Totality.
Out of Rochester almost an hour late, into New York City on time, back at my apartment a good hour to eat a post-trip dinner of stovetop ramen. I'm tired for not having gotten much sleep last night and for having been tense the whole train ride back - that said, the delays in leaving made the Albany layover a lot shorter than it'd have been otherwise, with that part leaving according to the schedule, and time was made up by going a little faster along parts of the route.
The main delay on Friday was an earthquake in New Jersey that morning, which had the trains go slower than usual out of a due sense of reasonable caution. After that, getting into Rochester was easy.
Saturday saw myself,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
petra, and Their Significant Other visiting the Susan B Anthony museum and getting a "compost plate", which was surprisingly, if not inexplicably, tasty. After getting some delightfully queer coffee that afternoon, though, I saw something that had me saying then and there I was fine with the rest of the weekend. Because TSO took me to a park not even a couple miles from the house where we hiked and leaped through early spring woods packed with local birds that had picking fresh ramps and chives as the second most wonderful thing in the forest.
Because the most wonderful thing was a fox. A glimpse of one is enough to know it by its color. Running off and away, between the trees and gone, I'd only seen it by sheer luck and chance and as soon as it was there, it wasn't anymore.
There were also some fabulous car husks, but nothing as joyful as a fox.
Similarly, Sunday had us walking in arboretums and a sunken garden, taking in the Eastman Kodak museum, and observing a Frank Lloyd Wright house and a pretty great waterfall. The evening was spent on putting together a Lego bonsai tree and commenting that though that day was absurdly sunny, there wasn't any guessing what Monday would bring, and trying to use Lego to distract ourselves. It worked until we ran out of Lego.
Monday began cloudy. It stayed that way through getting up, having tea, making a breakfast out of ramps, chives, and eggs to bring on the springtime. It kept going through checking out a local park and turning back for mud. It went through visiting Lake Ontario and taking in the sounds of the waves and the sight of a proper horizon and finding two coins in the parking lot and hoping whoever needed them for the ferryman's fare didn't need them anymore. It went through sorting the teas and the spices in the kitchen. It went through to us saying that we weren't going to miss totality, we might not see the sun but we'd know totality when it hit us, so we might as well break out the lawn chairs and grab a couple beers. So we did. We parked ourselves in a backyard thirty minutes' drive from downtown Rochester that got rabbits in the morning and birds all day, with unmowed grass and goldenrod patches, where I could hear a good dozen different bird species calling out by nine AM.
We sat, we talked. We tasted potato chips that aspired to push the boundaries of potato chip technology. We made each other laugh and we didn't push it if there was a moment nobody had anything to say. We walked to the edge of the yard and back, waving to the neighbors and chatting about what was going on above the clouds and listening to twelve-year-olds having a great time. We noticed, all of a sudden, the color was going.
It was a cloudy, overcast day where there wasn't quite enough sunlight for shadows and you couldn't see the sun through all the cover, not even faintly, and the color was going out of the world. It felt chilly, and some of that was it going colder and some of that was the color leaving. Getting turned down. Fading a bit, like at twilight, but it wasn't quite getting dark yet.
Not yet, until it did. Color going, and light fading, not quite going gradually but you still had to look around and see and look and have it hit you fresh the first time, the second time. Shaking and pacing, knowing something's coming, being told it's on its way. Hearing the birds go silent. Looking at your hands gone strange with so little color in the light. Ten minutes. Five minutes. Two minutes.
And over the western horizon, came darkness.
There's nothing else for it. We saw it coming towards us as something intractable, inevitable. A wave of darkness as a physical force. With all the clouds, we couldn't see what was happening to the sun or the sky: we saw what was happening to the world. I pointed and shouted for all the good it did, and we stood and watched, helpless towards the heavens, when totality hit. We stood, yelling, swearing, staring at what had become of everything - the clouds gone dangerous, the world gone empty. A sliver of light to the east and nothing else, nothing alive, beyond empty to gone dead.
Dead for a moment. Dead for a minute, because that was when the world turned on its head and started night. A minute and the spring peepers started, ready to get to work. Two minutes and we weren't swearing about our skin or our t-shirts or the clouds but we were swearing about bats making an appearance, vivid enough movement to recognize them against what had become of the sky.
As we saw totality roar in, we watched it rampage on past us, light hitting the western horizon and returning to us. We were shaking, we were trembling, we couldn't fit it inside our heads except in bits and moments, making sure everyone saw it, each person was there, we'd all seen the same things. Confirming, remembering.
And I realized we saw something out of a fairytale. Something that seemed lost in what's been said about the Totality.
We saw an eastern sunset followed by a western sunrise.
Apparently, some people were disappointed in what they saw. Evidently, my dad told me nobody else he spoke to - not even people with unobstructed views - spoke with as much joy about what they saw. I'm baffled at that, because certainly everyone must have realized what was happening, and taken what they could from it.
Waiting in the station, the ride back, the fresh air breaks and the layover and waiting in line to buy snacks, everyone had seen it. Everyone had their own story for where they saw it. For just a little bit, everyone could talk to everyone else about the same thing, and that was something special, too.
I know I'm not going to forget it.
The main delay on Friday was an earthquake in New Jersey that morning, which had the trains go slower than usual out of a due sense of reasonable caution. After that, getting into Rochester was easy.
Saturday saw myself,
petra, and Their Significant Other visiting the Susan B Anthony museum and getting a "compost plate", which was surprisingly, if not inexplicably, tasty. After getting some delightfully queer coffee that afternoon, though, I saw something that had me saying then and there I was fine with the rest of the weekend. Because TSO took me to a park not even a couple miles from the house where we hiked and leaped through early spring woods packed with local birds that had picking fresh ramps and chives as the second most wonderful thing in the forest.Because the most wonderful thing was a fox. A glimpse of one is enough to know it by its color. Running off and away, between the trees and gone, I'd only seen it by sheer luck and chance and as soon as it was there, it wasn't anymore.
There were also some fabulous car husks, but nothing as joyful as a fox.
Similarly, Sunday had us walking in arboretums and a sunken garden, taking in the Eastman Kodak museum, and observing a Frank Lloyd Wright house and a pretty great waterfall. The evening was spent on putting together a Lego bonsai tree and commenting that though that day was absurdly sunny, there wasn't any guessing what Monday would bring, and trying to use Lego to distract ourselves. It worked until we ran out of Lego.
Monday began cloudy. It stayed that way through getting up, having tea, making a breakfast out of ramps, chives, and eggs to bring on the springtime. It kept going through checking out a local park and turning back for mud. It went through visiting Lake Ontario and taking in the sounds of the waves and the sight of a proper horizon and finding two coins in the parking lot and hoping whoever needed them for the ferryman's fare didn't need them anymore. It went through sorting the teas and the spices in the kitchen. It went through to us saying that we weren't going to miss totality, we might not see the sun but we'd know totality when it hit us, so we might as well break out the lawn chairs and grab a couple beers. So we did. We parked ourselves in a backyard thirty minutes' drive from downtown Rochester that got rabbits in the morning and birds all day, with unmowed grass and goldenrod patches, where I could hear a good dozen different bird species calling out by nine AM.
We sat, we talked. We tasted potato chips that aspired to push the boundaries of potato chip technology. We made each other laugh and we didn't push it if there was a moment nobody had anything to say. We walked to the edge of the yard and back, waving to the neighbors and chatting about what was going on above the clouds and listening to twelve-year-olds having a great time. We noticed, all of a sudden, the color was going.
It was a cloudy, overcast day where there wasn't quite enough sunlight for shadows and you couldn't see the sun through all the cover, not even faintly, and the color was going out of the world. It felt chilly, and some of that was it going colder and some of that was the color leaving. Getting turned down. Fading a bit, like at twilight, but it wasn't quite getting dark yet.
Not yet, until it did. Color going, and light fading, not quite going gradually but you still had to look around and see and look and have it hit you fresh the first time, the second time. Shaking and pacing, knowing something's coming, being told it's on its way. Hearing the birds go silent. Looking at your hands gone strange with so little color in the light. Ten minutes. Five minutes. Two minutes.
And over the western horizon, came darkness.
There's nothing else for it. We saw it coming towards us as something intractable, inevitable. A wave of darkness as a physical force. With all the clouds, we couldn't see what was happening to the sun or the sky: we saw what was happening to the world. I pointed and shouted for all the good it did, and we stood and watched, helpless towards the heavens, when totality hit. We stood, yelling, swearing, staring at what had become of everything - the clouds gone dangerous, the world gone empty. A sliver of light to the east and nothing else, nothing alive, beyond empty to gone dead.
Dead for a moment. Dead for a minute, because that was when the world turned on its head and started night. A minute and the spring peepers started, ready to get to work. Two minutes and we weren't swearing about our skin or our t-shirts or the clouds but we were swearing about bats making an appearance, vivid enough movement to recognize them against what had become of the sky.
As we saw totality roar in, we watched it rampage on past us, light hitting the western horizon and returning to us. We were shaking, we were trembling, we couldn't fit it inside our heads except in bits and moments, making sure everyone saw it, each person was there, we'd all seen the same things. Confirming, remembering.
And I realized we saw something out of a fairytale. Something that seemed lost in what's been said about the Totality.
We saw an eastern sunset followed by a western sunrise.
Apparently, some people were disappointed in what they saw. Evidently, my dad told me nobody else he spoke to - not even people with unobstructed views - spoke with as much joy about what they saw. I'm baffled at that, because certainly everyone must have realized what was happening, and taken what they could from it.
Waiting in the station, the ride back, the fresh air breaks and the layover and waiting in line to buy snacks, everyone had seen it. Everyone had their own story for where they saw it. For just a little bit, everyone could talk to everyone else about the same thing, and that was something special, too.
I know I'm not going to forget it.
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