Gods, Omens, and Hot Wings at America's Total Solar Eclipse | Atmos

04.15.2024

A trip to the solar eclipse's path of totality exposed unsettling tensions between divinity and commodity in America's heartland.

In the hours before the solar eclipse of August 2017, my friends and I poured into a ravine in Middle Tennessee to find the swimming hole at the bottom. There was no trail, only pressed dirt and flattened moss. I was fresh out of college, working on a farm, the future both open and narrowing. Things were splintering; the recent election had rent many families down the middle, raised armies of vicious young fascists, who marched shouting across our cities. But we were here for something that transcended all that; it was the first pan-American total solar eclipse of our lifetimes, to sweep across the South in the thrall of summer. 

In remembering, it slips away like a dream. I remember the fish beginning to jump and the half-moon shadows on the rocks. I remember someone had a drone and lost it in the woods. I remember the rustling leaves, and how we were so much younger. I marked, at the end of that day in August, the date of the next one, April 8, 2024; and after plagues and wars and politicking, seven years later, at the appointed hour here I was, and here we were. 

The original peoples of Mesoamerica practiced precise astronomy. Suns died and were born again, were taken as signs to found cities or begin wars. Jaguars or demons were responsible, or the underworld came to visit the sky, in which case the codices instructed ritual noise-making to scare away the dark. 

The eclipse wasn't holy to us; it was an occasion for awe, but also for something like a tailgate. In central Kentucky, coming up from Tennessee, we stopped to buy a distillery's Eclipse Special—bourbon and moonshine together. There were specials everywhere. You could get SunChips Solar Eclipse Limited Edition Pineapple Habanero and Black Bean Spicy Gouda. Total Eclipse of the Hut Pizza Hut pizza for $12.

We came to western Kentucky on the road with so many others to soak in the miracle, somewhere between the X Marks the Spot Paducah Solar Eclipse Fair and one-stoplight farm towns readying themselves for us. We drove up Jefferson Davis Highway, named for the only president of the Confederacy, and by the side of the road, an obelisk in his name sprouted iron-gray from the ground. I later learned the KKK had burned a cross on top of it upon its completion. 

It was hot, hot for April. Later on eclipse eve it began to storm, so wildly Paducah's fair was abandoned even; the vendors' tents were still out, half-ripped off their skeletons, Jenga blocks scattered, cornhole left out to molder, battered by sideways rain.

On eclipse day, the fair returned. Four or five psychics, a NASA table, funnel cakes, lemonade, minigolf, the 4-H club, local media, all lined up along Paducah's Broadway to the waterfront. People furiously optimized their eclipse experience with telescopes and cameras. Others hawked T-shirts, some claiming the event as the state's own: "I saw the Kentucky Solar Eclipse."

It was the first pan-American total solar eclipse of our lifetimes, to sweep across the South in the thrall of summer.

The Victorians more or less invented eclipse tourism. Passenger liners made travel easy for the first time. In their rationality and science, eclipses, once held sacred, became a travel frenzy—eclipse expeditions, mostly for the rich.

In line for coffee, we murmured our excitement. Nearly everyone was on their way deeper into totality, further north or west, agonizing about traffic, asking, can we make it to Illinois? No, we'll be stuck for hours. I want to see the Superman statue in Metropolis, they put eclipse glasses on him. What about the national forest? Parking's full, it's one in one out.

I stood between three women from Alabama and a family from Atlanta, a mother, father, and three surly teenagers. "It's like being in some ancient Egyptian ritual—it's like a piece of black crystal hanging in the sky," said the father, the words spilling from him. "If not for my kids I wouldn't have gone to the last one, but I'm hooked. Some people think it's Y2K again. Well, I can't miss it. I have some gray in my beard now that I didn't last time. Next time maybe my kids will have children of their own." My turn to order coffee. "Goodbye and good luck," he said, and I wished him and his family the same.

Some fundamentalist Christians suspected the eclipse of heralding the end of the world. Others invented, seeing the ordinary geometry of its path, a conspiracy targeting small towns. Others saw dangerous astrological portents. An ancient Greek philosopher named Thucydides marked eclipses seven years apart, believing it to predict the outcome of the Peloponnesian War. This eclipse marks another divisive presidential election, whether the moon and the sun care about such things, or they're just absorbed in the work of orbit.

I went to the psychics. Ashley the Bone Witch sat me at a table and tossed a number of small items over a cloth painted with the Zodiac, over it splayed bones and other trinkets, a plastic knife, an octopus's sucker in a jar. Ashley didn't see the future, she said as she read my bones, the eclipse might bring intuitive clarity but that's it. 

Unseen, the eclipse shadow originated in the middle of the Pacific, sweeping towards us at 1,500 miles per hour. 

At the fair, Soheila, seven years old, a child of the last eclipse, asked my favorite color. It's blue. She painted the eclipse on my cheek, the yellow sun and blue moon, the colors seeping into each other, interlocked like an infinity sign, and I paid her five dollars. Her mom, next to her, told me Soheila was a miracle: She had escaped domestic violence in New Jersey, seven months pregnant. We need to protect Earth, Soheila told me, in the way of a kid putting a feeling to words for the first time, because otherwise, "we'll become a lonely rock in space." 

Some fundamentalist Christians suspected the eclipse of heralding the end of the world. Others invented, seeing the ordinary geometry of its path, a conspiracy targeting small towns.

The shadow fell overland at the Mexican city of Mazatlán, and exited Mexico at Piedras Negras. It crossed into Texas by way of dusty Eagle Pass, where the governor put up barbed-wire barriers to ensnare migrants crossing the Rio Grande.

It was getting to be time. We headed west, deeper into totality, to the fields of the Mississippi Delta, where the chemical sludge of the Ohio poured into the Big River and on toward the Gulf. The eclipse procession stretched along with us in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Small-town cops, overwhelmed, directed us. "Don't think they know how to drive," one grumbled.

The shadow moved across Oklahoma, into Arkansas, where the National Guard had been called and states of emergency declared, sparking fears of martial law, fears of crimes committed during two to four minutes of darkness, suspicions of governors trying to push legislation through while no one was looking, all alongside psychedelic festivals and NASA events. Diné people readied themselves for indoor quiet and prayer, so the sun could be reborn away from prying eyes.

It was hot hot as we pulled around and looked for a place to witness the miracle. On one side of town was a big white cross on a hilltop; churchgoers plied us with hot dogs and a ride if only we'd go see the glory of the Son and the sun. We demurred, choosing instead another hilltop, the Mound. This had been a spiritual gathering place for the ancient Mississippian peoples who ruled the delta for a thousand years; the people on it now, here to witness a cosmic event, profaned it all. Beers open, kids playing soccer, dogs barking. We sat in the shade, in anticipation, uneasy, excited.

Over time the light changed quality, as if the air had thinned.

Someone next to me had an app on their phone to predict phases of the eclipse. Observe the temperature, said the app.

It was dropping; we raised our hands excitedly to our faces in the flat, otherworldly light. The evening birds rose in confused song. "We're going to see the snakes," someone said. I had no idea what he meant. 

Five minutes 'til totality, warned the eclipse app.

A member of our party had failed to show. His parents had warned him that if he went outside, he'd be cursed. He called and said he didn't believe it, but it got to him. My friend Rosa, her family from Mexico, said if her grandma had been alive, she wouldn't have come, either. She had by luck worn red, which warded off the evil eye. I checked to see if I had red on me. Nothing. I felt suddenly unprotected.

Ten seconds till totality. 

The shadows of the atmospheric wind rushed across the ground: the snakes, the snakes. The air sucked out of the world, we began to shiver. What if Rosa's grandma was right, what if we shouldn't be here? Then all the shadows raced away under the great big shadow and all thought went.

The miracle moved towards the Atlantic, and we lost it. People packed up and left just like that: Show's over.

I think chills ran up and down me. I think there were stars. Phone lights blinked on, though pictures couldn't be any good. The festival fell away, sandwiches forgotten, the dogs went quiet, the wind rustled through the trees and up toward the heavens. Venus glimmered above the horizon; in Mayan folklore, the planet is Chak Ek, the sun's brother, the god of war, on his way to signal regime change and bloodshed.

I already can't remember: it's slipping away. I'm already trying to hold onto it. The shadows snaked as they rushed the darkness away. We gasped like we'd been in water. Heat returned to the field, and we began to sweat again. The miracle moved towards the Atlantic, and we lost it. People packed up and left just like that: Show's over.

I was hungry and hot; I walked by the hot chicken wing shop by the side of the road in Wickliffe, but an eclipse-goer passed the other direction and shouted at me, they're all out, and so still empty I shambled along to the eclipse parking field smelling paper plant fumes mixed with the ripe mud of the Mississippi mixed with Wickliffe's overloaded septic systems mixed with gasoline and listened to the foghorns of the barges that rolled coal down the river. All the while in the washed-out light of the day, I could still see the circular band of golden sunset beneath an indigo sky.

The eclipse had ended, and yet I was reliving it; fatigue had grown into a shattering headache, and the imprint of the black sun swam in my head as we drove out, I shut my eyes and leaned against the window, and still I saw it, not on my retinas as I had feared but in a place between dreaming and waking. We stalled in the post-eclipse traffic. The corona and the ache in my head became one shearing flash of white light. We passed a church sign that said He is risen; He is coming in glory; glory to the Savior, I repeated secularly, to remember the detail, he is coming, glory to the son, he is risen, glory to the sun, it has returned.

Time lapsed beneath my eyelids. I thought of the father I met from Atlanta, a pair of eclipses seeing his beard grayed, just one more and he's a grandfather. 2045, 2078, 2092, peace and rebellion and fire and flood and plague, past the worries of this year's election, beyond what we can see from here.

The moon and the crown of light behind it was all I could see over the soft rain that fell upon the fields and roads, all I could see as I ate a few grilled vegetables and half a hamburger and went to bed, all I could see as I faded into a fitful sleep in the natural and humming darkness of the soft springtime Kentucky night.

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