Eclipse party

            The tiniest, thinnest sliver of a pre-dawn moon hung low on the horizon when Mike and I left Bend for Ritter Butte, four hours away in the Eastern Oregon desert, where we would join film-maker Greeley Wells and twenty-five other artists, movie-makers, counselors, radio people, even a one-time mayor of Culver City, California, for an eclipse-viewing party. As we drove eastward, the earth turned, giving languid rise to the sun, a single star so powerful it could light half the world.

            Thus was the atmosphere set for three days of celestial wonders.

            We established camp under an enormous haystack. 

The celestial wonder that night was the stars, studding the black fabric of sky above the desert and massed into a white-washed Milky Way lashing the horizons together.

            The next day's excursion to look for a swimming hole wasn't celestial, except in the sense that it was heavenly to be in the water. We found a part of the shallow river that was knee-deep, or almost, where we spread out into a Seurat painting: people sitting on mid-stream rocks with their feet in the water, standing in the water like deer, napping in the grasses on the banks, the kids exploring the river bottom. The river's edge was lined with a dark, jagged wall of rock and, beyond it, the desert. I lay full-length in the water, clutching river-bottom rocks to hold myself against the current, alligator-crawling up and down the river.

            That night I dressed in a long, white, gold-threaded skirt, and a purple pashmina, moon and night colors, for the poetry reading Greeley had asked me to organize. The words of the poets – Thomas Berry, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wordsworth, Li Po, Yeats – evoked the celestial wonders of rainbows, stars, the moon, eclipses. The woman reading the poem by Rilke read it in German, then in English. We read Sigurd Olson's passage about ice skating under the Aurora Borealis and David Abrams' description of walking through rice paddies in Bali at night, mesmerized by stars and fireflies above and, reflected, below. Because a vivid sunset threatened to draw attention from the last reading, we moved outside the large shade tarp so people could watch the sun set the sky aflame while I read Annie Dillard's breath-taking description of a total eclipse – a perfect ending to the reading, which was, itself, a perfect preparation for the eclipse.

            Later that night Greeley took us stargazing: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the Crown, Cygnus, the Andromeda galaxy. That I couldn't always draw the imaginary lines that turned disparate stars into constellations was no handicap to enjoyment. The celestial wonders of the night sky were unignorable. All eyes were turned upward.

            The next morning's low clouds had evaporated by the time we walked up the hill to the top of Ritter Butte, past a long line of cars on the road ("more cars than this road has seen for a year"). 

On the butte, clumps of eclipse viewers dotted the hilltop. One young couple sat on a blow-up couch. 

I heard people speaking in German. I heard one couple say they had come from New York. There were ranchers and city folks, families with teenagers and young children. One artist from Greeley's group was hanging an elaborate screen of metal circles, each with a tiny hole in its center, in front of a white board. The circles threw dark, round shadows on the board with pinpoint spots of light. "What's the purpose?" a woman asked, and Kevin answered, tersely, "To get set up before the eclipse starts." During the eclipse, the tiny centers of light inside the dark circular shadows turned into crescents. 

Another artist stretched a white sheet under a pine tree and trained a video camera on the shadows. During the eclipse the shadows became feathery soft. 

            As the eclipse grew, people spoke in low voices: "Dad, where's the shadow?" "It's still over the Pacific." Parents mock-scared their kids: "The rattlesnakes and coyotes will come out! We'll turn into werewolves," and kids had their own impressions: "The world is going to go black," one explained to another.

            One often wonders if, after grand expectations, the event itself will satisfy.
            It did. The eclipse did not disappoint. (See last week's post for details.)

            That night Greeley hosted a post-eclipse party in Bend. Traffic extended the drive well beyond four hours, but no one minded. We were sustained by the experience of a lifetime.

            The food at the party was great. The shower was even better. It was pleasant to sit on the lawn and talk about the eclipse with these new friends, but I was very tired, as though the celestial wonders had sapped my strength. There were no stars in smoky-sky, city-lit Bend. I crawled into my tent early and went to sleep with my head swirling like Van Gogh's Starry Night. The solar eclipse with its constellation of events – the poetry, the swim, the stars, the gathering of extraordinary people – had scooped a nest in my psyche, where it will glow for years to come.