I was not yet in the double digits when I experienced my first full solar eclipse. It was a Saturday in March 1970. I was at my girlfriend’s house in central Pennsylvania, waiting and watching with her and her mother, Gloria. Gloria was the worrying kind, anxious about everything — toilet seat germs, lecherous old men and of course, on that day, that we might be blinded by the sun. As I recall, we were equipped with some sort of homemade pinhole viewing device, but even with that, Gloria urged us to stay inside. Less a cause for celebration, it felt more like the potential ending of the world. I wasn’t so sure I liked this idea of night when it was supposed to be day.
Nine years later, another full solar eclipse occurred, this one visible in the U.S. primarily in the Pacific Northwest and parts of the Rockies. Jaci McKim lived in Shelton, Washington, when that eclipse occurred. Thousands of people traveled from all over the world to see it. ABC even aired a News Special, with one reporter comparing the excitement to that of the first manned space flight and another, exclaiming, “This is just the most exciting thing I think I’ve ever participated in.”
McKim was as amped about it as everyone else. Alas, it wasn’t to be. “I had a job interview that day and so I had to be in the shower,” she recalled. “It really upset me.”
Just how much she had missed became clear 12 years later when her sister was lucky enough to catch the 1991 eclipse in Hawaii.
“She said, ‘You can’t imagine how incredible it is. It just does things to your soul.’ I thought, ‘Go ahead, rub it in.’”
And so the two made a pact that in 2017 when the next full solar eclipse occurred, they would meet at the Stonehenge monument in Goldendale, Washington, to watch it together.
But years later when McKim and her sister, both by then in Depoe Bay, started to research the eclipse, they discovered Goldendale will only experience the partial event.
“So, I started researching how far are we going to have to drive to see the total eclipse,” said McKim, who writes the Scuttlebutt table toppers found in restaurants around Depoe Bay. “Turns out we will only have to walk out our driveway.”
As you may have heard, two years, four months and handful of days from now, a full solar eclipse will occur, and the first place the moon will cast its shadow over the Earth will happen right here at a point between Depoe Bay and Lincoln City.
“This is something big,” McKim said. “Something most people have not witnessed. It is going to be major.”
McKim has already rented a house in Lincoln Beach that sleeps 29 for the friends who will fly in from England, Washington. D.C., Florida and beyond. And she’s not the only one planning her life around August 21, 2017.
“There are people out there who do nothing but go from eclipse to eclipse each year,” she said. “There is a very well-founded rumor that NASA has already reserved 50 rooms just for this event.”
It will no doubt be memorable, and hopefully for all the right reasons, though the crush of people expected guarantees there will be a certain amount of havoc. But it will likely be short lived, as will the eclipse.
There will be about an hour leading up it and then just two minutes when the moon, passing between the sun and the earth, blocks out the sun. It’s a moment described by the TV reporters in 1979 as “eerie,” “exciting” and “a spectacular sight.”
“I know different people I have talked to who ranged in age from 20 to 80,” McKim said. “Each one has their own special eclipse story.”
I, too, have an eclipse story. I remember that it grew darkish, not totally black, but dark in a way that felt a little creepy in the middle of the day. I remember that save for a brief, brave sprint to the back porch, we did not go outside. We did not look at the sun. We did not go blind and the world, of course, did not end. Not exactly life changing.
I’m hoping this next eclipse leaves me with a story just a little more special. I’ve already starting work on my pinhole viewer.
Lori Tobias covered the coast for The Oregonian for nine years. She lives in Newport, where she freelances for a number of regional and national publications. Follow her at loritobias.com.
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