gorfscapes

[gorfscapes]

Eclipse 2017, Ankeny Wildlife Refuge, Oregon

We idled in our truck past a field of hay, flattened under a bare and yawning sky, the hay all glossy from months without rain and rolling hills all around. Trashed campers and trucks and toy-sized electric cars were parked in every ditch and in the cut hay and people crossed the road haphazardly and sundazed, but it still seemed spacious, empty. It was like a crowd gathering for some peaceful music festival where there was no authority and the audience was trusted to govern themselves and the admission was free and the music was silence. We parked in a patch of thorny blackberry brambles down the road from the field and walked the half mile back under vibrating heat.

People dawdled all around in camo and tie dye alike, directionless, carrying camp chairs, wearing large practical hats and fanny packs, everyone either holding or wearing blunt paper sunglasses that looked like something from a future that never happened or a history remembered wrong, a collective dream that seemed convincing and could pass for a memory, some alternate Earth timeline that could have been or was meant to be or was imagined to be and never executed. They sat and pondered the sky expectantly, as if waiting for a sign from God, only visible thanks to the fairground science of the tinted lens that allowed one to peer into His dimension, or for the fickle oracle delivering her prophecy on the hillside or for the start of a film after a long commercial, projected onto the sky in a selected frequency of light. Drones hovered around the farmland, spinning slowly in place and blinking lights or tearing off suddenly toward a cluster of tents with strapping and confident young college men and patriarchs of Indian families wielding the controls toward the sky and smiling. The discord of drone motors lay weirdly and uncomfortable under the pastoral vista.

We laid out a blanket somewhere near no one and waited for the eclipse. I put on my glasses and saw that it had already started. A small perfectly round bite had been taken out of the orb of the sun. Through the lens, the normally impossible and mercurial shape of the sun was condensed into an abstracted neon disc, a rusty orange color, as if rendered by backlight on a laser-stained antique arcade screen. The way it looked, the lenses could have been a simple crescent shaped die-cut and the true world beyond, visible through the masking, could have simply been made of perfectly uniform orange pigment. It was hypnotic and difficult to look away. The imperceptible change of shape and movement of the moon was maddening through the lens, but it was surely happening. I had a sense of cosmic frustration at my primate mind's failure to behold something outside of my familiar time scale, and a primal defiant urge to keep the glasses on and focus; as if to prove to the cosmos that I could transcend my small human reality, or as if to catch the moon and sun in their sneaky dancing, to show that it wouldn't go unnoticed by us.

In the field, nothing happened for a long time. A matte black hot air balloon rose from over a distant hill and drifted across the naked sky, slow as the moon, like a weird omen. People scattered sparsely across the field, snacking or chatting, giddy and lazy. A family perched around an enormous telescope and spoke in Korean. Dogs peed and yapped. Pilots tested maneuvers on their drones or showed off for their friends.

Amy and I wandered to a grove of trees to pee. I noticed that my shadow across the hay was fuzzy and made of tiny crescent shapes. We took a photo of that. As we walked back, a cold wind came howling across the field and we saw that the light all around had become desaturated and dim and greyish and unreal. I checked the sun again through my glasses and it had shrunk to a tiny sliver of a crescent. We ran back to our blanket where my dad sat relaxing with his dog and his supplies, watching the moon.

The light had become even greyer and duller and more dreamlike as we ran. It had become like a cheap old film where a night scene is simulated by filtering footage of a daylight shot. It was strange to suddenly occupy the surreal sham world of a nighttime film scene, something that had always been fictional in my mind; as if I were now the resident of a fictional world. We sat and waited in the cold wind and the weird light, wondering if this was it, if this strange effect was all there was to see. We could've been satisfied if that were true. I kept checking the shrinking sun through my glasses. Suddenly, the familiar glare of the sun was snuffed out as the last sliver of light disappeared behind the colossal black stone that was the moon. A sudden roar went up as every person in the field gasped or shouted or cheered and clapped and a smiling drone pilot sent his blinking craft whirring inches from our view of the moon. The sky went a deep blue-black and stars appeared. On the horizon, it looked like there were many sunsets happening on all sides; in every direction, the sky faded around it's edges from void blue at the top down through a rainbow of warm hues until it touched the glowing orange edge of the Earth. And the moon was a stark and empty negative disc, like a hallucination, like the mouth of a black hole, yawning over the Earth, ready to swallow us, all gathered around to watch. And from the edge of that round void it spewed an undulating frosty white smoke, the tattered beard of a god, the mane of a cosmic ancient, a hazy and ghostly veil of divinity hatched from stardust.

For two minutes, all of us in that field were united in awe and vulnerability and absolute euphoric attention. And the past and the future all collapsed, the ancient and the fleeting, the divine and the mundane, the primitive and the epic and the cosmic all collided. The sprawling and terrible scale of the universe folded for a moment into a narrow something, a completely unfamiliar shape, some origami tesseract, that we on the ground could just begin to perceive the edge of, to glimpse a wisp of the infinite, so briefly that we couldn't quite be sure that it had really happened, that we hadn't imagined it, that it hadn't been a dream or a mass hallucination or some mis-remembered fictional history that we had all begun to believe.