Eating the eclipse
catherine disanto

We bumped down the dirt road for an hour, after turning off the graded gravel.

The headlights beamed into the sage, two tunnels of light illuminating our rocky path. The three of us sat silent in the car, the alien light of the clock reminding us we had been up since 4:30.

This was not just any early alpine start. This was not just any hike, chosen at random to fill a day off.  It was the eclipse: full totality in Jackson, Wyoming.

Our excitement blossomed as we began our climb, headlamps on. Eventually sunlight swarmed the sage fields as we climbed through the open meadows toward our iconic summit, the Sleeping Indian.  We clicked our headlamps off.  We de-layered, peeling puffies from warm shoulders.  I sat down in the spiky grass and peeled open a sorry banana thirty minutes in, dipping it into a single-serving Jif packet and handing inch-long chunks to the others in silence.

We reached the belly of the Indian, six miles and 4,300 feet of elevation gain later.  The earth turned to gravely shale, gray and open. Gone were the shocks of fireweed, the dewy willows brushing our arms with morning’s condensation. I turned and looked back over the mountain’s sloping flanks. A loopy string of brightly colored nylon and polypro dotted the gray like an irregular string of pearls. We weren’t alone anymore. The other hikers looked like rainbow sprinkles dotted across the monochrome meadow.

On the summit, hikers and umbraphiles had spread out and claimed their spots. Some looked east, toward the sweeping Gros Ventre mountain range. Others turned west, toward the spectacular Tetons. I unstrapped a Crazy Creek from my pack and shook it out, facing the sun. The partial eclipse was about to begin.

We settled in to wait, our eclipse glasses feeling chintzy and unnecessary. But then it began, a tiny black scoop out of the sun, like an exacto blade scraping off the tiniest rim. We pulled out the camp stove and put a pot of water on to boil for coffee. I spilled our communal snacks onto a raincoat spread onto the rocks: nuts, crackers, two types of cheese, a log of peppery salami. Someone popped champagne with a squeal.

We annihilated the food before the totality began. In between sips of warm coffee, we sliced the cheese with a pocketknife that was still dirty from its last adventure. We pounded the nuts, relishing their salty bite. I ate crackers absentmindedly, one hand moving from bag to mouth, the other glued to my face, holding up the eclipse glasses. It got colder and colder. We wrapped our legs in a down blanket and put on hats and gloves. The gourmet chocolate we had picked up tasted chalky and dry – it was nearly frozen as the temperature continued to drop.

And then it happened – suddenly, softly. The light had been silvery, fluid, for a few minutes, and then darkness crept over the range like a fox. We stood up. The darkness grew more concrete. It was like the final moments before the anesthesia takes over, a sudden narrowing of vision, but this time I was wide awake, hyper-alert. The world seemed to slow as the seconds ticked forward, languid but electric. The corona, unbelievably, looked as it did in the pictures. I ran from east to west as if underwater, seeing, not quite believing, not sure if my feet were still touching solid ground.  We started screaming, a collective, primal howl, when the light began to creep in again, two minutes and thirty-five seconds later. Tears pricked my eyes. I put a hand to my chest to feel the deep pump of my heart, doing its job even when the natural world around me felt upside down.

The sun burst out again in the second sunrise of the day. The summit slowly warmed. It was over.

Blood whirred in our ears as we collected our belongings. We broke down the stove and wrapped up the cheese. I ate a piece of salami and felt a peppery kernel lodge in my teeth. My hands were shaking too hard to pick it out. We began walking down again, this time carrying far more in our hearts than when we left the trailhead early the same day. We had seen the totality and had lived two days in one. We would not be the same.