Total Solar Eclipse, 2024

I'd heard mention that an eclipse was coming in 2024, but this didn't mean a lot to me until friends and family started saying we had to make plans to see it.  I supposed at that point that we did need to make plans, but that they should be written in pencil since it would probably be cloudy that day, or some other quotidian matter would arise.  I realized that we'd be up in Maine then and it would be criminal not to drive at least a little North to see the whole enchilada.  I was not prepared for what an incredible experience this would be.

I'd first thought we could just go up to Lincoln ME, which would be barely in the @115-mile wide path of total eclipse that would arc across the US from Texas to upper New England.  In Sedgwick we'd be a bit South of that arc, though Boston, for instance, would experience 92% of totality and so we'd be in the high 90s in mid-coast Maine.  But Sarah and L really wanted to see more, and so we decided to head for a place in the middle of the path to maximize the impact.

After an early Spring of dismal weather, April 8 miraculously was forecast to be a sunny day in the Northeast, though many places in the swath of totality would be overcast.  So the load on New England would be even greater.  A huge number of people were predicted to be heading North, and the roads might be impassable.  All motels were sold out, airports were jammed with people flying to New England, and there was a frenzy of t-shirts, tattoos, and eclipse rocks ... among other money grabs.

We decided to drive up 95 for at least an hour, but to be flexible as far as our ultimate destination, depending on traffic and crowds ... we wanted to avoid popular areas as much as we could.  Patten ME looked like it might be a good target, or further North and East in Monticello ME.  Sarah and I picked up L in Orono at 11:30, gassed up, and then got on 95 headed North.  The traffic was thick but moving and after an hour or so, the huge and beautiful bulk of Mt. Katahdin appeared to our left.  As forecast, it was a brilliant blue day without a cloud in the sky and the temperature, even that far North, was in the high 50s.

We passed the Katahdin-view rest area on 95.  It was already full to overflowing and was blocked by a State Police car so no one else could get in.  We exited onto route 11 in Sherman, and the large parking lot at the gas station/cheap hotel at the exit was already almost full and the party there had already started.  We headed North through the small town of Stacyville, which was packed with cars, and past the local dispensary and the town's schools, thinking maybe we should pull over at one of these places.  But we pressed on.

We'd decided to head for the "Mt. Katahdin Scenic Overlook" a few miles South of Patten, but the map on Sarah's phone showed the whole area as angry red, so we didn't hold much hope of finding a good spot there.  The view of Katahdin from the overlook *is* breathtaking, and State Police were allowing cars to park on the road after they'd overflowed the small parking area.  But the line of parked cars already stretched a mile North and a mile South from the overlook itself, and hundreds of people were making the long walk with lawn chairs from where they parked up to the field.  We thought if we could get past the overlook and the Amish farms popping up on the left and right, then maybe we could find a good spot in Patten, and we did.

Downtown Patten was full up itself, the municipal park and the recreation area a little past it.  But we then turned West onto Shin Pond Road (route 159) and found a great spot.  Cars were pulling over on one side of the road, where a solar farm was being built on an old potato field, and we were able to grab a spot there and set up our lawn chairs on the field around 1:30.  We had a great view of Mt. Katahdin through a couple of large power poles leading off from the solar farm, and we had a full view of old Sol itself of course.  But where was the moon?  It was there, sneaking up on the sun, but of course it wasn't reflecting back to Earth and so was invisible.  The cars kept coming and soon even that stretch of road was full.

Had a few sandwiches in the brilliant day with a gusty West wind and waited with our eclipse glasses.  The eclipse was supposed to start at around 2:20, achieve totality around 3:30, and last until around 4:40.  So our timing was great.  And at right around 2:20, there it was, a tiny little black bite out of the disc of the sun in the bottom-right quadrant.

The next hour was fun, but a little dull.  The moon crept slowly, slowly upwards on the sun, and through eclipse glasses you can't see much besides a kind of weird Venn diagram in the sky.  And even when the sun was half covered by the moon, things didn't look very different around us.  But by 3:15 or so things started to change as the remaining crescent of the sun got smaller and smaller.  Shadows got a bit more distinct, and the ridges on the bulk of Katahdin in the distance seemed sharper.  As the crescent dwindled and dwindled, it suddenly got distinctly darker and colors started to jump out.  The surrounding horizon got pink and yellow, like the sun was about to set in all directions.

And then it did set in all directions!  The crescent disappeared and we whipped off our protective glasses and saw a breathtaking spectacle.  The moon was surrounded by a corona of the sun, the world was dark, Jupiter and Venus and some stars were out, and there was a left-over glow at the edges of our world, all around us.  We're used to the sun setting in a specific spot on the horizon, but instead the moon had suddenly snuffed it out in the middle of the sky, and the remaining solar brilliance that we could perceive was not bearing down on us or streaming just over our heads in an after-glow of sunset, it was radiating out into space at right angles to us.

It was an amazing, unique experience and my mind struggled to understand and classify it.  I wanted to say it was cinematic, because it was a dramatic moment on a grand scale, like when King Kong first steps into the clearing in a monster movie.  But a cinematic experience is just a simulacrum, and this was penetratingly real.  It was so shocking we all stood up in order to feel it better.  I turned around and it was happening all around me, uniformly throughout the dome of reality I stood in.  The wind totally died with the snuffing of the sun, and everything suddenly turned eerily quiet and calm like a night-time room.  Then a murder of crows in the trees behind us started worrying.

But the most amazing thing by far was the pair of heavenly bodies occupying the same space.  In my time on earth I've seen many things in the sky: the sun, the moon, airplanes, helicopters, planets, drones, satellites, stars, meteors.  But this was something large in the sky that I'd never seen before, a glowing ring with a dark hole in the center, like the aliens had arrived just overhead.  At about seven-o-clock in the pair of discs there was a bright red pearl in the diamond necklace of the corona.  Probably a solar flare glowing from behind a mountain range on the moon.

I was stirred by an unnamed emotion, and everyone was, you would have had to be dead not to be.  Some people tried to express their emotions by whooping or clapping, but then immediately fell silent because no expression was sufficient.  Totality was supposed to last around three and a half minutes where we were, but was over way too soon.  Suddenly a crescent of the sun re-appeared, but on the bottom-right now, and the world started to return to normal.  The wind started up again.  It had seemed to take forever for the last quarter of the sun to disappear, but now it was coming back fast.

Some of the cars started to peel away immediately, desperate to beat traffic on the way back.  But we realized this would be futile and took our time, sitting back down and gushing about what we'd just seen.  We got things together about 15 minutes later though, and joined the line of cars heading back South.  And a long line it was, we crawled all the way back, past the State troopers watching us from every cross-over on the highway.  There were license plates from all over the East (and beyond), we saw:

• Maine
• Massachusetts
• New Mexico
• New Jersey
• New Hampshire
• Florida
• Rhode Island
• Pennsylvania
• New York
• Maryland
• Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Delaware
• California
• Alaska
• North Carolina

And I heard a funny bit of conversation in a rest area men's room: "That was great!  Where are you from?"  "Bangor."  "Oh, we stopped for lunch there!!"

Finally got back to Orono and dropped off L, and then drove the last bit back to Sedgwick in the dark.  It took us about 4 hours to get back after about 2 1/2 hours to get to Shin Pond Road.  A long day but incredibly worth it!