I had planned for months and plotted my strategy for the total eclipse. I had the appropriate lens’ filters, two tripods, extra batteries, extra flash cards, three lenses, a remote shutter actuator, and an extra camera. This event would only allow just a little over two minutes to capture what I was told, and imagined would be, a singular and extraordinary event.
From first contact with the moon's edge, until second contact with the moon and the sun’s transition into totality, the eclipse proved captivating on its own right, for what I knew it meant. Still, it almost felt like waiting for a drop of pitch to fall. All this I casually watched through my Clark’s Planetarium eclipse glasses, while snapping photos. Those photos worked according to plan. Then, the total eclipse burst upon me!
First, the moon’s dark shield (a vast shadow beyond my vantage to encompass) shifted swiftly from the west, to absorb us, as a mid-day dusk enveloped the mountains. In a wink, a 360-degree sunset ringed the horizons. At this same instant, the eternally dependable sun (extinguished in totality) became a black hole in the sky, and a window into infinity. It was ringed with what seem to be a huge, undulating, shimmering span of white flames, jetting streams of electrons into the firmament.
Now, I could abide it with my naked eyes, and I stared a few seconds in amazement. In my eyes, mind, and heart, the flaming ring and streams of light appeared to fill the heavens.
Suddenly, I sprang into action, taking pictures, adjusting my camera settings, and even (at one time) changing lenses. With each photo, I took quick glances (for instant feedback) at my camera’s monitor as each frame was displayed. Each time, I became more and more alarmed. What I was seeing, or at least felt I was seeing with my naked eyes, was that this enormous, astonishing, ineffable beauty, escaped replication in my photos. Growing more and more frantic, I made an evermore furious series of camera adjustments, rapidly switching my attention back and forth from the sky, my monitor, and then activating the shutter.
As the full eclipse lost its hold upon the sun, a massive, dazzling display of brilliant god-rays shot through the moon’s valleys, as if searing, white fires were melting rings around its crest. This was a display that others have described as stringed pearls, fracturing out from the moon’s waxing edge. Instantaneously, the beads of light bled together where a blinding, single point of white flames danced in one phosphorous-like explosion on the trailing edge of the sun's black hole. Then, a midday dawn shot into our valley, igniting a second, rose-kissed ring around the Targhee valley. The day “began,” again, for the “second day” on the same day.
I settled onto the ground, to my knees, all due to my emotional and physical exhaustion, the abject disappointment in my photography skills, and in my utter amazement at the spectacle.
Nevertheless, I thought, felt, and actually cried out, softly, “What an amazing experience!” I specifically say, “experience”– not “spectacle”– because as the sun slowly waxed into fullness, and as its full strength reunited with August’s promise, I felt this deep and profound sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. I could not understand why, though. As a photographer, I thought I had failed. Despite this, I was utterly content, as if I had, personally, just given birth to a child.
It made me fill guilty. It’s not like I’d accomplished a significant civic duty, saved a life, or advanced world peace. So, what was the source of my feelings? The best I could say was that I had just experienced something transcendental or mystical.
Perhaps it was because I had traveled miles to get there, had endured three, restless nights car camping in preparation, and had hiked four hard miles up to the Ridge on Grand Targhee to set up my observation point. Perhaps it was because, when experiencing totality, one is directly under the moon and the sun, and their gravitation force exercised some influence upon me to lengthen the stature of my mind, body, and spirit. And, why not? Don’t they both pull the oceans slightly aloft?
Maybe it was because, as I stood there (at this juxtaposition) gazing up at these two enormous orbs, I could more fully grasp their girth, sense their weight, and envision their reality. Indeed, to stand beneath the behemoths, I had felt as if I had been pulled into the firmament and was suspended weightless and inert, just a few reaches away from their materiality. Overall, I felt unbounded by time and space. I sensed I was, in some small measure, like the astronauts of the 1960s, perched upon the moon's surface and feeling the sanctity of the earth from which my spirit had soared.
Still, maybe it was because the eclipse had transformed the sun into not just a black hole, but a window. And there, at its center, was a portal into the essence of the universe through which I had gazed, into eternity where I had never been permitted to look before. Maybe it was a great eye, around which danced massive bands and waves of rays in its corona that winked upon my existence to give me its blessing. Or, maybe this entire experience was, simply because of its dazzling beauty, like experiencing the wonder of a first love.
In all, I saw the laws of physics in a simple display of order. I had, indeed, come to behold the planetary movement against the backdrop of the sun, which allowed me to rationally understand what I was seeing. Yet still, what I felt could not be explained or captured with just my rational understanding. Yes, I knew the science, but what I didn’t expect was that, which I perceived, was beyond explanation and almost impalpable. It was as if God or the universe had allowed me, for a brief moment, and for a modest personal investment of time, to peer into eternity and see and feel the inner workings of our solar system.
I took some time to revel in it all and then headed home, content to have seen it, but disappointed to have failed in my objective to capture it. Once home, I downloaded the payload of photos onto my PC (personal computer). To my great chagrin and satisfaction, I quickly discovered that I had captured the total eclipse – not perfectly, but sufficiently enough to appease my disappointment! I then realized that while watching the totality, a vast phenomenon filled the expanse of my emotion beyond its capacity to see the sun’s corona for what it actually was. A small, but still amazing display in the dark heavens appeared to span the entire expanse of the sky from horizon to horizon. It did not, however, match up with the beautiful, but dramatically scaled-down reality of its actual appearance in my monitor, which I could not see in the darkness of the mid-day night of my eyes, but could only perceive with the rapturous noon-day expanse of my soul.
If fortune and circumstances allow, as the New Year opens upon us, I challenge you (in honor of that experience) to plan to go to a full eclipse, wherever it next presents its window to eternity before earth’s children’s eyes. Be prepared, then, to feel and experience something that is bigger than the laws of physics. Be prepared to experience something in a way that eclipses its actual physical reality. Only then will you understand why our ancestors were so overtaken by it. You will be, too, even with your modern understanding and seemingly sophisticated intelligence.
Loren M. Lambert © December 31, 2017
