Tag: solar eclipse

Part Three: Every Now and Then I Fall Apart (alternate title: Eat, Prey. Love)

Panic had broken out around her. All the forest animals were aware of the near miss the woodchuck had during the last eclipse and were terrified of not being able to watch for predators. Most had never even realized there were things happening in the skies above them—the only time they looked up was for hawks. Now everyone was suddenly Chicken Little when it came to the sky.

“The birds knew and they didn’t warn us!” screamed the field mice. “It’s a conspiracy!”

“The crickets are in on it, too!” wailed a hedgehog. “How did they know to start chirping? Did they have access to an app that’s only on Android?”

A groundhog, manically running in a circle with his eyes closed, tripped over a root and tore his ACL. He lay on the ground moaning, clutching his wounded limb and making such a racket that it caught the attention of a turkey vulture flying by. This was exactly the kind of eclipse content the bird was hoping for.

The woodchuck was stunned to see the entire meadow and forest had erupted into chaos. Scientists had predicted some animal behaviors might be odd during the eclipse, but not this level of weird. She was horrified to see one of her cousins lying prostrate on the grass, his naked belly exposed to the sky as he screamed incoherently about the end being near. The buzzard certainly seemed to agree with him.

It occurred to the woodchuck that some of the animals might be blaming her for this, which was, of course, ridiculous. All she had done was pretend to be blind for several years to get people to pamper her and bring treats; she never said anything about writhing around on the ground in plain sight of a very large bird with talons and a beak.

Oh. Well, perhaps they had a point.

The woodchuck ducked back into her burrow, uncertain of what to do about the carnage that was about to erupt. Shirley was fully awake now and could hear the screaming above ground. “Do something!” she shouted. “You’re the only one they will listen to!”

The woodchuck did not believe this was necessarily true, but her only other option was going deeper into the burrow and hiding in a tunnel. She glanced wildly around the cozy dark room, trying to think of what to do, when her eyes fell upon a metallic cold food shopping bag she had saved from her last trip to Costco. 

“Shirley!” she screamed. “Help me tear this into strips!” The two woodchucks ripped the silver fabric into long pieces as fast as possible, and she scrambled up the tunnel gripping as many as her tiny arms could hold. 

She paused at top of the hole. Outside there was terror and screaming and possible disembowelment; fellow groundhogs who hated her and felt she was responsible for the carnage that was about to happen. It would be so much easier to duck back inside and hide.

She flashed back on the last eclipse and the power she had felt course through her body just before her retinas started smoking. Maybe there was just a little bit of Captain Marvel still in her.

She dashed out of the hole and threw herself on top of her writhing cousin, flipping him several times until he fell into a nearby burrow. The turkey vulture was in a dive straight for the entrails but had to pull up before it hit the ground, zooming back into the air before readying another approach. This time it was going for her.

“Tie these around your eyes!” she screamed at the other animals, tossing the foil strips in the air. “You won’t go blind!” She threw the last ones at the other woodchucks just as the vulture snatched her by the nape of her neck and lifted her in the air. Shirley seized her foot and went airborne herself. One by one, all the now blindfolded rodents grabbed onto to each other and formed a furry chain that tethered them to ground; it stretched into the sky at least fifteen woodchucks high. 

The turkey vulture gave up, as the groundhogs were all pretty chunky and probably kind of grisly. The chain plummeted to the ground, with the woodchuck hitting last with a wince-inducing smash.

She awoke to a cold compress of soothing leaves on her forehead and a crowd of doting animals trying to anticipate her every need, bringing her insects and delicious berries. It was just like the last eclipse, only this time she could see their grateful faces beaming at her. She was their hero, but now she deserved it. She would be as humble as long she possibly could, or at least until they stopped waiting on her.

She picked up a fresh cicada someone offered her and bit into it, the crunchy filling delighting her senses. There were two or three on the bark platter, and she popped them into her mouth as well. Were they early this year? It seemed too soon for cicadas.

The woodchuck sighed and relaxed. Spring was here, and it was calm, and quiet. She hoped there wouldn’t be any more extraordinary natural phenomena to worry about this year.

Part Two: The Dark Side of the Moon

She wasn’t really blind, of course. A slight singeing and some minimal scarring occurred in her beady black pupils, but that faded quickly. Shirley came every day and bathed her eyes with the juice of assorted berries, which turned them blue for a while. She thought it looked striking but her cousin sniffed and said it reminded her of one of those pale-eyed husky wolves.

More surprising was the outpouring of concern among the forest creatures. A steady stream of delicious leaves and bugs were left outside her burrow so she wouldn’t exhaust herself hunting for food. Get Well Soon! messages scratched into bark were dropped into her hole and she amused herself by sorting them into a scrapbook with the sincerest words at the front. The woodchuck beamed as concerned rodents came from all over the forest to check on her. She had never felt so beloved.

One day while she was out healing in the sun, she accidentally reached out with a lighting fast reflex and caught a grasshopper. It became obvious that she wasn’t sight-impaired and no longer need help. The attention stopped. The other animals had their own checklists to accomplish before winter set in, such as bulking up for hibernation and not getting eaten by hawks.

The woodchuck was not ready to let go of the scam. There is an old saying in the forest: once a narcissus, always a narcissus (animals have far more old sayings than most humans realize). Someone had whittled a long white stick that was the perfect height to use as a cane, so she perched the wire-rimmed sunglasses the guilty marmoset had left for her on the tip of her nose and felt her way around the forest. She knew she looked regal as she worked her way around, waving and tapping, until she realized it also alerted hawks to her presence. 

The whole thing became considerably less entertaining when someone dropped a flyer down her burrow. It was a picture of the current weasel in charge in 2017, the one who liked to wear a severed fox tail on his head; he was staring up at the sun and pointing. Someone had scrawled moron across the picture. They were laughing at her.

She became reclusive and angry. The woodchuck had never been a particularly social animal but now she shunned the other creatures. She showed up late to work, bit the Mayor of Punxsutawney and lost her job as the weather groundhog. She said hateful things about the beavers, about grabbing them whenever she wanted and laughing at how she could do whatever she wanted because she was famous. She meant it ironically because her fame had become an albatross around her neck, but the beavers were still hurt by the comment. The woodchuck also wished she could get that damn bird to leave her alone. 

Even Shirley, her most faithful and loyal cousin, had had enough. “So you made a mistake,” she said, “it was an extraordinary natural phenomena and none of us were ready. The eclipse glasses hadn’t come in yet and how were we to know how stupid it was to stare?” Shirley did not add that she knew enough not to but had enough sense not to mention it.

Cancel culture was real. Humiliated, she stayed in her burrow as much as possible and spent her days watching reality television on her phone. Love is Blind was her favorite. She began grinding her teeth at night, although that proved to be a good thing because it kept her incisors from growing through the roof of her mouth.

Hibernation came as a relief, because for six blissful months she could tune out the rest of the cruel forest and simply dream about being pursued by marmots and not think about the state of the world. As time passed, the weasel with the orange fox tail on his head was inexplicably still around, and she couldn’t help but feel this was all his fault. Perhaps if she had had better guidance, she wouldn’t have stared at the stupid sun. (She also had nightmare about the Love is Blind reunion and woke up in the middle of February wondering why they hadn’t spent more time talking to Chelsea, but was eventually able to fall back asleep.)

Seven years had gone by, a very long time in the short span of a groundhog’s life. And now here she was again, unprepared, with the sky flipping the script and the weird half-moon shadows flickering over the grass. She recalled what Shirley used to say to her: “Those who cannot not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” which was a pretty compelling statement for a groundhog. Actually, it might have been a lyric from a Carlos Santana song, but that wasn’t the point.

What mattered is that she alone had the power to take back her life—only she could change the course of her own history.

She grabbed her tiny sunglasses and turned to face the dark.

Coming soon: A Total Eclipse of the Heart

Part One: Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

The woodchuck startled awake, sitting up so quickly in her burrow that she banged her head on the dirt ceiling of her sleeping chamber. It was pitch black inside and she was disoriented and dizzy—but this wasn’t like normally waking from hibernation and waiting for your eyes to adjust; something about this felt sinister. She heard a voice whisper the darkness is coming. 

“Shirley, what did you say?” Her cousin, who had slept over during hibernation, groaned and rolled over on her side. “Go back to sleep,” she mumbled. “It’s too early to get up. It’s only April.”

Ignoring her cousin, the woodchuck poked her head out of her hole and did a slow 360 degree turn around the meadow. The sky was still black and across the horizon the light was beginning to dawn, but on the other side, the sun was setting. How could that be? She thought she heard the rumbling bass of Johnny Cash singing about going down, down, down. Something was wrong. Something was happening.

The insects had gone silent. Even the birds were still, as if it were the middle of their sleep cycle. Tiny half moon shadows danced across the grass.

She reached for the dark glasses that were usually perched on her tiny forehead, but they were not there. It made her uneasy to not have them on, because you just never knew when you were going to be caught outside with proper eye protection and . . .

“Oh my God!” she screamed. “It’s another fucking eclipse!”

Seven years earlier: August 21, 2017

The woodchuck scampered playfully toward her burrow but paused to hide behind a huge catalpa leaf, looking back coquettishly to see if the large marmot was still ­­following her. Most of her hind quarters were sticking out on either side of the leaf. Mating season was over, but you couldn’t blame a girl for flirting. 

The marmot must have lost interest, for he stood frozen, staring at the ground. Tiny half moon shadows were dancing across the dry grass and the normal chatter of the birds had ceased. The silence was eerie and the woodchuck shivered slightly, wondering what had happened to the blistering hot day that she had been sweating through just moments ago. Why was it getting darker? Hadn’t she just eaten lunch?

Her would-be suitor the marmot began running toward her, glancing in terror at the sky. He grabbed her and shouted, “Look away! Look away! It’s the Rapture!” as he dashed off and dove into a burrow.

The woodchuck had hoped that was going to be her line but apparently not. 

Suddenly, every cricket in the forest launched into a cacophony of chirping like someone had flipped on a switch. What was wrong with these stupid insects? They weren’t supposed to start that infernal noise until after dark.

Except that it was. It shouldn’t be, but it was. 

She glanced up at the sky just in time to see a black disk slip in front of the fiery sun. A golden orange ring surrounded the circle with flame-like spikes pointing in every direction. All the other creatures had vanished down holes or were hiding in trees. She thought she heard the opening notes of Also Sprach Zarathustra off in the distant forest, or maybe it was Johnny Cash? She was alone in the meadow, transfixed by the movement in the sky, suddenly wondering if she was about to become imbued with super powers by the glowing orb that had been overcome by a simple circle. What could this mean? Was she about to become Captain Marvel? 

As she stared at the black hole that had swallowed the sun, a brilliant point of light appeared on one side. She squinted a bit but was hypnotized by the sight and could not tear her eyes away as the inky sphere moved diagonally and the searing light of the sun burned away the dark orb. 

Shirley was shouting at her, something about stop staring at it! and are you a complete moron? But if she was going to become the next Marvel hero, she didn’t want to miss a moment of it. 

Suddenly the day became normal again. The heat returned and the crickets shut up, embarrassed they had been fooled by something as basic as a celestial event. Shirley dragged the woodchuck into her burrow and started screeching at her about crispy retinas, which the woodchuck thought sounded delicious until she realized what it meant. 

She spent most of that fall and hibernation hiding in her burrow, rubbing a salve of crushed fireflies and tree sap into her sore eyes that did not seem to help much but gave her an eerie glow. A tiny pair of round sunglasses were left at the opening of her burrow, a gift from the guilt-stricken marmot who had apparently confused the Rapture with an eclipse.

From that day forward, she would be known across the meadow as the Blind Woodchuck. 

Coming soon: Part Two: The Dark Side of the Moon

Part One: Barbie was Right*

Planning for the eclipse weekend had started almost a year ago. My oldest sister Kathy was the first to alert us all to the importance of the event, and months ago discovered that many houses and camping sites in the Path of Totality had already been booked. But my youngest sister Karen was persistant enough to find a huge log cabin-ish farmhouse in southern Indiana that would sleep the entire family. While not directly in the Path, it was close enough that we could get there before the eclipse.

(As is fitting for her profession as a psychiatrist, Karen is pragmatic and practical. But as a sign of her committment to this event, she had dressed the statue in her front yard as an eclipse enthusiast. Karen calls the figurine Georgeanne and she has an outfit for every holiday. I warn my sister that this is one step away from decorating a concrete goose and I mock her accordingly, but damn, the old girl looked good.)

geaorgeanne

So we gathered on the Friday before the event at the Wise Old Owl cottage, where every surface was decorated with either an owl or a moose, but sadly, no woodchucks. My other sister Carolyn and I were the last to arrive from Chicago, as we had been led down the wrong road by an arrogant, disembodied voice from Google maps. In my phone, the voice is known as Joyce, and she insisted we turn at a place we had no business turning. We had been warned that cell service could be spotty and had printed out two different sets of directions, neither of which matched the way Joyce urged us to go: yet still we followed her instructions rather than our own instincts. She gayly led us down winding, unmarked roads and then abandoned us in a field. I believe this was a test by the robot overlords to see if people would blindly follow the voices coming from their phones and may be the precursor to the robot uprising, as we did exactly what we were told and then pleaded for Joyce to come and save us. When they instruct us all to drive our cars into quarries, we will  join all the other lemmings at the bottom, holding up our iphones and searching for bars.

Eventually we came upon two gentlemen and a chihuahua sitting on a front porch and they gave us directions back to the main road in a bemused tone, as if we were not the first fools that the voices had led down their road. The chihuahua, however, was furious and had to be restrained, no doubt angered by the clear and present danger that no one except him seemed to understand. It was a weird beginning to the trip.

The house was huge and supposedly slept 20, if your idea of sleeping is two bedrooms on the top floors and then sixteen assorted bunk beds, double beds and pull out couches in one big basement room. It was very cozy down there with all the nieces and nephews and aunts and owls and squirrels. It was also very cold and completely dark, or as I call it, perfect vacation sleeping weather, with none of that pesky natural light to wake you up. I felt like Kevin in Home Alone when I woke up in the dark silence and realized that I had no idea where my family had gone.

The next two days were a whirl of activities, with some people participating in everything and some not moving from the porch swing. I like a vacation where no one judges you for inertia. There were fabulous meals and many bottles of wine, and games and a fire pit and a funtoon boat with a slide, but always lurking in the back of our minds was the event on Monday. We became obsessed with finding gas, stopping at every tiny station to top off a tank in a car that had only driven 2 miles since the last time it was filled. We worried that there would not be enough ice for the coolers and ended up with enough to fill the back of a station wagon. One of my favorite finds out in the middle of nowhere was an ice ATM. You fed two bucks into the slot and it dispensed 16 pounds of ice, no clerks needed. You could even get it unbagged and let it flow right into a cooler. Clearly this is once again the robots looking to catch us off guard as we complacently let them control the flow of cubes, but I’m willing to let them have this one. You can just never have enough ice.

Sunday was our last evening at the house, and after another amazing meal with lots of wine to wash it down, the core four sisters sat down to try to figure out who owed what. We are all smart women; some of us hold advanced degrees and at the very least, all of us can use a calculator. So we were amazed and chagrined when the simple task of dividing up costs turned into an SAT math problem, one that assured that none of us were getting into college, not even a community one. For over an hour, we subtracted and divided and swore and multiplied and could not come up with the correct sum. A spread sheet was created and abandoned, amounts were rounded up and down and the final amount owed was furiously scratched out in order to begin again. One by one, the grown nieces and nephews left the room, completely embarrassed by their algebraically impaired mothers. At one point, my brother-in-law begged to let him eat the cost of the whole trip, just to get us to stop. I’m still not sure the number we came up with was correct, but it was such a relief to move on that I don’t even care. There is no place for math on a vacation, especially when combined with a nice red.

*Math is Hard.

Next: Part Two: Hopkinsville

Burn, Baby, Burn

catsin3D

Countless articles are warning that you will need special glasses if you plan on looking at the eclipse. Make sure you get the right kind —shameless grifters are apparently repurposing old 3D glasses and trying to pass them off as NASA approved, so be suspicious if yours have a Captain America logo on the side. I found a pair at a local hardware store for under two bucks and was surprised at how flimsy they are. For all the worry about blind woodchucks, I was expecting something a bit more substantial.

Some procedural questions for those of us who already wear glasses: do you duct tape the cardboard ones over your existing specs or shove them underneath? What if you have bifocals? Can I get these in my prescription? Are the disposables biodegradable or will they still be in landfills by the time we go through this again in 2024? Can I get the eclipse pair in those really thick, dark frames that all the hipsters are wearing?

Not peeking may be the safest option, but you can’t hear all the hype about this event and then elect to just stare at your shoes while it is happening. Looking at your feet should at least remind you to make the classic Pinhole Shoebox experiment. This diagram shows how to construct this project. It works exactly as described but should come with a warning— opinions may vary on its effectiveness.

Pinhole Shoebox

The last eclipse that was visible from the midwest area of the U.S. was in 1994. Chicago wasn’t anywhere near the path of totality so there wasn’t quite the amount of coverage there is now, but it was still in the news. I had been talking it up to my kids (who were nine and four at the time) and perhaps raising expectations for this great event in the sky just a tad more than I should have. Since I was all about Safety First and crafty as hell to boot, we constructed the Pinhole Shoebox as a family project. It was very low-tech but I assured them it was going to work perfectly. They seemed doubtful.

The afternoon of the eclipse found us out on the playground of the elementary school with kids milling about waiting for something momentous to happen. As the time approached, the light started to vaguely dim but it wasn’t as if total darkness fell. It just seemed cloudy. I had the shoebox positioned correctly to catch the light and as the moon moved in front of the sun, a perfect crescent shadow slowly advanced over the white circle that was the sun projected at the back of the box. It looked exactly as Carl Sagan had promised!

The problem with this whole experiment is that it happens inside of a shoebox and the image is about the size of a pencil eraser. You could call it anticlimactic. Others might use the words profoundly underwhelming.

Excitedly I called the kids over to show them that it had worked and they looked baffled. They had imagined something like the stream of light hitting the crystal staff and sending a laser beam through the darkness of the pyramid tomb in Raiders of the Lost Ark. What they got was their mother with her head in a shoebox acting like she had discovered something about the sun that Galileo might have missed. As I handed the box to my daughter so that she, too, could marvel at this astronomical event, I caught the look on her face. It was the dawning realization that this was to be the first of many moments when her up-to-that-point cool mom was actual going to turn out to be the embarrassment of her life. She’d heard about this in the girl’s bathroom but hadn’t expected it to happen this soon. And why was the waist of her jeans so high?!?

Shortly after this, she refused to be picked up from school in the battered old Chevy Chevette I was driving at the time. My advice is don’t try the shoebox experiment with anyone over the age of eight. You’re setting yourself up for humiliation. It’s going to happen eventually, but why add fuel to the fire? And for God’s sake, stop wearing those mom jeans.

Fun fact: Galileo was completely blind by the age of 74. Coincidence? I think not. 

Animal Crackers

An interesting factoid about the solar eclipse is how it will affect the behavior of animals. Clearly the woodchuck* may be regretting some of his decisions, but how will his furry friends react to this natural phenomenon? According to the internet, not well.

“Researchers of the Zoological Survey of India studied rock bees during an eclipse, finding that the number of them leaving and returning to their hive every minute increased dramatically during a partial solar eclipse. These social bees are known for their aggressive defense strategies and vicious behavior when disturbed. As the sun dipped behind the moon, more than 150 bees buzzed about, when normally only a few would move away from the hive. Said the researcher, “It would appear that during the partial solar eclipse, the rock bees became distinctly restless and more active.” 

Distinctly restless and more active is not how I want my bees to behave, and that was just during a partial eclipse. They are going to totally freak during a total one. It also appears that the colonial orb-weaving spiders of Mexico will have no idea what to do with themselves, as they start ripping apart their webs when the day goes completely dark, then reconstructing them when the light returns. Even the hippos are going to need Xanax:

“Hippos on a sandbar in the Zambezi River began entering the water as the eclipse set in — possibly mistaking it for the onset of evening, when the animals typically leave their resting places and traverse the bottom of the river. Sunlight returned before any of the herd had reached the riverbanks, and the study reported an apparent sense of confusion, even apprehension among the animals. They continued in this state, seemingly, for the rest of the day.”

So now we’ve got angry bees, confused spiders and apprehensive hippos all running around, as well as an extra million cars on the roads trying to get to the Path. And apparently ground squirrels go completely nuts as well, as the length of their “non-stop running sessions were much greater than normal during and for two hours after the eclipse.” This should make for some interesting roadkill. Between the angry bees and the manic squirrels, I may not even get out of the car.

Oh, sure, you say, it’s just a squirrel. They are small and cute and can be beaten to death with a shovel if necessary. But have scientists considered how this lunar event is going to affect werewolves? The moon will be full as the shadow passes in front of the sun, even though it’s the middle of the day. If this is messing with the hippo’s heads, what will it do to werewolves? Once again, I turned to the internet for expert advice:

“A lunar eclipse during a full moon will cause a werewolf to de-transform from their monstrous hairy wolf form during the eclipse. Yet they will maintain their mindless violent werewolf rage while in human form and will totally lose all sense of humanity, causing them to go on a serial killing spree of anything that crosses their path.”

And I was worried there wasn’t going to be any cell phone service.

************

*There was some chatter on Facebook about the fact that a woodchuck and a groundhog are the same thing. While that may be factually correct, please be assured that nothing on this blog can be assumed to be true as my main research tool is werewolves.com. But it would explain the nightmare that I had where I kept thinking I had written a new post, only to wake up each day and find it was the same one over and over.

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck stared directly into a solar eclipse?

woodchuck_eclipsebehind it

I think the answer is obvious. The first rule about watching the solar eclipse is don’t watch the solar eclipse. Foolish woodchucks who don’t wear their special glasses during this event will find themselves scorned and mocked by the other rodents. They can be very mean.

I hope the rest of the woodchucks have already ordered their glasses from NASA, because on August 21, 2017, North America will be able to experience its first solar eclipse in almost a century. For a total of 2 minutes and 41 seconds, the moon will move in front of the sun, blocking the light and warmth of the star we depend upon for our very survival. It’s a preview of what life will be like if Donald Trump stays in office much longer.

A total eclipse is said to be an awe-inspiring moment.  The light dims and goes flat, the temperature suddenly chills, birds and animals go silent (except for my cats, who will assume it’s time to eat since it will be dark). Woodchucks will make bad choices.

Most of the U.S. will be able to see at least a partial eclipse (or as Congress calls it, “a skinny eclipse”), but to get the whole experience of Black is the New Orange, you will need to be in the Path of Totality. The Path is not some flower-laden trail of dirt that little girls skip along; it is a wide arc of the sightline that swoops across the country, suddenly throwing tiny little midwestern towns into the spotlight simply because of where they are geographically located.

One of these towns is Hopkinsville, KY, population 31,000. That’s for today. On August 21, it is expected to be more like 150,000; or rather, 150,011, as my entire family and I will be there, too.

The Blind Woodchuck, besides being a cautionary tale, is also your guide to All Things Eclipse. Check back frequently for a first person narrative of how to prepare for this great event, and moment to moment observations about whether thousands of people standing together in a field staring up at the sun will simultaneously burn their retinas to a crisp. We can all learn from the woodchuck.