Eclipse expectations
Was it worth seeing the total solar eclipse?
We drove up to Maine to see the solar eclipse, and I wanted to talk about it before it got pushed out of my mind by more recent experiences.
I didn’t actively plan it this way, but for me, watching the eclipse ended up being a perfect example of foregrounding actions, not outcomes — the mindset shift I’ve been working on for a while.
Until two weeks before we left, we weren’t planning on viewing the eclipse in totality. We’d booked an Airbnb in a 98 percent zone and figured it would be good enough. But then everyone else told us it was NOT good enough and we were WRONG.
“It’s so different, it’s life-changing,” blah blah blah, everything you’ve been reading and hearing from experts exhorting you to see totality versus a partial eclipse.
Even Dan’s family members who lived in the 98 percent zone were leaving the area to stay in a house in the path of totality up near Rangeley for the weekend and into Monday.
I didn’t want to commit to spending days in the Middle of Nowhere, Maine just to end up with a cloudy eclipse day. (And the historical forecasts predicted clouds.)
So we decided that if the weather cooperated, we’d take the two-hour drive from where we were staying to hang out with them and see the show.
If the weather was blah, heck, we were still in midcoast Maine and there were about a million other things we could do that day (breweries, junk stores, eating various pizzas and seafood and seafood pizzas and visiting various shop dogs, because there are always shop dogs).
However. On the weather app, a big bright sun emoji shone bright for April 8, so off we set for 100 percent totality.
It was fun driving through parts of Maine I’d not yet seen — I’m a sucker for a small town with clapboard houses lining up to a charming main street and a 35-mph speed limit.
And it was fun being at the house with a big group, making homemade pizzas (lord, we ate so much pizza on this trip, you have no idea) and hanging out in anticipation. Like one of our old New Year’s Eve parties, when we’d start getting festive in the afternoon as guests started to trickle in.
Then there was the eclipse itself, a spectacle that it was in fact worth seeing once in my lifetime. The rented house was surrounded by snow-covered fields and ringed with forest, so we were able to see the light change drastically from crisp white to golden — like an old photo filter — and watch the horizon glow with a pink sunset as the sky above deepened to navy blue.
In fact, I might have loved watching the shifting light more than anything else, though the totality of the moon blocking the sun was very cool with the pinpricks of Baily’s beads and shimmering corona.
And then it was over, and yes, we still had traffic on the two-lane county road that wound us back to the highway even though we waited for the side-of-the-road watchers to disperse. It’s Maine. It’s not built for these crowds. We knew this and that’s what music in the car is for.
Was I pleased that I saw the eclipse? Hell yes. It was an incredible natural phenomenon, just like everyone said, and though I didn’t feel my life changed by it, I thoroughly had a memorable time.
And despite myself, I kept saying to members of our group that I couldn’t believe everything worked out exactly as planned, because it’s in my nature to never expect that things will work out until they actually do.
Would I travel again just to see one? Not if it meant going somewhere where we wouldn’t have a backup plan of something else to do if the weather betrayed us.
The outcome of a cloudy or rainy day in 98 percent totality wouldn’t have bothered me in Maine, and if we have another reason to go to Denver or Tulsa in 2045 (I can think of a few!), the eclipse would be an astronomical cherry on top.