Eclipses are about fortuity. I got my parents to drive me to my first one when I was 13. We happened to wander to Malignant Cove in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Sandra Blakeslee, legendary science writer, was there too and the next day I was in the Times (next to Colonel Sanders, link below):
http://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/11/archives/for-2-minutes-there-wasnt-any-sun-for-1500-visitors-at-nova-scotian.html?_r=1
Thirteen‐year‐old Jeremy Wolff persuaded his parents to take him to see this eclipse. His father, Michael Wolff, who teaches English at the University of Massachusetts, said: “Jeremy kept saying in an oedipal way it's the last eclipse in your lifetime, so what could we do?”An astronomical alignment of precision, beauty and complexity, and you are on the spot. The sun 93 million miles away is precisely covered by the moon 230,000 miles away, casting a shadow 65 miles wide through the midline of our country. The size/distance ratio required for this is miraculous, or coincidental. Take your pick. It's a glimpse at the scale God works at.
Julie and I, during our golden pre-marriage years, travelled to two eclipses: Colombia, in February 1998; and northern France in 1999.
Stories and photos (from early days of html) here:
http://already.com/colo/colombia.html
http://already.com/eclipse2/11.htm
Eclipse Chasers are generally astronomy nerds, but it's as good an excuse to travel as any. We've know since '99, the year we were married, that the next realistic one to see was in 2017, which seemed a truly unimaginable distant future. Tomorrow I take my wife and 2 kids to Nashville, the largest city completely within the totality; both because the clear-weather odds are decent, and because it was my mother and grandfather's hometown. We've been on the coasts plenty, but a long time since we've seen America. We'll be 50 miles west for the event, an Airbnb just over the Kentucky border. I booked early.
These are magical, sacred events, changed by our ability to predict them, but still awesome: to witness larger forces drawing on the face of our planet. Prophesy-wise, calamity-wise, this one, this line, seems particularly easy to read into. I'll give you the facts: see what you come up with. It starts in Portland, OR, and ends in Charleston, SC.
At this time of division, the path cuts through the guts of our country from the Northwest to the Southeast. Coming first through Salem, capital of privileged, "progressive," pot-legal Oregon--just 20 miles south of Portland. There could be disaster, 600,000 ironic stoned kids all decide to hop on I-5 at the same time.
The shadow leaves the continent in Charleston, historic heart the slave trade, the business of racism. Charleston has the only slave market building that is still standing, now a museum where you can see the whips and pistols and iron shackles that enforced human bondage. Superficially at least, the other end of the spectrum from Portlandia.
In the Times story, Blakeslee calls solar eclipses and the precise diameter/distance ratio that makes them possible "a fortuitous freak of nature." Maybe, but no more than any of the mysteries that allow life in this warm brief bubble of atmosphere. No, not a freak of nature: but God apparent in the universe, the magic and mystery, the natural beauty and perfection of things. Einstein said:
"There are only two ways to look at the universe: That nothing is a miracle or that everything is."
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