Eclipsed

On October 14th I was in New Mexico to help my dad build a ceiling for his shop. I went out there to spend time with my father. A quick trip, a few days. It turned out that I went during one of the busiest weekends of the year: an annular eclipse, balloon festival. I barely got a car to rent. When I booked the trip, I didn’t realize I would be one of many. New Mexico’s tourism department said it set records last year — $11.2 billion of economic impact from tourism. I can only imagine how a-once-in-a-grand—while-eclipse will boost those billions of dollars for 2023 (numbers not available yet). The next annular that the U.S. will see comes in 2039, but a total eclipse is next year.

On Saturday, the day of the event, we started on the shop before the moon began to pull in front of the sun. Wood was pulled out, the saw buzzed, drills pumped, and ladders clanked. I wore a t-shirt. It was mildly warm. My dad lives in a rural, secluded spot, many miles outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico. He has a chicken coop, a pig pen, junipers, roses, a garden, a beautiful homemade house. It’s a slice of paradise, a tiny town of two, him and his partner Ellen.

As we put boards above our heads the time of the eclipse ticked in the back of my head. Throughout the day the moon dragged its shadow across Oregon, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Texas. People in Mexico and many countries in South and Central America also witnessed this celestial event.

I first noticed the temperature drop. I needed a hoodie. Maybe ten degrees cooler. The world went gray. From a NASA image it looks like a black ink blotted out North America. We used old welder helmets to see the eclipse — the perfect road of fire highlighted around the black sphere. It was smokey through the dark welder shield.  The whole event arrests your attention. We stopped for a few minutes to bathe in the moment, dock the experience. Some chickens went into the coop, surely confused. We acknowledged something was going on with our little patch of earth and where we stood.

Soon, the moon passed, as with the moment, and we got back to work. It would take the rest of the day to finish the ceiling. It took me an absurd amount of time (several days) to think about what it meant to experience this phenomenon. This was especially true with all the news of planet Earth, along with a full work and life schedule.

I thought of the millions who looked up at the eclipse — not just in New Mexico, or from a hot air ballon near Albuquerque — but across the western hemisphere. How millions paused for this moment so they could look up and connect with the cosmos. Cosmos to humanity. I just happened to be in it’s path, helping Dad build a ceiling.

People do this all the time. Stop and look. People collect images of sprites — optical phenomena, a red jelly-fish shaped crash of natural lights above thunderstorms; lighting discharge. People watch for meteors, shooting stars, super moons. A bunch of astro-tourists. People buy t-shirts, dump money into hotels, restaurants, take vacation, take 10 minutes to look.

Organizations and companies latch onto such events, too. NASA sent up rockets to study the annular eclipses’s effect on the upper atmosphere. People back in the day used smoked glass and made pin-hole projectors — today, libraries and NASA handed out protective eyewear by the thousands.

Why? To understand it through high-tech data collection or special glasses. To be pulled out of our heads, and off our planet for a moment and see these two forces — moon and sun. They meet and the day goes dark, the temp drops. The normal contours of the day change.

All these events remind me I am a tiny human crawling around on a rock. The earth and the cosmos are mighty. The sun isn’t some light bulb, it’s this gurgling ball of gas, with a bunch of planets and moons and asteroids rotating around it. Dust, rock, liquid.

People get curious. Scientists want to learn. Tourists, everyday folk, non-scientists want to see and feel. We want to know. I want to see it. I want to understand it. I want to be in the shadow of awe.

Despite all the money used to chase this eclipse; the commodification of such events; the resources to blast off rockets high up into the atmosphere; the fuel to float balloons, there’s curiosity behind all of that. Curiosity to experience.

I need reminders that people try to learn about the earth. I need reminders curiosity is a force that people can use. Curiosity can be wielded to learn about fellow humans, events, history, along with rocks in outer space.

For there is plenty on this earth that pushes for destruction. The sky rips open with bombs — shadow and hot light — explosive rockets and bullets and white phosphorus. There is a sense of slathering incuriosity and insolence that seeks to pulverize. It’s viral.  There isn’t any matter of lessons from a celestial event that can seemingly push against it — humans often create the loudest of global events.

But there is that curiosity. At least for me, that is the first feeling I need to care about a subject. It feels like a feeling that is needed to stop violence. It’s such necessary feeling — an agent against apathy, solipsism, even hate. It’s a bridge. It’s the first feeling that opens up a question that stops me in my busy scrolling and to-myself strolling.

As the New Mexico earth started to warm on Oct 14, and the moon moved away from the sun, I went back to drilling screws into the ceiling. I watched my dad looking at the ceiling, plotting the next move. I felt this collective moment of curiosity end. It slid into the past, but it leaves a memory. A memory that I joined thousands, millions even, in looking outward and up in wonder and curiosity.

A few more things.

Naomi Klein’s newest Doppelgänger is the book I didn’t know I needed. If you use the internet, if you publish stuff on the internet, or if you use social media, this book is for you.

The Daily this week had an excellent episode. Please listen to “Lessons from an Unending Conflict.” It’s about when Azerbaijan seized the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians fled their homes. After three-decades of war, diplomacy couldn’t solve the problem. It made me think about brute force and how irreconcilable differences are so damn hard to fix among countries,  and people.

Check Good Tape print magazine on the best conversations happening in the audio industry. Podcasters on podcasting. Check it if that’s your jam. Learn about great podcasts like One from the Vaults and Centuries of Sound.

This is a touch old, but read about how women are leading the tech industry in Kyrgyzstan (Bloomberg/Ashlee Vance). Super interesting. Kyrgyzstan’s GDP doesn’t even add up to New Mexico’s tourism economic impact of 2022. But here how coders, women in particular, are making a big impact on the economy.

Been thinking a lot about facts and how best to find them. And how best to use fact checking within an organization. This guide has been a good piece to study. By The Truth in Journalism Project.

Explanations are not Excuses, excellent thought piece on Israel-Hamas war. (New York Magazine/Sarah Schulman)

#spookyscience has been a joy on TikTok (Check out Hank Green’s posts!)