An eclipse is the experience of time passing. You wait for it to happen — there’s nothing you can do to hurry it up, or slow it down — and then it finally happens, and you sit with it in the dark until enough time passes that the light returns.
I took the train to Southern Illinois last weekend to experience totality. Paul had gone down two days earlier to snag a campsite in Shawnee National Forest, and it’s a good thing he did because the campground was full by Saturday morning. The Sunday train — the Eclipse Train — was similarly full, and vibrating with eclipse energy. The young person sitting behind me kept his seatmate entertained with a steady stream of eclipse facts for the full five-hour journey. A woman with tidy braids and sturdy boots across the aisle peered at her guidebook, or out the window, with equal intensity, shifting restlessly in her seat. Down by the snack bar, a wild-eyed man perched shoeless on the luggage rack, chatting up passengers as they passed by in search of coffee, a cookie, a beer.
Up in the forest, the rangers had set a pop-up tent at the entrance to the Red Bud Campground, offering handouts on eclipse viewing and directions to eclipse-only overflow camping at a nearby airfield. But some folks, denied a site, simply pulled into the parking lot or onto the shoulder of the road and slept in their cars, their headlamps flickering like fireflies in the darkened vehicles. By late morning they were gone, in search of something better.
In the morning a fine mist clung to the tops of the pines; spiders had draped their webs over the be-needled ground. A young mother at the campsite beside us kept track of four little girls under ten — lighting a fire, setting up hammocks, making breakfast, digging pots and bowls and sweaters and hats and bug spray out of an oversized Rubbermaid bin. At the water pump, a camper cast anxious eyes to the sky. “Hope it burns off by noon!” A ways away three young women practiced morning yoga on mats unfurled alongside their tent. In an adjacent site a man in garishly patterned leggings ran through his own stretches, and watched.
By 10 am the fog was clearing; cameras were being unpacked, and children and birds combined their trills in a chorus of collective vibration. Around us people packed up their cars — the mom, the yogis, the watcher all bugging out for viewing spots unknown. But I just lay on the bench of the picnic table and felt the sun warm my face, oblivious to its sudden celebrity. How far away was the moon? Did the sun know it was about to be occluded? Did the pair know they were for the day, the main characters in every camper’s story?
Around noon Paul and I packed up camp chairs and cameras and eclipse glasses and water and snacks and hiked down a trail from the rim of the canyon, picking our way carefully over rocks slick with rain. “Remember when I had a broken foot?” I called out, and we repeated our outdoor mantra: “No trips to the emergency room.”
We passed glades of young pines, and shiny clusters of may apples popping their umbrellas up through the duff of the forest floor. We marked the calls of chipping sparrows and red-bellied woodpeckers and tufted titmice. During his trip to Shawnee for the 2017 eclipse, Paul said, when all the other animals fell silent a lone titmouse kept up its song, undeterred by the dark.
We stopped at a smooth clearing a mile down the path. High above, the moon was starting to edge across the face of the sun; on the ground the shadows of the trees began to shift and diffuse, Paul set up a camera, cardboard solar filter precariously perched on the lens, and set the timer to snap a stop-motion image.
Tick. Tick. Tick — the shutter counted off the seconds, as constant as the creek below.
People passing on the trail at our backs called out “hello” and “happy eclipse” but for the most part we were alone, our eclipse experience shared by our community of two. We ate trail mix. Paul showed me how, if you make a tiny enough aperture in the circle of thumb and forefinger, you can see the shadow of the moon.
Even at 3/4 eclipsed, the world is so bright.
Six minutes from totality things started to get weird. The light turned grey, the shadows on the ground became fringed; the air cooled, but the birds continued to sing, and then suddenly it was dark, just a ring of fire around a center of endless black.
It lasted four minutes, but it felt like one, and was an eternity, like it could easily just stay dark forever.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
When the light came back it came back fast, and as the moon passed off the blazing star the quality of the returned light felt cooler, crisper, strange. The crows, until then subdued, had a collective freak out, ca-cawing at the second dawn.
We sat and watched, and listened until at thirteen minutes past totality a new silence: the HD card on the camera was full. Artificial time stopped, but the moon continued its orbit past the sun.
I imagine waiting for the eclipse to be something like waiting to give birth: time slowly ticking by, expectations ever-adjusted, plans being made. I imagine because I’ve never given birth. But, closer to home, it’s perhaps akin to waiting for your one-year scans, though with a blurrier understanding of outcomes. Mine are coming up in a few weeks, aligned with the first anniversary of the end of active cancer treatment. I don’t think I realized how tightly I was holding that eventuality — the mammogram and ultrasound on the calendar, drawing nearer, tick tick tick — until about a week after the eclipse.
Some days after we returned to Chicago, after we’d bathed and done the laundry and dried out the tent, I noticed a strange small growth in my armpit. A skin tag, it appeared. What the fuck? What now? It had come out of nowhere. I pondered it for a few days, and finally decided I should get it checked out, but I didn’t show it to Paul because I didn’t want him to worry and I didn’t want him to think I was being paranoid. It probably was fine; it probably wasn’t, like, skin cancer — right?
But I did mention it to my family, and at the urging of my sister sent a photo of the growth to my brother-in-law, the dermatologist: “This isn’t something I should be worried about, right?” But even after he sent me back an enlarged photo of the growth — saying, “Does this answer your question?” — I still didn’t get it. I didn’t get it until my sister called and said the word out loud.
“It’s a TICK.”
A tick. Like the several we had already captured and destroyed at the campground days before. I had been so bound up in my own projections of what might happen next to my body as I wait for the days to pass, inexorably, one second at a time, that I had missed Occam’s Razor burrowed into to my armpit — as obvious as it would have been to Paul, to my brother in law, or anyone else. As a friend well versed in the psychology of medical trauma put it, “This is your reality now, you just have to figure out how to manage it.”
In this case, it’s managed — though it did involve yet another trip to urgent care. But I’m newly reminded that the sweeping arc of illness never truly ends, it just flexes and bends, like the shadows, with the days.
Tick tick tick.
What Rick said. Plus: Your Substack is among fifteen or so I get, maybe a few more, and they're all by writers and yours is the most consistently well-written--not just typed but edited,, honed, listened to, etc. Please don't tell me you just wing it off the top of the head--I'd find that terribly depressing. There is, as well, the wonderful sandbagging of the reader, vis-a-vis "tick." It's a good example, in miniature, of how book titles sometimes sandbag us--for instance, when way deep into the novel you realize that Sophie does, in fact, have to make a choice.
Does one say, "Hang in there!" to an aerialist?
Hang in there!
After reading "Tick Tick Tick" I find myself, unexpectedly, laughing at the weirdness of eclipses and the fact that crows are upset at having two mornings on the same day (which I think is very sensible of them) and the things we see yet don't see. I suppose my laughter was relief and joy. Thanks for taking me along on this adventure.