Catching Up: Eclipse Chasing
Once upon a time, back in 2017, there was a partial eclipse in our area of the US that made some headlines. A then-baby Elise and I went outside during the event and looked through our cereal box eclipse viewer. Woo! Minor excitement, we can say we were there, etc. etc. I guess I took a *fantastic* selfie at the time to commemorate it all.
Needless to say, news reports that heralded another eclipse this year in 2024 didn’t elicit much enthusiasm at first. It was going to be another partial eclipse. Our part of the world might get a tad darker for a couple minutes, but unless you were looking for it, you probably wouldn’t notice.
HOWEVER. I started seeing Facebook events from friends back in Vermont with titles like “Total Eclipse Viewing Party!” and “Eclipse Watching!” and I began to wonder if this was perhaps more exciting than I had once thought.
Finally, when another friend from here in MA texted to ask if I knew that the total eclipse would be visible from my very own hometown, I decided it might be worth doing a little more research to see if I might be missing something.
Lo and behold, total eclipses are FAR MORE INTERESTING than partial eclipses, and within a matter of days, a plan materialized for several of our homeschool co-op families to make the trek up to Jericho to watch the eclipse at a family friend’s farm and make it the most amazing field trip of all time. Emphasis required.
In preparation for our trip, we watched a bunch of YouTube videos to help us know what to expect. This one was a particular standout. The big kids were pumped. Did you know that animals start acting like it’s evening? Bugs change their sounds? The temperature drops? If you’re near a mountain, the wind starts to blow? The excitement couldn’t be contained. The moms going on the trip started a text thread that was going nonstop almost 24 hours per day.
The closer we got to the eclipse date, the more headlines about absurd levels of traffic started popping up. We started to get anxious. Three of us had a church obligation that held us at home until late Sunday afternoon, leaving us only the night before the eclipse to get up to Vermont in time. What if the traffic was so bad that we wouldn’t make it in time? Should we leave Sunday night? Monday morning? Would we be forced to watch a partial eclipse on the side of the highway in nowheresville, Vermont? Let’s be honest, there’s a whole lot of nowheresville in the state. The unknowns were piling up.
After much hemming and hawing, I decided to skip the second day of the church event so that I could go up earlier on Sunday morning. Our holier friends stuck it out, with one deciding to come up late Sunday night and another in the wee hours of Monday morning. Another family came up Sunday morning as well, while one Super Eclipse Chaser family drove through the night to ensure they’d get the full eclipse experience.
Not one of us hit traffic.
Eventually, all of us were in the same state at the same time, and we were all there several hours before the eclipse was going to begin. We passed the time checking out the Snowflake Bentley museum, hanging out by the creek behind the museum with plentiful reminders to not fall into water (which led to the snowmelt-swollen Browns River), sampling local fare (including many eclipse-themed goodies - shoutout to Snowflake Chocolates), and eventually making our way to the Davis Farm, which was hosting a viewing party event.
What could be better than watching an eclipse beside a charming group of cows? Nothing, I tell you.
Enter fears about cloud cover.
We started checking the weather obsessively. There were reports of a bank of clouds headed our direction. Would we still be able to see it? What had once been a completely clear blue sky started displaying an assortment of wispy clouds. Nevertheless, we remained mostly optimistic after finding that we could still see the sun through the light cloud cover.
At last, at 2:14 pm, the moon took its very first tiny nibble out of the sun. There was much rejoicing. Cheers of incredulity that it was actually happening echoed across the field. Our eclipse glasses started taking a beating as kids bent them over their eyes to see the moon’s shape engulf the sun.
Special note: a big thanks to my mom, who got Charlie to nap while the eclipse happenings carried on!
Since first contact happened at 2:14 pm and totality wasn’t until 3:26 pm, we spent the intervening period exploring the farm. We met cats, horses, and cows, the kids played on the embankment of the nearby cree, and we all enjoyed the lovely, if waning, sunlight.
Soon, though, we all came back to the viewing field. The temperature was indeed dropping, so we donned our jackets. The diminishing sunlight took on a strange hue, and I felt like I was wearing sunglasses even when I wasn’t using the eclipse glasses. Our colanders showed us that totality was approaching.
And then, all at once, the sun slipped entirely behind the moon and a mid-day evening fell over the field, eliciting screams of absolute awe from the watching crowd.
It’s hard to describe the utter wonder of those three minutes. I can honestly say I’ve never experienced anything like it in my entire life, and when discussing it afterward, every single one of the moms of the families present ranked it as one of the top ten or perhaps even five most amazing moments of our lives. I, almost never one to cry at major life moments, felt my eyes fill up. Perhaps it was because it was a sort of visible miracle. The fact that God cares enough to have created a world in which the sun’s distance from the earth so precisely aligns with the moon’s distance from the earth and allows us this moment of perfect wonder gives us a tiny foretaste of the wonder and glory of what it will be like to be with Him for eternity. If He loves us enough to give us this astronomical mystery as a common grace, how much more will we experience His love when we are with Him face to face?
Even though time seemed suspended for those three minutes, the moon did indeed emerge on the other side of the sun, and light flooded over us again as quickly as it had been extinguished. We took a few pictures (somehow, this is the best one we got…group photos are hard!), decided to grab some creemees (soft serve ice cream, for all you non-Vermonters) on the way out, and packed ourselves back into our cars. I checked the traffic as we ate and internally groaned when I saw the estimated travel time: 4.45 hours, rapidly increasing. Considering the drive up took three hours almost on the dot, the idea of five hours seemed miserable.
Little did we know…that was only the beginning. We got on the road and stayed completely just about completely still. We inched our way to the highway. We inched (quite literally) our way to one single exit. Granted, it was a long way between exits - the drive from Jericho to the Waterbury exit takes about 40 minutes on a good day, but it had been two hours just to go that far. I decided to then inch my way still further off that exit to see if the back roads would be faster. Apparently, 50% of the drivers had also decided to try that method, and we didn’t go any faster at all - in fact, it might have even been slower. We pulled over at a tiny grocery store for an hour just to see if it would clear up, grabbed some snack-like dinner to eat in the car, and I tried to address a migraine that was beginning to take up residence at the back of my head. My mom, who had been riding with my dad, came to the rescue and took up the noble driving effort as we left the parking lot, hoping for the best.
I suppose there isn’t much to say about the next several hours, except that a) my migraine took its full course while my mom piloted our car; b) it got so late that all three kids (blessedly) fell asleep and stayed asleep for the entire drive; and c) the moms’ text thread was constant until we’d all arrived at our respective homes. Our expected ETA had been around 8:30 pm when we’d left Vermont. Our actual arrival time was 2:46 am, a full ten hours after we’d left.
Was it worth it, you ask? Unequivocally, it was. Without a doubt. 100%. And to commemorate the entire thing, I now have a car magnet that essentially summarized the whole event.
