I marked April 8, 2024 on my calendar way back in August of 2017. I’m not normally a girl with a ten-year plan, but after my friend Karen and I saw shadows like bitten cookies through her sister’s colander on August 21, I too was bitten. My sister and I were comparing notes on that year’s eclipse and both confessed we needed to experience the total event before we died. I checked NASA’s website and was delighted to learn the next total solar eclipse would be perfectly visible from my summer cottage dock!
In the years between, every so often I would search my calendar dates and check or recheck when this event was to occur. The idea crystallized about six months ago. I might actually get to mark this item off my bucket list. And here I am, in Lake George, collecting my husband from work and heading up the Northway on the long-awaited April 8, 2024.
I neurotically check the weather app again to see a cloud icon next to the Owl’s Head, NY forecast for the day. Are we making the right choice to drive another hour-and-a-half north to be in that swatch of black marked as the path of totality? Plenty of people are perfectly happy right here in Bolton Landing, and Dan’s boss invited us to hang on his dock for their viewing party. Lake George is bursting with tourists who would never have ventured to town during a normal mud season. What if we get stuck in traffic, or the weather is worse up at our camp, and we don’t get to see it at all?
Traffic on 87 is not too bad. We pull off at exit 30 and see our first police officer of the day. He’s shooing motorists who tried to park along a curb where a hot dog vendor usually sets up. I guess they are serious about all that “no parking along the road” stuff they’ve been blaring at us from portable light-up signs. As we climb into the High Peaks, we see more and more parking areas with “Eclipse 2024” advertised. Even so, the shoulders near trailheads are full of cars. I guess folks don’t care about the threat of being towed.
The quiet little Stewart’s c-store in Keane, where we sometimes stop, is swarming with eclipsers lined out the door for the toilets, some of whom brave the porta-potties outside. It’s not yet ten o’clock, but as we drive into Lake Placid, the Horse Show Grounds are quickly filling up with spectators. When we stop at the deli to grab sandwiches for later, the cashier tells the local in line ahead of me, “I can’t believe you left the house and braved the roads today.” It’s a good five hours before the eclipse begins, but that makes me anxious to get into my place!
We pass through Saranac Lake and see similar sights of people setting up chairs and cameras at lakeside vantage points, but on the other side of town the crowd thins out; few cars are heading north from there. As we gradually drive farther from civilization, where I usually sweep the forest for shadows shaped like moose or bears, I’m scanning the skies and fretting about the cirrostratus clouds that might come between me and the long-awaited 3 minutes of totality.
Carly Simon keeps me mental company. I wonder if Warren Beatty really did fly his Leer Jet up to Nova Scotia in 1972. All I remember about that eclipse was trying to figure out what I was looking for through the DIY viewer I made with the other eight-year-olds in my Brownie troop. I didn’t see anything through that little hole.
I’m much better equipped this time around. I’ve got a pack of eclipse glasses and a little filter for my iPhone. Hopefully the lyric “where you should be all the time,” will apply to me this once.
The dogs in the back seat know they are getting close to camp when we pull onto Wolf Pond Road and start voicing their readiness to chase ducks. Its barely noon. I can finally relax, eat my sandwich, and stretch my legs after the rush to get here. I’ve plenty of time to spare. Dan and I set up our viewing station with folding chairs on our neighbor’s dock and walk the dogs. I even read on the couch and close my eyes for a few minutes. (They pop back open with the panicked thought of sleeping through the eclipse after all this effort to be here.)
At three, we leave our pups inside and take our places facing the sun. We’ve been wondering how she will look through these mirrored black spectacles that block all attempts at vision. I don my paper glasses and lift my face skyward. “Oh my gosh! Look at that.” Already a curve of light in the bottom right quadrant is missing. I can barely stop looking to play with the camera filter and attempt to capture her.
For twenty minutes my husband and I soak in the empty quiet of sky and lake. Slowly the void of light grows and expands until only a sliver of our star remains visible. We discuss the very slight changes we notice in the colors, but it still seems plenty light out. I’m slouching in my chair, back of head resting comfortably, watching the crescent of sun shrink until only a shaving of fingernail remains—then sudden blackness—no fingernail. I hear hollers and whoops piercing the quiet up and down the lake. I rip off my glasses and gaze upward. The breathtaking circle of glow in a twilit sky emboldens me to look carefully. I feel like Moses, hidden in a cleft, given a glance of God’s back. This is the most I can be allowed without being destroyed. And even this glimpse of glory overwhelms me.
