The eclipse chasers who insist the only way to experience a total solar eclipse is in the path of totality are totally right.
I think I said those exact words in 2017, when I was part of a quartet of State Collegians who journeyed to South Carolina for the same experience.
(A crazy trip: We took the golfer’s special from Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe to Myrtle Beach, rented a car for the trip back and watched the eclipse from a park in Columbia. It happened to be the first day of the fall semester. I ditched, as the kids say.)
Annie Dillard wrote that the difference between partial and total is like the difference between kissing a man and marrying him. Or the difference between flying in an airplane and falling out of one.
Our eclipse buddies, Richie and Anita, have since moved to Cleveland, so we joined them there for Total Eclipse 2024 (they even had the T-shirts).
Anita laid out our Cleveland options: SolarFest at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? Total on the Oval at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History? Total Eclipse Fest at the Great Lakes Science Center on Lake Erie? Or one of the 20 or so other celebrations at parks and other public places around the city?
The communal experience had a lot of appeal, but I feared a Times-Square-on-New-Year’s-Eve experience. I did that once, in high school. Memorable. (“I can’t breathe!” I heard one celebrant cry. “My leg! My leg!” cried another.) But never again.
I also feared getting stuck in traffic and being unable to find a place to park.
The nature experience had a lot of appeal also. I wanted to watch “the wind blow ‘cross the water,” to quote from an old song by The Band. I wanted to see and hear what the birds would do. I wanted a hush.
It occurred to me that the best place to take in a total solar eclipse would be on a farm: I’d rather see how the cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, chickens, ducks and geese react to sudden nightfall at mid-afternoon than hear a bunch of humans whoop it up and exclaim at how “cool” and “awesome” it is.
Alas, Old MacDonald’s spread is nowhere near Cleveland (though one version of the children’s song, collected in the 1910s, is called “Ohio”). So we did the next-best thing — walked to nearby Horseshoe Park with its small lake, cattails in the lake and redwing blackbirds sitting on the cattails. I love both the look and the call of the redwing blackbird, so I was well pleased.
There were about a dozen of us. Our little group came equipped: lawn chairs, blankets, cookies and brownies, two black eclipse buns from a local bakery, lime wedges, ice, tonic water and – you guessed it – gin.
The forecast was iffy. How could it not be in early April in Cleveland? But this was C-town’s time to shine. Forget those old jokes about the Mistake on the Lake. Forget caustic Randy Newman singing “burn on, big river, burn on” after the famously polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969 (for the 13th time).
The city had hosted the NCAA women’s basketball final on Sunday. The Cleveland International Film Festival was in full swing. The Guardians’ home opener would begin as soon as the eclipse was over.
The town was jumpin’. So the clouds, in deference to it all, stood off to one side, as if they were as interested in the spectacle as we were. It wasn’t a clear sky, in other words, but no cloud ever crossed in front of the sun to block our view.
For the first hour that view was no different from the view you’d have had in State College if the sky had been clearer (not to rub it in). It was what happened from 3:13 to 3:17, when we could take off our eclipse glasses, that was so glorious: Nightfall. The redwings singing their evensong. The sun a black disk with a fiery rim. A red ruby, known as a solar prominence, at the bottom of the disk.
I call myself a wordsmith. I mentioned above that I didn’t want to hear a horde of people say, “This is so cool!” So how did I respond to those four glorious minutes of totality?
I flung out my arms and said, loudly, “This is so cool!”
And then, dawn light on the lake and the cattails and the trees, and a reminder of the sun’s power: Even 95% shadowed, it lights the world.
As I wrote this column back in State College 24 hours later, a text arrived from Anita.
“Now I’m just putting it out there,” she wrote. “Spain in 2026 for the next eclipse?”
I’m there. Because, you know, it’s just, like, so cool.
