What a day! After two solid weeks of typical Vermont early spring weather—rain and snow and heavy cloud cover—Monday dawned bright and beautiful: blue skies, no humidity, and not a cloud in the sky. Along with a couple of old friends, we headed north from our house in southern Vermont in the early morning. We had originally planned to meet other friends in Burlington, but the weather reports were talking about clouds rolling in from the west, so we decided to find a spot up in Vermont's "Northeast Kingdom," near St. Johnsbury. We ended up in a great spot for viewing—a little local bar in the tiny town of East Burke, with a big grassy picnic area behind it with a great view, and maybe 40 or 50 so other folks, including lots of kids, hanging out and waiting for the Big Event.
The first hour leading up to totality was fabulous. With the glasses on, watching the moon—which was itself completely invisible—take a little chunk out of the sun, and then a bigger chunk, then a bigger chunk, … A gorgeous sight—the deep black of the moon's shadow against the intense gold of the sun, and the sharpness of the line between them, like it had been cut out with an Exacto knife. It occurred to me that this was the first time I had ever seen a crescent sun. And when your neck got tired and you took off the glasses and looked around, the light was getting all weird and soft, and it was getting ominously colder and colder. It was like being outside during a sunset, but all in much speeded-up time—and with the sun, oddly, still high in the sky.
It was breath-taking, sort of in the way that your first view of the Grand Canyon, or Niagara Falls, is breath-taking. But then the last sliver of the sun gets smaller and smaller and finally disappears, and everyone whips off their glasses to look, and people start yelling and laughing hysterically and jumping up and down and hugging each other … Like shipwrecked sailors who finally spy rescue ships heading their way, to borrow a phrase from John Banville. Me included. It is, to begin with, stunningly beautiful. Suddenly, it is night. In the sky is this big black disk—blacker than any black you'll ever see—lit from behind and shooting out rays of white light across the suddenly-deep-black sky. And with one little spot of pure intense gold—the "ring" of the diamond ring—hanging off of its bottom edge. No description (or photo) can do it justice.
