocks, for some reason they are reluctant to walk on the small pumice stones, so I’m sure I’ll get some more of that stuff. We like rock gardens and xeriscapes and such. We’ll get to that at some point, but for now I’m going to watch my concrete cure. It beats watching paint dry.

I live at the bottom of a hill on top of a big pile of gravel. They call it ‘alluvium’ on the geologic maps, but that’s just fancy-talk for rocks and sand that have been washed off the hillsides. A veneer of dirt sits on top. I hesitate to call it ‘soil’ because it’s barely that. If you want to grow anything besides juniper or star thistle you have to add nutrients and other organic matter. When you irrigate the water that doesn’t get retained by the soil percolates through the alluvium until it hits a clay layer. We call that clay layer ‘hardpan.’ It’s impermeable. It causes tree roots to turn sideways. When the rains come the water hits this layer and flows underground. We used to have a cellar that was below grade and it flooded every winter. In fact it would flood if my upstream neighbors watered their lawns.

It’s mostly desert around here. But there’s more water than you think. It’s just underground. I can dig a hole in my yard and a couple of feet down it’s saturated. Or not. It seems random. Dig a line of fence posts and there’s nothing. The next one over and you hit a pocket of water. When it really rains, and that happens sometimes, the hardpan will block the downward flow and the yard will fill with standing water. Over the next few days the water will soak into the ground and move on. I suppose it shows up in the creek beds below me, or joins an aquifer, or something. I don’t really know. It’s pretty damn dry around here, it’s not like this mysterious underground water is feeding a forest.

We had some digging done the other day for a concrete project. At one end of the dig there was standing water. Just a few inches, but it was there. Where did it come from? I don’t know. After spending all day panicking that I had another leak in my water line (we just had that fixed after much hassle and expense) I came to appreciate that it was perhaps just more of that anomalous water that regularly bedevils us.

I’d be willing to bet that if we could peel off the street and look beneath it we would see a web of rivulets. Capillaries of trickling water. Pockets of the stuff trapped in the aggregate sitting on top of the clay and just waiting to be freed. And a few feet one side or the other, not a drop. It’s vexing, this anomalous water. It’s not predictable. The gravel the town sits on is not uniform. It’s thick in some places and thin in other. Some spots are mostly big rocks and some spots are mostly pebbles and fine particles. It’s all jumbled up and mixed together. The hardpan varies as well. You can’t expect nature to erode mountains with any kind of regularity. It’s a big random conglomeration and that’s why we get this whack-a-mole water stuff.

My contractor is a very exacting fellow. He does not like surprises. When he forms up a concrete pour he does not want to worry that one end of it will be a soupy mess. And I’m writing the checks so I’m all for his careful approach. I want my concrete to last. So neither of us like this anomalous water. It appears here and there but not everywhere. It appears in odd places and at odd times. This is the first day of fall. That means we’ve just had summer. Why are there pockets of water under my feet after months of hot, dry weather? I don’t know.

Richard Feynman was quoted saying “I can live with doubt and uncertainty” and other stuff like “I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things.” He was usually talking about big problems in theoretical physics, not little problems like anomalous water in my yard. But I think the same attitude has to be applied here. I don’t understand what’s under the ground, but I guess can live with it.

I remember well Our Atomic Future. After The Bomb, it was the promise of peaceful uses. Uranium would power our homes, factories, and business. No more smelly oil or coal, no more air pollution, just pellets of enriched earth silently and invisibly glowing, making steam from the heat and making electricity from the steam. Then shit happened. First came a probing jab with the left hand, easily fended off, but ominously named: Three Mile Island. The right cross that followed was a doozy: Chernobyl. Our Atomic Future, now staggered, was no match for the left hook: Fukushima. Down it went.

I miss Our Atomic Future. I wish I could still believe in it, but futures that never happened don’t seem belief-worthy. Our gigantic carbon experiment will continue even if we revolutionize ground transportation with electric cars and biofuels. Diesel engines running on heavy fuel oils power our shipping fleets; kerosene-based fuels power our commercial aircraft. We’ll be sucking on our hydrocarbon-rich basins for many years to come, don’t you worry, we love blasting the ancient reservoirs of fossilized life into the sky for all to enjoy.

The sun and wind make up our new dreams. It’s very cool to imagine such a thing: Our Renewable Future. That future crowded out Our Atomic Future to the point where only a handful of adherents remain. Yet the atom was split to save all mankind and no one is going to take that away. A new nuclear age is an easy one to envision thanks to that noted futurist, Steve Jobs. This fellow made everything pocket-sized, and slick to boot. Cool look and feel, solid performance, cutting-edge features. Design was paramount, tech became the new aesthetic. Our Atomic Age could never be revived in such a marketplace. Nuclear power plants are just slicker versions of the old-style power plants. They weren’t new so much as improved. And everyone knows that Americans expect new and improved.

Imagine Steve Jobs redesigning Our Atomic Future and setting in motion our new nuclear age. Palm-sized devices for extreme places. Suitcase-sized power plants for running a village. Generators the size of beer coolers giving communities off-the-grid energy. All of them smooth, silvery-surfaced, with simple and intuitive interfaces. Hell, a child could run one. Or perhaps that other mythologist— George Lucas—could chip in with atomic cars and boats and planes that have friendly personalities and colorful appearances. In fact I think we should build an AI of those two consciousnesses and have it spew out possible nuclear futures.

Everyone could have their own personal nuclear pile, like a key fob. It could run all sorts of things. You wouldn’t have to be tethered to the nearest AC plug to keep your phone or laptop charged. Just charge it up with the little atomic box. Forgot to pay the power bill? It will keep the fridge running and the water heater going until you can scratch the cash together. That’s real energy independence.

I suppose folks might be squeamish about all that fission. But big problems need big answers. When we are all living in vast beehives in the currently uninhabitable parts of our globe, or in enormous termite mounds in earth orbit or on the moon, we’ll need lots of energy. Something will have to supplement the sunshine. Maybe by then we’ll have unlocked the secret of the sun—fusion. It worked in Back to the Future, right?

Forty years ago we launched Voyager and it’s still out there, just past the edge of our Solar System and nosing its way into interstellar space, its nuclear heart still beating. Plutonium-238 (not the Pu-239 used in bombs), in a gizmo called an RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator), powers our longest-traveled spacecraft. Atomic power was the last to be harnessed in our earth-bound vessels but will be some time before (or if) it ever replaces our carbon-based engines. Our fossil fueled jumbo jets can shrink time and distance at 600 mph, that’s ten miles a minute or one-sixth of a mile per second. A furlong is one-eighth of a mile at 220 yards, so one-sixth is a few paces short of three hundred. I can walk that in a few minutes.

Voyager has gone thirteen billion miles or so in its four-decade journey, that works out to about eleven miles per second, or sixty-six times faster than a 747. Every significant gaseous orb, ball of rock, or hunk of frozen goop out there got a flyby and the information is still coming. Voyager’s electromagnetic voice takes nineteen hours to reach us and it is expected to keep sending its data for three or four more years. And despite all the magnificent science being done we are still faced with the fact of the vast emptiness of space.

We aren’t getting anywhere near another star, let alone a habitable planet. The further and faster we go the less ground we cover. The post-war era was all about shrinking the earth as our transportation web grew in size and speed. The space race showed us our tiny earth and we’ve since surrounded our little blue marble with constellations of our own satellites. But we still dream of exploring the unexplored places. Unfortunately space is too big for our puny dreams, un-explored is perhaps better said as un-explorable.

All of our science-fiction stories rely on some miraculous faster-than-light scheme for their characters to traverse the mind-bendingly huge interstellar distances. Otherwise they would just be studies in despair as generations of humans would yearn for the stars but be unable to reach them. It would take Voyager tens of thousands of years to come close to a star other than our Sun. We’ll have to content ourselves with Martian probes or even perhaps human astronauts exploring the red planet’s surface. Anything beyond that is science fiction—fantasy, really, as no one is close to figuring out how to go faster than a rocket. And a rocket is a pea-shooter in the big scheme of things.

So our plutonium dreams have gotten us no closer. We still stand on the edge of the black emptiness. The abyss still yawns before us. It would give us nightmares if we thought about it too much. Lots of substantive, temporal things give us nightmares, we certainly don’t need any cosmic ones. Humans have medicated themselves with all sorts of creations throughout our history and today we have an enormous pharmacopeia of possibilities.

Some of those possibilities are called anti-depressants and we’ve been taking them at ever-increasing rates. One in six of us here in the States takes psychiatric drugs, that’s just the prescribed ones, and that’s over fifty million people. I’m not ant-drug or anti-pharmaceutical by any means, lots of folks need this stuff to function, and I’m not one to argue with how people get through the night. But I came across a story that gave me the creeps. It’s here, at the SUNY Buffalo campus, and it says they are finding antidepressants in the brains of fish in the Great Lakes.

Now that’s what they call an unintended consequence. As far as I’m concerned people can take all the Xanax or Prozac or Celexa or Zoloft they want or need. That ain’t my concern. But I’m pretty sure no one wants to dose the fish with it! I’m all for targeted drugging. When I knock back a whiskey or puff on a pipe I’m aiming at me and hoping I don’t hit anybody else.

Seems we’ve gotten pretty good over the years at treating our waste streams for excess phosphorus or nitrogen and we kill the pathogens and whatnot but there is stuff in there now that we can’t yet handle. We’ll have to figure it out at some point. Right now the fish are still edible (we don’t typically eat fish brains) and that’s cool but you have to wonder if the fish get screwed up by all this stuff. It works on our brains, I expect it will work on theirs, too. But no one has any notion of the impacts, at least not yet.

What it tells me is that we have to re-imagine the meaning of waste. Stuck here as we are on this ball of watery rock in the midst of uninhabitable nothingness, I say we ought to make good use of things. You grow something or dig it up and turn it into something cool you would do well to get more than one use out of it. In fact what happens to our coal or oil, or our textile fibers or construction materials, should be just as important as their first-use. Products should be designed with end-uses in mind so that we don’t have waste at all, just a resource being re-purposed. We thought we had a handle on our piss and shit but now we find we are washing our drugs into the heads of unsuspecting creatures we share the planet with.

We will still dream about the stars. And we will still wrestle with our terrestrial nightmares. Everything we see out there in space only makes us seem more remote and more isolated than before. Not that I want them to stop, mind you, I dig all the groovy science. And I’m OK with cosmic nothingness, it forces me to focus on the everyday things. And we need our meds, man. Sleep doesn’t always come easy and a human being that can’t get a decent sleep is a goddamn mess. But our nightmares belong to us, we don’t need to foist them on the fishes.

We got a bit of a respite from the smoke this morning and now we are anxiously awaiting the predicted rainfall. While the smoke here in our little bowl has been thick and persistent we are fortunate that the fires are not closer. Some here in the State of Jefferson have had to evacuate, others are preparing to do so. Here in town we are relatively safe even if we are gagging on the ashfall.

It’s the new normal for us in the rural West, these smoke-clogged summers, and this year we’ve shared our experience with the millions who live in urban areas like Seattle, Portland, and Denver. Los Angelenos are well-versed in this annual ritual; the city has been spreading its tentacles into the wildlands for decades, more and more contemporary Californios live within shouting distance of wildfire country.

I get depressed when the sky is blotted out by the smoke and everything smells like the inside of a Smokey Joe. I love the high desert twilight and I haven’t seen much of it lately. There are days when Butcher Hill, a mile at best from my homestead, has been almost completely obscured. It’s not just the itchy eyes and scratchy throat and genuine unhealthiness, it’s the feeling of helplessness. I keep hoping for a good stiff breeze and then when one comes it just dumps more smoke into our little nook. Yreka sits in the northeast corner of a broad river valley, butted up against the remnants of a large mountainous complex to the west. The hills act like a trap and hold in the foulness until some significant meteorological event comes along and scours out the basin.

But I ought not to complain. Some folks around here have it way worse. And as a fellow I heard the other day say, “complaining is for those folks in Houston.” Yeah, that disaster makes ours seem paltry. But it is a disaster nonetheless. Life in the West is mostly a mirage. There’s no real water to speak of, except along the Pacific littoral, and even they have issues. Southern California is home to the great hordes but they can’t live there without the gigantic plumbing apparatus that delivers water from the mountains. I remember trying to explain our climate to my Irish cousin: she did not believe that we can go six months without rain. The reason they call it the Emerald Isle is because three days without rain is unusual!

But the skies have opened as I type this and glorious rain is coming down. Whether it will do anything lasting about the smoke is hard to say. With the summer rain there is thunder. With thunder there is lightning, and lightning sets fires. I think they call that a Catch-22. But I intend to enjoy this fresh precipitation as much as I can. At some point later this month the climate will start moving toward the autumnal cooling and the fires will abate somewhat and the smoke will clear. Then we’ll get our lovely clear winter. Sadly, we’ll do it all again next summer.

Stay safe out there. Here’s a little Jo Stafford to make you feel better:

She can really sing, eh?

It was just a week ago that we were bathed in the shadow of the moon. They say these things stick with you. Uh, yeah. I’ll go with that. We live on a big ball of rock hurtling through space. Another big ball of rock got exactly between us and the sun. And I mean exactly. Eclipses, occultations, conjunctions, and syzygies happen all the time. Perhaps “regularly” would be more precise. But a total solar eclipse, especially one visible across a large swath of inhabited space, is an infrequent event.

The apocalypse of crowds and traffic and shortages of essentials did not really happen as many expected. Sure, there were car jams and lines and empty gas tanks. But for the most part, people got to where they were going, got to see the eclipse, and got to go back home. It was amazing, really. Oregon and the many agencies and organizations involved did a hell of a job, I think. I feel fortunate that we experienced none of the chaos that was predicted. The small towns along our journey looked no worse for wear afterwards. I saw a semi-trailer loaded with port-a-potties awaiting a tractor in Prairie City on Wednesday morning. In John Day there were swarms of tourists but we found a parking spot on the main drag and got a table at the brewpub at lunch time. There were rooms at the inn in Burns. It was busy, but not so different than most summer days in a recreation-oriented place. I sent a note to the District Office thanking the USFS personnel who obviously stepped up big-time to handle the influx of campers. We even got a visit from Ranger Dan at our campsite!

Here’s a bit from the Malheur NF website:

As visitors depart after their Great American Solar Eclipse experience on the Malheur National Forest, officials would like to thank users for their cooperation. With the great influx of forest users in the past week, few illegal campfires and no human caused wildfires were reported. The vast majority of users abided by regulations in place, providing for an extraordinary eclipse experience to be had by all.

This seemed to match our own adventure. We encountered other people but folks were pretty cool overall and determined to have a good time. There was enough space for all of us and we didn’t burn anything down. I love a good campfire, but you’d be nuts to light one this time of year. It seems they will be extending the no-fires policy even into hunting season, and they are also restricting off-road travel. That’s a good idea. There were plenty of excellent roads up there—access was not a problem.

I shared the eclipse with a gang of good friends. And made some new friends as well. Things that happen on an astronomical scale are both humbling and eye-opening. Quotidian concerns slip away. The trick is to keep that outlook going. Packing up and heading home and re-joining the world makes some of the magic rub off. I don’t want that to happen. I want to keep that place that I found myself in with me all the time.

We are all in this together. We are on the Ark and we have no place else to go. We can go around arguing and complaining but that won’t get us anywhere. The only thing that matters is that we work together to solve problems. Perhaps the right thing to say is work together on possible solutions. No one has all the answers. We are a social species. We have to have each other to survive and thrive. We won’t get there if we don’t listen to each other and try to get past our differences. The things we share and have in common far outstrip the things that separate us.

It’s the great existential dilemma: we crave uniqueness and individual autonomy but those are impossible without a society. Our rules and regulations herd us together and force us into compliance and conformity.  But it is that very stability that gives us the opportunity for creativity and personal expression. We want freedom but we can’t get it all by ourselves, we have to have laws and social order to claim that birthright. I suppose the anarchist will argue it differently, but history suggests that people have to come together and make compromises in order to have liberty. It seems oxymoronic, but the longer I live the more I accept and embrace contradictions and seeming absurdities.

I find solace in the mountains and the forests. Camping is so oddly complicated, all the goddamn stuff you need just so you can simplify and get away from it all seems crazy. Why does it take all that energy and effort to learn what ought to be easy to grasp? I suppose when you are in the maelstrom of things you are just paddling to stay afloat. It’s only when you beach the boat that you can reflect and learn. And it seems like we have to re-learn the same things again and again. Nothing really meaningful, I suppose, is truly simple. It may be simple to express, but not simple to put into practice.

After I recovered from my moments in the moonshadow I told myself not to forget what I found out. But it doesn’t work like that. You have to keep at it. It’s like muscles—once you build them up by working out you have to keep working out or they won’t be built up anymore. In those two minutes the sun was eclipsed I knew everything. But that can’t last, and it didn’t. But I got a look. And I can remember.

We’ll see what sticks.

It all happened so fast. The sun became a tiny sliver as totality approached and then slipped, liquid-like into a shining ring around the moon. Then it slithered into mercury-like beads and in a few seconds was gone. Shouts and whoops came from the group as the darkness increased and we could all look directly at the spectacle without our viewers. I was transfixed by the filamentous corona extending into space. It’s something I’ve seen pictures of but had never seen in real life. Much like seeing wildlife in the wild instead of a zoo, the thrill was palpable. I was short of breath and my heart was racing. I kept thinking “wow” and I think I kept saying it, too. The silvery whorls and plumes of light extending from the eclipsed sun were subtle and beautiful and extended out at least a full solar diameter.

Everyone was excited. I hugged my bride and told her I loved her. She’s faithfully joined me on many nutty adventures over the decades and this one was particularly special. I was a bundle of nerves all month beforehand, worrying over trip details and wondering if we’d get skunked by crowds, chaos, or the weather. But none of that mattered now. An odd calm came over me and I started to feel a little giddy. All the worries and stresses of daily life seemed so silly standing there on the mountainside with the moon covering the sun.

And we were looking, unaided, at the sun. The eclipsed sun. One doesn’t go around looking at the sun. But with the moon blocking its rays we could. That was a weird feeling, I must say. Totality was much too brief. The image of the usually-hidden solar corona was etched into my mind, for good I hope. I had a feeling that I’d been let in on some special occult knowledge, that I was now a member of some secret society, that I’d been allowed to view what was forbidden. But that was transitory. The two minutes were up before we could fully grasp the event and the process began to repeat itself in reverse.

There were cries of delight and not a little bit of anguish as the sun began to emerge again. On one hand, my reptilian brain was thrilled that our life-giving orb was still there to shine down upon us. On the other, my modern mind was sad that the great conjunction was waning away. All of us wanted it to last longer so we could revel in its novelty. How many of us will experience another totality? I thought again about how lucky I was to live in a place where I could play in the shadow of the moon. I had the luxury of both time and means to pursue this adventure. I marveled too at the ancients who could, many centuries ago, watch and learn the patterns of the moon and the sun and grasp the rhythm of the saros and predict the re-occurrences of this celestial marvel.

As the twilight began to fade and the daylight re-emerged we all began to relax and chat and mingle. I noticed that I was both exhausted and exhilarated. I’d lived a whole day in a few minutes! The coronal features had faded away and we got another fleeting look at the diamond ring and then it was back to a partial eclipse. The day began to warm up and the landscape began to look normal again. I used to joke that whenever I did any interesting demonstration in chemistry or physics class that the students would never really see it the first time because they unfailingly demanded that I “do it again!” which of course was not always practical or even possible. I understood them now. I did my best to be open to this amazing experience but I longed for a re-do so I could look and feel again, and see it and feel it with a sharper eye and more finely-tuned heart.

But it was not to be. The sun and the moon had done their dance and that was that. There was still an hour to go until the final contact, and we kept putting up the filters to our eyes and scanning the sky, but the main event was over. All we had now was our memories and impressions. We began to talk and share among ourselves and re-live the experience. I developed a sudden thirst and was thankful that our party had prepared itself with coolers of beverages and refreshments. Of course I had my water bottle but what I really needed was a cold beer and I sucked one down greedily. I remember being a little unsteady on my feet and sat in my trusty fold-out nylon camp chair, alternately looking up and waiting for the eclipse to be completely over and staring wordlessly out across the forest all around me and the naked ridge to the west. I was, for a time, bereft of thought.

The approach of totality and totality itself seem to race by unnaturally fast. Time had sped up just when we all wanted it to slow down. Now time came to a stop. The last limb of the moon took, it seemed, forever to be free of the sun. Those final minutes stretched agonizingly. Oddly, we all wanted it to be over! Now that it was done let it be done. But whenever you wish for something to happen faster it never does, it always slows to a crawl. But nature can’t be bothered with our perceptions and the moon and sun continued on their imperceptible separate marches and soon all was back to the way it was before.

The moon, despite eclipsing the sun, was thoroughly invisible, as it always is during its new phase, and what evidence we had seen of its presence in the sky was gone. The sun climbed upward and westward as it does every morning, heating the air and the ground and casting the shadows that mark the progress of the day. It was like the thing had never happened!

But it had, and we were there. I’m sure I’ll be playing that movie again and again in my mind in the days ahead, and I’ll remember the feelings even if I won’t be feeling them again. It’s hard to recapitulate awe. Suffice to say it was indeed something special, and I’m thankful that I got to be a tiny part of it.

Sunday, the day before the eclipse, featured high clouds in the morning that strengthened during the day. It was worrisome. We had the perfect spot to camp: along a forested creek in the mountains. We had the perfect viewing site: an old quarry a few hundred yards up the road. But the weather had to cooperate. I went to sleep on Eclipse Eve with a bit of trepidation. We’d left smoky skies behind us. The John Day River basin was the clearest place we’d driven through and the air got even better with the increase in elevation. The days we’d been in camp featured bright, blue skies.

The sun didn’t come up over the treetops until about seven in the morning but I was up and out of the camper an hour before that. My friend Robin told me later she’d heard my feet crunching on the gravel and was tempted to stick her head out of her tent and yell “Christmas morning!” It sure felt like that. I was all anticipation. I marched up the hill to our view spot, spooking a grouse in the process, curious if anyone had come to camp there. Sure enough, it was empty. More important than that, the sky was clear.

I knew we had a few hours before the event and that smoke or clouds could come rolling in but somehow I knew they would not. The morning was cold and very still. The air was dry and fresh, like a breeze had come through in the wee hours and given our little area a quick cleaning-out. I had to stop and deal once again with this feeling of shock. It was going to work out! The preparation and planning was going to pay off! We were going to get a perfect morning with which to experience the eclipse! I felt really lucky to be where I was and to be surrounded by the people I’d hoped to share the space with.

The road flattened out and the benches cut into the hillside gave us a broader view of the landscape than we had down in our riparian campsite. The rocks were a loose, brittle, shale-like stuff that I had a hard time figuring why anyone wanted to quarry. I suppose they might have made road fill, or riprap, but I sure would not have built anything on them. It didn’t look like material had been mined there in many years. Pumice was interspersed among the big plate-like pieces and angular chunks, it was sharp-edged and bits of volcanic glass were embedded in it. It wasn’t exactly a place to lie down, but it was a nice contrast to the flour-like soil in camp which oozed its way into the pores of my skin, not to mention coating everything we had with a fine dust.

Our camp neighbors joined us, it was they in fact who’d scouted the spot and suggested it. There were sixteen humans and two canines in our combined parties: thirteen adults, one teenager, two children, one old dog, and one puppy. Eighteen individuals poised to be in the shadow of the moon that would race across this eastern Oregon mountainside. Suffice to say all were eager and excited. Well, I can’t speak for the dogs, but I suppose they were happy to be running around in the sunshine.

The weather was crisp and cool at half-past eight but the bright rays of the rising sun warmed up the rocks beneath our feet in a hurry and we soon peeled off a layer as the air temperature started to catch up. First contact was a little after nine and the whole event, until final contact, was to last almost two-and-one-half hours. The sun would gain over twenty degrees in altitude and swing westward almost thirty-five degrees during the eclipse. We were feeling good about our spot, and you can see why:

The centerline is in red, you can see we were quite close, effectively on top of it as the duration was predicted to be the same, just a few seconds over two minutes.

We had our eclipse glasses ready and we settled in to watch and wait for totality. Partial eclipses are certainly interesting, but unless they are near-total you don’t get the light and color changes that happen when the sun is fully obscured. It takes very little sunlight to seem normal, a lot of the sun can be covered and yet not be noticeable. But this event was different. We knew the darkness was coming but it was still not something you could prepare for. I suppose the first thing most people noticed as the second contact approached (a little after ten) was the drop in temperature. The air got quite cool, perhaps ten degrees lower on Fahrenheit’s scale. At this point I was rooting for the moon as I’m a shadow, shade, and cold-weather fellow. Anything that reduces the heat of the sun on me makes me happy.

I noticed that the shadows around us were strange, with distinct penumbras and other odd features. We played with our splayed fingers, casting multiple crescent-sun images on the ground at our feet. Straw hats were in abundance and their multiple tiny holes gave us a panoply of pinhole projections. Colors began to get weird, like someone had dialed back the saturation, the hues graying and smearing, the objects losing their crisp edges. It’s hard to describe. It wasn’t like anything I’d seen before and I’m not sure I can put words to it. It was eerie, I can tell you that, and everyone was feeling a strange mix of excitement and wonder, even a little fear. The sun is one of those things we count on everyday—when the moon comes to cover it up you think, just for a moment, that it might not reappear!

Soon totality was seconds away and all of us were riveted by what was happening. This is the “awe” part of the story. When we were in Mexico in 1991, on the beach at Mazatlan, our view of totality was covered by fog. The sun was higher in the sky as the eclipse was at noon and it was also a long one, almost seven minutes. That time we could see for miles along the beach and out over the Sea of Cortez. We saw what looked like an enormous thundercloud hurtling towards us. It was the shadow of the moon! The sky was very dark and sunset colors were on the horizon in all directions. Our site this time did not give us the same vantage, and the short duration (and clear sky!) let us focus on the sun itself. Darkness, perhaps to the level of nautical twilight, came quite suddenly, eliciting gasps and cheers.

And we got to experience those special totality-only features: the corona, the diamond ring, and Baily’s Beads. But that’s for the next post.

I spent several weeks trying to find the perfect eclipse site. I wanted to avoid the I-5 and US-97 corridors as I figured they would be the busiest. I figured the Oregon coast might have a chance of summer fog and did not want to go through that again. We got “fogged out” on the Mexican coast in 1991 during totality so I did not want to be anywhere near a marine environment. I wanted to stay in Oregon and not go further east so the drive times would be manageable. I thought US-395 would be our best bet and I noted that the centerline was just north of the little burg of Prairie City which was just a few miles along OR-26 from the 395 junction at Riley. The Malheur National Forest had many excellent roads and opportunities for dispersed camping, some within a few miles of the centerline. We found such at spot only five miles south of highway 26. It was a large primitive hunters’ camp with many flat areas and access to Clear Creek. We decided that was the place. I organized material for my friends who said they wanted to join us for the event and I made sure they knew exactly where to go as we would be out of cell range. Then I fretted for the remaining weeks, worrying that my secret spot would not be so secret and that hordes of campers would be jockeying for it and for my fallback spots as well.

We got there on Thursday the 17th. The eclipse was Monday morning the 21st. We encountered very little traffic on our drives and saw almost no one once we left Prairie City and headed into the Southern Blue Mountains. Shaking with anticipation, we pulled our camper off the highway and on to Clear Creek Road (FR 2635). We encountered no vehicles or people. At the sign for Looney Springs we saw our turnout and entered the camp area. For the first few seconds all seemed perfect. Too perfect. Sure enough, at the very end of the site, a big blue Sprinter van was parked. Someone else had found “my” spot!

I wasn’t upset. Really. I was too anxious and too excited to fret about “losing out” and I knew the campsite was large enough for us and them. They turned out to be very nice people from Seattle (a couple and their young daughter) and they had been there for five days. Five days! That’s planning. I had to tip my cap to them. Sure enough they had worked out that this place would be perfect for the eclipse using a similar logic to my own. How could I be upset about that? Not to mention that their drive (about 420 miles) was identical to mine. They were also expecting another party, or perhaps two, to join them.

The campsite was large enough, as I said, for several vehicles and had sufficient spacing and tree cover that more than one party could inhabit it comfortably. We grabbed the big flat area right the entrance on the opposite end from our neighbors. I pitched a tent that we didn’t intend to use in order to make the site look more full to discourage other campers. It worked—the few folks that pulled in to check it out (three other vehicles that day) saw us at one end and them at the other and decided to drive on to somewhere else.

The next day my buddy Otto arrived in his camper and we placed it strategically to block off some flat camping spots. Only a handful of others came by to check out the site, I talked with some and gave them suggestions about other places to go. No one was frantic or bothered, there was still time to get settled for the weekend and the crowds predicted had not yet materialized. After darkness fell and we were ready to hit the sack a vehicle came by and I had to bullshit a bit to discourage them from coming down the road any further. There were places to camp that would not have been too disruptive to us or our neighbors, but I was trying to save spots for at least three more vehicles that I expected the next day. Part of my line was to whine about “those people from Washington who came last week and took the spot I had scouted” and that generated some sympathy. The poor guy even said “sorry you lost your spot” as he reluctantly backed out and went exploring down the road. I did not feel guilty, there were plenty of places to camp all over the forest, denying him one place would not deny him a chance to experience the eclipse. The early bird gets the worm, man.

Saturday came and we had some early morning traffic on Road 2635 but our little ruse held out long enough for the rest of our group to arrive. We “circled the wagons” at our end of the camp and all was good. Our neighbor’s second party arrived as well (I saw Washington plates and just pointed when they pulled in) and by the evening all were settled and happy. There were ten of us in six vehicles, and one of my pals used the tent we had pitched. Our neighbors at the other end had two vehicles and six people. Several dozen yards separated our sites so we all felt good about the space. Over the weekend we visited with them and got to be quite friendly and we wound up sharing the same viewing space for the eclipse on Monday morning.

But that’s the next post. My first reaction? Shock. I still can’t believe I picked a perfect spot out of the the many possibilities. I did my homework and it paid off. And my friends all came and we had a great time together. We had no complications. We even had perfect weather for the event. But like I said that’s the next post. I’m still in shock, really. Things worked out so well it almost doesn’t seem real. I expect it will take a while for the shock to wear off. Then I can re-live the awe of the eclipse itself.