It takes a hell of a lot of stuff for two humans to take a road trip to the mountains. Today I’m on stuff-management duty, otherwise known as packing. Sleeping bags, flashlights, shovel, saw, sun shower, camp chairs, binoculars, radio, rope, hammock, tent and stakes, mats and pads, tarp, crate, and bucket. That’s a few of the items. Plus water—LOTS of water—and a water filter. Food, of course, in bags and coolers. Ice is always the limiting factor of a camping trip. Beer, actually, is the limiting factor, but that’s what the ice is for! Clothing and footwear for five days at the campsite and a day on either side in the motel room. Not to mention reading and writing material, cards and games, the all-important maps, plus eclipse information. I’ve got a three-page checklist just for the stuff I keep in the camper and another page for the stuff I’m bringing. I know I’ll forget something, and I already can’t find something I know I’d like to have with me.

It’s a dizzying array of crap, I have to say. Who knew it was this hard to “get closer to nature?” Speaking of crap or the-call-of-nature we have to take care of our own needs. We won’t be in a developed campground so there won’t be a pit toilet. In the old days you dug a latrine. These days they frown on that what with all the impacts on well-visited sites. Veteran campers all know places where the toilet paper is still sitting, half-buried, trying to decompose. We’ve got a portable loo solution that works pretty well and we’ve used it successfully before. (Check out ‘wag-bags’ if you have not heard of them.) We’ll also have to pack out all our own trash. The campgrounds don’t have garbage bins and we only found one place in town (at the ranger station) that had a dumpster. We may have to drive home with all our refuse and debris, which I am prepared to do. It’s a small price to pay for a clean camp. We are actually bringing large heavy-duty bags to collect the existing trash that people left behind from previous visits to the spot. It’s disgusting what people leave behind and bewildering that they would do so. We figure we’ll pick up what we can, it will make our stay more pleasant, but we’ll leave the tied-off bags behind with a note for the Forest Service. Something like “you can thank us for cleaning up after the low-life assholes who were here before.”

But this is an adventure expedition and I’ve no time for negative thoughts. It could be cloudy or smoky or otherwise poor viewing. There could be a forest fire and road closures. The crush of visitors could overwhelm the infrastructure and cause foul-ups or delays. The small towns along the path could run out of gas! Lots of bad things can happen. I’ve decided this is one of those create-your-own-reality moments. I’m going to see—to visualize—a thoroughly successful outing. Easy travels, a happy camp, and great weather. The plan, such as it is, coming together just the way we want it to. That’s where I’m going to put my mental energy. I am banishing fear and doubt and putting courage and faith in their places.

We leave tomorrow and drive to Burns in our VW Eurovan camper. Thursday we are at the campsite. Friday a buddy is coming in his Eurovan. Saturday we expect one couple in their RV and another later in their VW bus. Sunday another buddy should arrive. A few other folks I know have threatened to crash the party and that would be just fine but I don’t expect them. Monday morning is the eclipse. If you think all these people coming to  Oregon this weekend is a cluster-fuck, just wait until they all try to leave afterwards! We will stay one more night in the camper and then it’s back to the motel in Burns for Tuesday and home on Wednesday. (Yes, we have reservations.)

There will be no campfires on this trip. This is an extremely high fire danger time all over the West and the USFS has already issued its restrictions. I’m guessing most people will comply, one hopes that eclipse-chasers have some outdoor savvy and that the idiots will mostly stay home. One hopes.

There’s a full tank of gas in the rig. We’ll stop for ice on the way out of town tomorrow morning. Thursday we’ll make one more stop for supplies in Burns, then head for the hills. Wish us luck!

Wildfire smoke didn’t blot out the sun last week but it did give the moon a red-orange cast. It’s part of life here in the high country—hazy skies from forest fires. Some are local, some are hundreds of miles away. We get smoke in the valleys every summer and it matters not where it comes from. All you can hope for is the wind to shift and push the smoke somewhere else.

Saturday evening altocumulus clouds emerged from the southwest and gradually covered the entire sky. Sunday morning and early afternoon were overcast and eventually rain clouds formed and we got evening thundershowers. It was nice to get a break from the smoke and be able to open the windows and let in some fresh—well, fresher—air. This morning the altocumulus were back and they looked like a big smear of frosting overhead and to the east. Sure enough the sun was obscured until almost noon.

Right now it is clear overhead but a big heap of clouds still covers the eastern sky. The smoke is back, not as bad, but persisting. This is pretty common stuff all over the West. Mostly summer days are clear, dry, and hot. Rain, other than from thundershowers, is unusual this time of year. If an eclipse were happening in two weeks over Yreka I would tell people that odds are excellent there will be bright blue skies.

We are going north in two weeks to the zone of totality in eastern Oregon. It’s a lot like here. Most of the time it is clear and dry. Sometimes there are thundershowers, but they are typically in the afternoon and mornings are usually could-free. Wildfires are a problem as they spew their smoke all about. It’s not so bad when you can get indoors and stay indoors. But we will be camping for at least five days. Right now the skies over where we want to go are described as “hazy” from smoke. Overcast skies and possible thunder, lightning, and rainfall are expected over the next few days. The National Weather Service graphics for this week up there look just like they did for last week down here.

What can you do? Unless a forest fire closes the roads or otherwise impacts local services we are still going to our planned camping spot. It’s a risk, I know. We could get “skunked” for the eclipse. Our viewing site could be overcast or fouled by smoke. If today, a Monday, is just like Monday the 21st, we’ll be watching the eclipse behind clouds!

But I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s mostly hot, dry, sunny, and clear in this part of the world during this time of the year. So I’m banking on that. But if we do suffer the misfortune of totality being blocked by some other natural phenomenon then we’ll just have to make the best of it. Sure, I’ll be disappointed. And I’ll pursue my next chance to see a total eclipse with much more vigor and enthusiasm.

But chasing the moon’s shadow is an adventure. The journey is as much a part of it as the destination. The eclipse, in all its phases, is only a small percentage of the time that we will be out and about. So, we expect to enjoy ourselves regardless of the outcome. The part of the country we will be visiting is both beautiful and bizarre and I know I’ve a lot more to learn about it. It’s always fun being in the mountains. Our site is forested and there’s a big creek running close by. It’s remote, but accessible. We don’t have to go four-wheeling or ford a stream or winch ourselves out of some gully. So there’s little or no danger. It should be mostly relaxing. No phone, no computer, no TV. Lots of hammock time. The only uncertainties that matter are how long the ice and beer will last!

We are ready for whatever Mother Nature throws at us. I’m expecting a fastball right down the middle but if I get a curve or a change-up I’ll still put a good swing on it.

The moon is a better timekeeper than the sun. At least as far as eclipses go. A solar eclipse can only occur on a new moon. So the NEXT solar eclipse has to be an integral multiple of new moons away. The sun can only be eclipsed when the moon it at its orbital nodes. And the type of eclipse—be it total or annular—depends on the moon-earth distance. The moon appears about 11% larger at its nearest distance to us in its elliptical orbit—this is called lunar perigee. All of these events are on different time scales.

The moon moves from new moon to new moon (the synodic month) in about 29.5 days. The moon moves from node to node (the nodical  or draconic month) in about 27.2 days, and the moon moves from perigee to perigee (the anomalistic month) in about 27.6 days. It turns out that 223 synodic months, 242 nodical months, and 239 anomalistic months are all about 6,585 days. That’s about 18 solar years.

Ancient astronomers were aware of this eclipse cycle and the word that’s come down from antiquity to describe it is saros. The saros is a group of related eclipses, all about 18 years apart. Eclipses separated by a saros have similar characteristics. They have the same geometry: they occur on the same node (ascending or descending), at approximately the same time of year, and when the moon is at the same distance from the earth. The 6585 days is really more like 6585-1/3 days, so every third saros (54 years) the eclipse is roughly on the same place on the earth. That 1/3 day means each eclipse is shifted about 1/3 of the way around the globe, so it takes three cycles to get back to the same area.

The saros was first noticed for lunar eclipses because a lunar eclipse is visible over half the earth at the same time. Ancient peoples did not have the travel and communication capabilities that we have today so they may have predicted a solar eclipse but were unable to know if it occurred. It may have taken place thousands of miles away!

Eclipses happen every year so there are multiple saros series going on at the same time. A saros lasts over a thousand years and is comprised of dozens of eclipses. The upcoming total solar eclipse is part of the same series as the 11 July 1999 total solar eclipse that was seen across Europe and was possibly the most-viewed eclipse in all human history. Eclipses in a saros begin with the most fleeting of partial contacts, pass through the annular/hybrid phases, peak with total eclipses, and then fade back again. They reflect, in depth and degree of the eclipse event, all the motions that have to coincide and overlap for us to be able to experience an eclipse. People mostly live in a narrow temperate-equatorial band on the planet, but the shadow path of a solar eclipse can brush the huge polar regions or plunge miles of empty oceans into darkness.

Humans had to view, record, and study eclipses for generations in order to learn about patterns like the saros. Take a look at the path of the upcoming 21 August 2017 total solar eclipse:

Now take a look at the path of another eclipse in the same saros series, this one 54 years away on 23 September 2071:

I don’t think I’m going to make it to 2071. Adding 54 to my current age pushes me well past the century mark. But it is interesting to see that the third eclipse in the saros after this one is pretty close to the same part of the earth’s surface. (GE means Greatest Eclipse where totality is longest.) The 02 September 2035 event passes over China, South Korea, and Japan. The next one after that on 12 September 2053 sweeps across North Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Finally the third in the group returns to the Americas. It amazes me that astrologers and astronomers of yore were able to predict eclipses, or at least create eclipse-predicting algorithms, of such precision. Obviously they lived in sufficiently stable societies that could preserve the records and educate succeeding generations about the measuring and calculating methods needed.

Fortunately for those who would like to view a total solar eclipse we have all these overlapping saros series to choose from. We don’t have to wait 18, 36, or 54 years to see another one. In fact, there is a total eclipse in July of 2019 if you want to go to Chile or Argentina. Hmm, it’s winter then, maybe I can go skiing! Actually I’m trying not to think too far past the trip to see THIS eclipse. But there is another one I want to plan for, it’s in 2024 when I’ll be almost Medicare age:

Anyone up for a trip to Austin, Texas? I hear it’s a really fun town.

Partridge says that this word comes from the Greek zeugnumi which means “yoke” or “join” and that gives us the modern sense of the Late Latin word that emerged of “linked” or “paired together.” In astronomy a syzygy is a conjunction of two bodies, actually three, because you have to include the body the observer is on. In the case of an eclipse we have the lining up of Sun, Moon, and Earth for the solar variety; and Sun, Earth, and Moon for the lunar variety.

This happens monthly. Perhaps you had one of those teachers who tried to show you moon phases using a flashlight and a tennis ball. When the moon is between the earth and the sun the near side is in shadow and hence can’t be seen. We call this a new moon. When the earth is between the moon and the sun the near side is fully sunlit. We call this a full moon. But the moon and earth are offset slightly, otherwise we would have a solar or lunar eclipse every two weeks. A solar eclipse can only occur during the new moon. A lunar eclipse can only occur during the full moon.

But we only get a handful of eclipses per year, not two per month. This is due to the inclination of the moon’s orbit about the earth. The earth and other planets lie roughly in the same plane if looked at from outside the solar system. That is why planets appear in the sky very close to the sun’s path. The apparent path of our sun through the sky is called the ecliptic. If we project this line infinitely into space in all directions we get the ecliptic plane. The orbits of our celestial neighbors lie along this imaginary plane:

The moon, though, has its own ideas. Its orbital plane is tilted about five degrees relative to the ecliptic. Here’s a way to visualize that:

As you can see, the moon only puts itself in a blocking position when it is at the so-called nodes where the two planes intersect. Thus eclipses can only happen then, when the moon is at those points. One is called the ascending node and the other the descending node reflecting our earth-bound sense of up and down. Here’s another look:

Most of the time the moon is “above” or “below” the ecliptic and cannot eclipse or block the sun. Thus most new moons don’t produce solar eclipses. The same with lunar eclipses—most of the time the moon is not in the same plane as the earth and so the earth cannot cast its shadow on the full moon’s face. In order to have eclipses the moon must be ascending or descending through one of its two orbital nodes.

The moon is at or near its nodes twice per year. So we ought to have two solar and two lunar eclipses per year. And we do, usually. But it’s not that simple. The nodes are not fixed. This “regression of the nodes” is due to precession, a phenomenon that all non-uniform spinning bodies exhibit. Think of the wobbling of a spinning top—that’s precession about the spin axis. If the nodes were fixed, eclipses would happen at the same two times per year, half a year (six lunations) apart. But they don’t, they can happen during any month. This is because the eclipse half-year is about nine days short of half a solar year and thus two such eclipse half-years are about 18 days short of a full solar year. Consequently conditions for an eclipse (moon at the nodes) move “backward” through the calendar. This was known to the ancients and formed the basis of some of the first eclipse predictions.

This month we will have a syzygy of epic grandeur, that of a total solar eclipse. The moon and the sun and the earth are all in the right places at the right time and observers in the United States will get a chance to experience the turning of day into night. Although the path of totality restricts the viewing of the total eclipse to a narrow band, all fifty states will experience a partial eclipse somewhere within their borders.

The earth and moon are locked in a gravitational embrace. The moon, strictly speaking, does not orbit the earth. Rather, the earth and the moon each orbit around a common point. That point is called the barycenter (‘bary’ is Greek for ‘heavy’) because it is the center of mass of the two-body system. The moon’s mass is about 1/80 of the earth’s and it is about 30 earth-diameters away. The barycenter of the earth-moon system, it turns out, is located about 1000 miles beneath the earth’s surface.

Here’s a .gif I found on Wikipedia that illustrates the dance:

That’s how it goes for us and our lunar partner. Round and round and round. Our moon is quite large for a planetary satellite. It is in fact bigger than the dwarf planet Pluto! The Sun is much more massive than the Earth, about 333,000 times bigger, so the barycenter of the earth-sun system is much closer to the center of the sun itself even though the sun is almost 12,000 earth-diameters away. The sun accounts for about 99% of all the mass in our solar system. Jupiter, interestingly, is massive enough and far enough away that its barycenter is about half a million miles above the sun’s surface. That’s not much when you figure Jupiter is nearly half a billion miles away.

This odd dance we do only shows us one side of the moon. We know the earth rotates on its axis once a day. The moon rotates on its axis once a month. The earth revolves around the sun in one year. The moon revolves around the earth in one month. That synchronicity of the moon’s rotation with its revolution means we see the same face all the time. The moon is said to be tidally locked to the earth. The so-called dark side of the moon is not really dark at all, we just don’t get to see it illuminated like we do the near side. So it’s best to call it the far side of the moon as it is always further from us than the side we see.

The moon disappears from our view once a month as it travels between us and the sun and the near side is no longer sunlit. That means the far side would be in a full moon phase if we could see it. No humans saw the far side of the moon until a Soviet spacecraft sent back pictures in 1959. We actually do see a little more than half of the moon’s surface from earth because the moon’s orbit is not a perfect circle. Its slightly elliptical shape causes a little more of one side and then the other to appear in our view now and again. The moon appears to wobble east-west. This is called libration and is something you can observe yourself. Get a moon map and a pair of binoculars and watch the Mare Crisium and note how far from the edge it appears. Watch carefully for several days and you will be able to see it ‘wobble.’ A full moon, I should note, is very bright, so if you look at it with binoculars wear your sunglasses. Waxing crescent and first quarter phases are good times to find the Sea of Crises, just west (from our perspective) of the famous Apollo 11 landing site at Tranquility Base in the Mare Tranquillitatis.

The moon also has a nodding north-south libration but that is due to its inclined orbit. The moon does not lie in the same plane as the sun and the earth but is tilted about five degrees. This is the reason we don’t have eclipses every month. But that’s the subject of my next post.

Our trip covered almost 1000 miles or one kilomile. At roughly 0.75 kmi the VW turned on the dreaded check-engine light and then the motor coughed and quit. It restarted, but lurched its way around and was obviously in distress. Fortunately we had made it to our lodging and were merely driving downtown to get some food and drink. I found a local mechanic the next morning and they hooked up their computer-code gizmo and told me I needed a new mass-air-flow (MAF) sensor. Naturally they had to order the part and we had to wait another day for it to arrive. It took all of 15 minutes to fix after that. Being a Volkswagen engine the part was twice as expensive as most: $235! It’s about the size of a stick of deodorant but if it fails you can’t do much driving.

Starting for home the next day the check-engine light came on again. I went straight back to the shop and they ran the diagnostic again and it found no issue with the MAF and no other problems. We then drove to the VW dealer in Bend and tried to get them to check it out but they insisted they were too busy and could not see us on a drop-in basis until the next day. Well, fuck those assholes. All I wanted was five minutes to check the code output! The guy told as that as long as the engine was running fine not to worry about the light unless it was flashing. Thanks pal, that’s reassuring. Why have the damn light if it is meaningless? Suffice to say we made it home just fine, but it was not without its white-knuckle moments, worrying that some problem would manifest itself in the middle of US-97.

We covered a lot of ground in the state of Oregon but had no rain until we returned to California. There were thundershowers in Butte Valley and believe it or not snow on the summit of Mt. Hebron. By Grass Lake the rain was coming down so fast it was pooling on the highway. Once we made it to A12 the normal summer weather was back in full force—lots of scary-looking clouds but no precipitation.

Today and tomorrow we are cleaning and organizing. We both need a break from all the driving, and as much as we love camping it’s nice to be in a real bed and take hot showers! The eclipse is on the 21st of August, so we have some time before we take off again. Now if I can only get that goddamn check-engine light to turn off!

They told us we got the last room at the inn (and only because of a cancellation). It’s that busy time of year—summer vacation—here in recreation-happy central Oregon. After some excellent camping and some arduous driving we found an oasis in Prineville, namely the Ochoco Brewing Company. They make a fine pilsener, I must say.  The bad news is the VW crapped out and we have to stay an extra night while we wait for a part. The good news is we get to keep our motel room. Road trips have their own crazy logic, it seems.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover beautiful mountains and forests emerging from the vast arid volcanic wastelands that characterize much of the eastern part of the state. I suppose that’s a bit harsh, the river valleys are filled with irrigated fields and pastures and quite a number of prosperous-looking farms and ranches. And I don’t think I’ve been anywhere with a higher percentage of four-door, four-wheel drive F-250s. Those aren’t cheap, man.

As far as the eclipse goes, I think we’ve got a couple of good spots pegged. I feel like a fisherman who has a secret fishing hole and is loath to tell anyone about it. So I won’t—yet. My notion of a good spot is someplace isolated, in the woods, with water nearby. Key word: isolated. I can see the appeal of the wide-open spaces along highway 26, the moon’s shadow racing across the tablelands and prairies would be quite dramatic. Some of the landscape, especially around John Day, is freakishly bizarre. The flat-topped buttes are ringed with dark basalt columns that look like a monk’s tonsure. Goofy formations of blocky lava chunks like a kindergartner’s art project are pasted capriciously on the cliff sides. Throw in the sweeping vistas, a hundred or more miles in every direction, and I can see the appeal. A forested site would lack those broad views but I’m in the mood for isolation, like I said.

A staff person in the USFS station in Prairie City which is very close to the centerline said they were expecting “50,000 people” for the event. There can’t be more than a thousand residents! There are a lot of ranches and farms in the surrounding area and several are renting out their fields to campers. We spoke to a clerk in a grocery store in town and she said her husband was planning to “stay inside and close his eyes!” That was my favorite reaction to all this eclipse hype. I’m wondering if the numbers are exaggerated. On the one hand, an eclipse is pretty cool, and gas is cheap, and if the filled motels are any indication people are on the road in big numbers this summer. On the other hand, it’s a bit of a nerd-fest, don’t you think? Are there really that many nerds and nerd-wannabes in this great land of ours?

It’s bloody hot here today. We took the vehicle this morning to a shop in town a little less than a mile from the motel and we were soaked in sweat on the walk back. This was before ten o’clock! I think I’ll enjoy the air-conditioning in the room for a while and then go for a swim in the pool. Yes, they have a pool. Thank goodness for the little things. I want to go back to the Ochoco Brewing Company and try that unusual pale ale again, they seem to have a creative brewer. But it will be REALLY hot by this afternoon. Fresh brew, though. Sacrifices may have to be made.

Actually we are in Hines, Oregon which is just a stone’s throw from Burns. In fact it is hard to tell where Hines ends and Burns begins. No matter, we had a good steak and some local brew at The Pine Room Restaurant and now we are kicking back in our motel room. On the way here (via US-97 and Klamath Falls) we had lunch in the mini-burg of Dairy on 140 on the way to Lakeview. The place was called O’Connor’s Bar & Grill! From Lakeview it is US-395 to Burns. Talk about wide-open country. Lots of sagebrush and juniper and some imposing volcanic buttes. Lake Abert is huge but singularly uninviting as it’s alkaline. Figures. You are out in the high desert and you get to a 60-square mile body of water and it is undrinkable and can’t be used for irrigation.

I kept thinking about the pioneers who came this way. “Well Jethro, I think this looks like a good place to graze us some cattle!” Seriously? Of all the places to pick, these characters decided the prime real estate was bone-dry and hot as hell. I suppose if you are the first people to settle a place it might look good. But my goodness it’s some seriously bleak country. And it’s huge. The distances are staggering. It’s one thing in the age of the automobile and the interstate system, it’s another in the age of the covered wagon. Those folks were either nuts or totally hard-core. Most likely both.

Tomorrow we head out to the forested regions to look for camping spots. We are scouting potential locations for our eclipse trip. It’s a month from the event and we need to get some boots on the ground so we’ll have a workable plan of attack for then. I have a feeling that this part of Oregon will not experience the crush of travelers that are expected for the more accessible areas like the coast and the I-5 corridor. Madras, just north of Bend, is sort of eclipse central, and we are far from there. I’m hoping the famously clear and dry summer weather that bakes the arid wastelands to a crispy golden brown will mean good viewing for those of us prepared to swelter for science.

So what’s the allure? Why drive hundreds of miles out to the middle of some godforsaken scab-land for a two-minute event? I don’t know. Maybe I’m the one that’s nuts. I have air-conditioning and hot showers. I’m choosing to forgo them. I suppose it’s the scale of the thing. After all we are talking about the sun and the moon. They are really big things and really far away. The moon is about ten earth-circumferences away from us. To travel a quarter of a million miles you’d have to circumnavigate the globe ten times. That’s a long way. It’s miniscule compared to the sun’s distance—over 90 million miles away. Forty trips around the equator will get you a million miles. To get to 90 million that’s 3600 trips!

Astronomical distances are of course on a much larger scale. The nearest star other than the sun is over four light-years away, that’s about two dozen trillion miles. So this solar system stuff is pretty damn small by comparison. But on a human scale it is pretty damn big. The deep space stuff is so massive (there are stars so large that if placed where our sun is they would fill the space all the way to Jupiter) and so distant that our feeble mammalian brains can barely grasp the numbers. So a solar eclipse is a local phenomenon. It’s happening in our own celestial neighborhood.

That makes it more dramatic. The moon will actually cast it’s shadow upon the earth and I intend to stand in the middle of it. I’ve looked through ‘scopes at deep-sky objects like galaxies and whatnot and it’s pretty cool shit. Now that we have the Hubble up there peeking into the void we get great pictures of amazing and bizarre structures, and with X-ray imaging and other magical technologies we can “see” things that we never knew existed. All of that is pretty damn groovy.

Maybe that’s it. Eclipses have been experienced by humans since they could look up. For many they were of great cosmic and cultural significance. Predicting—not just observing—eclipses goes back to antiquity. In fact eclipse data are still predictions. The measurements of the actual events are necessary to check and fine-tune the models used to describe these heavenly motions. It only seems like the NASA geniuses have this stuff all figured out. More like they are always figuring. Things are complicated out there and they are always tweaking the formulae. Eclipses, particularly total solar eclipses, are something humans have looked on with awe and reverence for a long time. In our fast-moving special-effects 24/7 info-tainment world an eclipse may no longer have that cachet. I know I’ll be missing a few baseball games and Law & Order re-runs. Guess I’ll just have to suck it up!

I’ll report back in a few days when we are on the return leg.

Science upends the world. That’s what makes it different. Philosophy and religion can stick with the old questions as they are unanswerable. Were the old sages wise? Do they still teach us? That’s enough material to keep anyone going. It’s good stuff, but it’s not new. Science alone does that—it finds out new things.

Here’s one:

There are more bacteria in your gut alone than cells in your entire body.

Our parents and grandparents didn’t know this. They might not have cared. But it would have upended their world. After all this is what that bit up there means: there is more of them than you.

If that doesn’t mess with your head consider a check-up. Seriously. There is more of them than you. What is our most sacred and treasured thing? Our autonomy. Our sense of self. Our individual identity. Our uniqueness. It should be said that unless you are a twin or somesuch you do indeed have a unique arrangement of alleles on your genes. This notion of apart-ness is powerful and important, especially in a capitalist society. But now we know that there are more of them (tiny critters) than there are of us (folks).

I think we ought to shout that from the rooftops. I have a lot of rooftops, and it’s hot. But think about all the foaming at the mouth we do over stuff like immigration. We as a body politic worry about whether there are more of them than there are of us. That’s nothing. We are already there. There’s more of them than us.

We aren’t who we think we are. Science has shown us that our idea of race is a fallacy. We all have the same genes. Some of us have different characteristics, but we are all united by common ancestry. We’ve all got the same DNA. Now we’ve found out that our very notion of individuality is a joke.

You’ve got a monkey on your back. Me, too. All of us. It’s inside, and microscopic, but it’s there and it’s as much you as you. More, in fact. Imagine the genetic possibilities, all the many, many non-human genes living within you. That blows my mind. Think about the diversity of creatures. It’s like your own wilderness area. A private ecosystem. Well, except for the stuff you excrete. Thanks for sharing, by the way. Nothing is truly private in nature, it all has to go somewhere. Closed systems are temporary things; the Second Law cannot be violated.

I’m not an “I” anymore I’m a “We.” Me and my flora. There’s more of my flora than there is of me. And before you get upset about these alien invaders it turns out they are the older ones. I’m the newcomer. These living things came first. It may be that they made me come about, that their role in the evolution of hominids was a crucial one. After all without them I can’t digest my food or void my wastes or fight infection or any of a host of things. We live within an intricate metabolic energy balance, whizzing and pasting and pooting through the day. We have to have air, fuel, and water to keep things pretty close to 98.6 Fahrenheit. We are constantly on, we have only a shutdown button and there’s no reset. Our very lives are flux as we live inside this permeable membrane that continually exchanges stuff, like air and other chemicals—the stuff of life—with the outside world. If it stops, we stop.

And now it turns out a whole bunch of other things are in there with the me I thought was just me. I’m in this bag of skin and bones with armies of them and only one of us. I mean me. Here’s some science-speak:

The gut harbors trillions of bacteria that modulates the host homeostasis within and outside the intestinal tract.

Good thing! I like homeostasis. You should, too. So these trillions of fellow travelers with me are keeping the me alive. I can’t kick ’em out. I’m stuck with them. They make it all go and I suppose I ought to take a more neighborly outlook. Hey, I eat live-culture yogurt! I drink homebrewed beer! I’m very pro-biotic, man. My bacteria ought to be happy with me. I’m thinking it’s smart to keep them that way.

Science is a human endeavor. It’s filled with all that’s good as well as all that’s bad about people, just like any other human endeavor. But this new stuff that pops up is truly new. People may have guessed some of the things about nature back in the day. The Greeks came up with the idea of atoms, for example. But those were just ideas then. They are tangible now. Not literally, you can’t touch them. But they are real. Ideas in science are all fine and dandy, but repeatable results matter more. And when the facts come, we have to be ready to see the world anew.

We are not what we think we are. Our social conditioning and mental outlook are holdovers from more ignorant times. We know more now than we did then when we constructed these schemes about individuals and societies. Science has out-stripped cultural norms. We aren’t autonomous beings. We are ecologies. That’s a very different thing. So different we don’t know what to make of it. We aren’t mentally evolved enough. I predict that will change, and sooner rather than later. The accumulation of such revelatory ideas will reach a crticial mass and we’ll be forced to adapt, as a species. Note the physical words, mass and force. See how hampered I am by the language of Newtonian mechanics? Surely these happenings will not be governed by Newton’s Laws. They aren’t billiard balls or rocket ships.

In the meantime I’ll try to be me and you try to be you and we’ll all be us together. But we better start thinking more about them. They aren’t going anywhere.

I’ve got this notion about going up to Oregon to see the eclipse next month. They say a million people will converge in the Beaver State for this event, that will increase the roughly four million population by twenty-five percent. All for two minutes of totality. The entire eclipse will be over two hours, but the shadow will be complete for only a fraction of that time. I’m chasing that shadow nonetheless. Looks like a scouting trip up to the eastern part of the state is the first order of business. I’d like to find some dispersed camping spots out in the woods somewhere near the centerline. If I can come back with a list of three or four likely places that will make the actual journey more relaxing. It’s only a day’s drive from here, but I plan to stay away from the key highway corridors, especially US-97 and I-5, and I want to be up there before the weekend as the eclipse is a Monday morning.

We took a trip to Mexico in 1991 to see a total eclipse predicted to nearly last seven minutes. We were on the beach at Mazatlan and as totality approached the temperature dropped dramatically. What happens when moist air gets cold? Bay Area people know all about marine fog. That’s what happened. A fog layer formed and obscured the eclipse from view! But I remembered something a colleague told me before I left, which was to ‘turn my back on the sun’ and watch what was happening to the earth. Sure enough we did and we saw the moon’s shadow racing across the Sea of Cortez. I did not expect that to be such a startling sight, but it was. Eclipses create two shadows, one while the sun is partially covered (called the penumbra) and one when the sun is totally covered (called the umbra). As you can imagine, the umbra is much darker, noticeably so, and to see a shadow on that scale was mind-bending. I’m a big fan of mind-bending. That particular eclipse cast a shadow about 150 miles wide! The path this summer in Oregon will less than half that.

Nocturnal fishes leapt from the waters as the umbra passed over us. Diurnal birds circled and settled to roost. Lights came on in town. Stars and planets came out in the dark sky overhead. It was noon, but there was twilight all around us, like a 360-degree sunset. Too soon the trailing edge of the great shadow raced onward across the globe and we entered the lighter penumbra. As the sun emerged from behind the moon in the partial phase of the eclipse the temperature rose again and the fog vanished. Although we missed the main event it was still a full fight card, and in life you often have to swallow the bitter with the sweet.

One of the things you can’t control in this world is the weather. They say the city of Madras will have the best chance of cloud-free viewing. But I figure a great swath across the arid west including large parts of Idaho and Wyoming will have clear skies. That’s just the way it is most August days in these places, hot and bone-dry. But we could get out there and camp for four nights and wake up to rain or overcast or some other unusual or unlikely weather event and get skunked. But that’s OK. I mean of course I’ll be disappointed (and have to start planning for 08 April 2024), but that it will still be an adventure. And that’s what these umbral dreams are about—the adventure. A true hunter embraces the hunt; the outcome may not be the desired one, but there will still be the hunt. I like to think that the journey is just as important as the destination.

It’s going to be hard to find the right spot. It would be nice to have some shade and a water source. We are equipped for dry camping, but five days is a lot of water to pack. It’s not hard to ration for drinking and cooking, and you can do cleanup with a lot less if you plan ahead. But we will be in the heat and dust for five days. I’m going to need a creek to bathe in or a little brook to fill the sun shower. Water levels are falling and streams are drying up all over. And even though we’ll likely be in one of the many National Forests this is eastern Oregon. This is part Blue Mountains and part Snake River and much like the nearby Columbia Plateau and Great Basin. Hot summers, very little rainfall, cold winters, and snow at high elevations. Grasslands interspersed with forested slopes, rocky drainages, mesas, buttes, and arid landscapes. I expect there will be many old buck-hunting spots and other hunters camps near the roads, primitive but well-used, with flat spaces for a few vehicles and tents. The developed recreation sites will be the first to go and I don’t want to compete for any of those.  I’ve camped all over the west in such spots, usually they are empty in the summertime and don’t get action until deer season.

When you stand in the shadow of the moon you feel like dancing. Or running amok, naked and howling like the poor creatures who think the day has suddenly become night. It’s like the hand of god passing over the sun, you feel like you’ve forgotten to sacrifice an ox to Zeus and he’s letting you know you’ve fucked up. That terrifying and wonderful sensation of tininess, of irrelevance in the vastness of the cosmos surges through you and instead of despair it gives you joy and you shout and cheer with life. At least that’s what I think right now. Maybe after all the sunburns, bug bites, and rocks in my shoes I’ll feel differently. It’s going to depend, I imagine, almost entirely on how much water will be nearby. Nothing like a good cold soak on a hot day to improve the spirits.

So that’s what’s on my August calendar. If I were you I’d stay home and watch it on TV. Not that you shouldn’t enjoy this amazing natural phenomenon, I just figure you’ll get a better view and there will be one less car on the road.

Stay tuned for updates—I’m sure there’ll be enterprising live bloggers and all that sort of thing on the big day. Not me: I’ll be unplugged. But fully connected, I hope, with my umbral dream coming to life.