At about 7:00 am, on February 26, 1979 there was a total eclipse of the sun near the town of The Dalles in Oregon. Being a life long crazy guy about the stars, astronomy, and physics I really wanted to see this event. At the time, my wife Mary Jo, my year and a half old son Kevin and I lived in McKinleyville, on the far north coast of California. A little 500 mile jaunt to the The Dalles on the northern border of Oregon seemed like a reasonable weekend trip (even though the 26th was on a Monday and there was snow on many of the roads). The physics department at Humboldt State University was making the trip and planned to watch the eclipse from an observatory on the north bank of the Columbia River. However, since I had graduated from the department five years earlier, I was not invited to join their adventure. That meant that I would have to make the trip on my own. Mary Jo decided to accompany me with Kevin, which I found to be a great blessing that would really enhance the adventure.
My family and I headed north toward The Dalles on Sunday the 25th hoping to be in a good location by first light Monday morning so that we would have a view as the eclipse started at 8:00am. Since we were poor at the time, in order to save expenses we decided to camp on Sunday night, get up early to see the eclipse, and then drive home that same day. We would miss only two days from work this way, so it was really just a long weekend adventure.
The drive over highway 99 to Redding and then north up highway 5 to the region was uneventful. Since it was the middle of winter, the camp grounds in Oregon were not full – in fact they were empty. Luckily they weren’t all closed. We found a beautiful campsite next to a crystal clear river. The campsite was set in a grove of aspen trees, many of which had recently been felled by beavers. It was cloudy and cold, but at least there was no snow.
We spent a cold night sleeping in the back of my work van. The van was just a shell that I used as a work-truck when building houses. It had no insulation or other fancy things (no carpets, back seats or anything else). Moisture kept forming in the ceiling and raining down upon us as we slept. Our son had a fever and didn’t feel well. We tried to stay warm as we settled into our sleeping bags – but it was not a very restful night.
At first light we woke up and headed east, looking for a good place to observe the eclipse. The weather was not promising because it was mostly cloudy – the last thing you need for observing an eclipse is cloud cover. However, as we traveled east, the clouds started to break up, becoming patchy in the dark sky (the moon is always dark when an eclipse of the sun occurs because it gets between the earth and the sun, hence no sunlight falls on the side that we observe).
We finally came over a rise and found ourselves on the ridge of a hill that sloped down to the east. The Columbia River was to our left (north) and in front of us was a great rolling wheat field, disappearing over the eastern horizon in front of us. It made me think of looking across the fields of wheat in the Midwest. It was almost time for the eclipse to begin, so we had to stop if we were going to catch the show. We pulled off the road with a couple of other cars, and got out to wait. By this time it was almost 8:00 am and the sun was up. We could see the observatory with the other folks from Humboldt to the north, just across the river. They were in the shadows of the clouds with no view of the sun, we were standing in the sunshine.
We got out to watch the show, but unfortunately our son decided it was time to scream for attention. Not a gentle cry, or something that could be remedied with a little food, but rather a full blown tantrum that required some serious attention. It was one of those terrible, distressing moments in my life. My son demanded attention, but the eclipse was starting and totality would last less than three minutes. We had just driven ten hours getting here, and it would probably be the last time in any of our lives that we would see such a thing. We were going into a 15 minute event; my opinion was that we just let him scream for 15 minutes and deal with him later. He was a very colicky child and did this often. My wife couldn’t bring herself to let him be for a few minutes, the mothering instinct was just too strong. I wanted to watch the event, so I did – but with a huge amount of anger being directed at me for ignoring my son. She was extremely forceful about making sure that she was going to deal with him, and ignore the eclipse. I finally decided that even though I was clearly getting into lifelong trouble, I wanted to watch the eclipse – she would only take glances now and then, so I think she missed most of it. It was really too bad, because we were in for such an amazing experience. For the next 15 minutes I kept trying to point out what was happening, but by then she was so upset that I didn’t think she could really see the magnitude of the beauty that was all about us.
The day was breathtakingly beautiful. Large clouds were swirling through the sky, dark ominous rain clouds with large breaks edged with bright white borders. The sun was low in the eastern sky, lighting the wheat fields in a way that made them like golden waves reaching toward the horizon. The fields dipped off to the river on the north which cut along the base of a bluff, where the observatory was located – still in deep shadows and rain.
Then it started. The first thing that I noticed was that the fields felt like they were pulsating with light. At first it was a gentle pulsation about a second apart. They gradually become more evident and I could see that they were bands of shadows racing across the fields from the east toward us. The shadow bands, as they are called, went perpendicular to their movement. They looked like waves in a pond where someone had splashed a rock on the far side from where we stood. They were very distinct, dark shadows and bright sunlight alternated between the lines of shadows marching toward us. As they crossed our location, the light level went from almost dark, to full sunlight, which accounted for the pulsing. The pulsing got to be so strong that it felt like my entire body and the earth were pulsing in a giant coordinated unity. It jarred me. I felt my entire body react with each pulse, which got faster and faster with time.
I looked down to the ground and saw that the shadows of things (my body, arms, hands, the car, trees, etc) had somehow grown long feathery hairs. The hairs looked to be about a foot long and were wavy, they edged everything. I am not sure, but I think they began to grow on things themselves, not just their shadows. For some reason this is difficult to recall, I am not sure if the “feathery hairs” were just on the shadows, or on things too.
So there I was, pulsing with the light, seeing hair-like projections on everything, watching the moon slip across the front of the sun though my welding goggle lenses, as the day got darker and darker. I was totally amazed and transfixed by the experience.
Then the moon finally lined up completely over the sun for the beginning of totality. Everything went totally silent. The pulses stopped, the shadows vanished, it felt like the breeze stopped blowing, and all noises stopped – we were suspended in complete stillness and solitude, while in the sky the sun blossomed into a huge shinning mandala of golden light encircling the black disk of the moon. The sun became the size of a basketball held at arm’s length in front of your face. It was no longer a solid object with a defined surface, but rather it was a wispy, glowing, beautiful thing surrounding the dark central disk of the moon. We all stood in awe at the majesty and beauty of the sight and feeling. The cold air settled in my bones as I watched for the almost three minutes of totality.
Then the pulses started up again, slowly at first but quickly returning to their rapid pace. It all repeated, playing backwards in time. I could see that across the river the observatory never got a glimpse of the magic that was playing out on our side of the river. Too bad their luck failed them on that trip.
After the event was completed I felt like I had been carried into a dream, I was just standing there feeling like I had been blessed with some sort of universal magic. It was a totally awe inspiring and huge experience. It was nothing at all like what I had expected. I had expected to see the day get dark, I had seen photos of totality so I expected to see the corona beyond the moon, I had heard that it got quiet as the birds went to sleep. However, I didn’t know about the shadow bands, feathery hairs, or the feeling that it all forced upon me. It was truly an overwhelming experience. I can understand why it was such a big deal by the ancient ones, it IS a big deal.
It was finally over, and my son had finally calmed down. I was in trouble with my wife, but was pleased at having been able to observe such a magnificent sight. I am still sorry that my wife couldn’t find a way to set a few minutes aside to fully appreciate the beauty of the event. We left to travel home, taking a short cut over the mountains near Crater Lake. The road past Crater Lake was open, but the snow was 15 feet or so deep. We traveled over the mountains through canyons of snow, vertical walls fifteen to twenty feet on either side of the two lane road. It was beautiful, but a bit scary, to be in such wilderness in the dead of winter, with almost no other traffic on the road.
A few years later we happened to be traveling in the desert near Needles, California. We had heard of an ancient native America rock art work next to the Colorado River. It was called the Topoc Maze. It is located on a gentle rolling desert hillside. The native peoples of the area had moved rocks into long parallel rows, some with the dark desert varnish showing, and some with the white side showing. This pattern results in waves of light and dark lines going across the hillside. It is hundreds of feet across, with the lines staying parallel to each other as they wrap across the hills and valleys of the area. My first and current reaction is that they recreated the appearance of the shadow bands in rock. It looks just the same to me as what I saw in Oregon on that cold and beautiful morning. I think that the maze could be dated by finding out the date of the last full eclipse of the sun to go across that region. I wrote to a noted expert in the field and told him my theory. He shot back that it was impossible, that the Indians never did anything that didn’t have immediate practical use and they would never make art the attempted to reproduce real experiences. I thought it was a pretty odd response, but it didn’t do much to change my mind. I can understand how they might have found an eclipse a moving enough event to want to copy in on the ground for whatever purpose.