by Mike Bendzela
Funny how an object that weighs 8.1 x 1019 tons manages to elude our attention most of the time. But it can be very shy, sometimes crouching on the evening horizon, thin as a filament of copper; sometimes disappearing from view for whole days at a time. Then, one bright afternoon, you’ll glance up into the broad blue sky, and there it is! a ghostly, waxen presence, “staring from her hood of bone,” as Sylvia Plath memorably put it. You forget the days spinning by and miss its fullness; or clouds move in and secrete it from your view.
Recently, though, it lumbered its fat ass right in our faces. Narcissist of the moment, it imposed its presence onto legions of us and dared blot out everything for whole minutes at a time. I drove over one hundred miles due north into Maine’s backwoods country, along with multitudes of others, to see it happen.
Thousands of generations of our hominin ancestors trembled and vomited at the sight of the midday light going out. They thought the gods had abandoned them.
Not us, though. We know better. We know our orbital paths and our diamond ring effects and our giant leaps for mankind. We consult the Internet for coordinates and blithely emit a million tons of carbon into the atmosphere in order to go gawk for a few minutes directly into the maw of the beast.
Guilty as charged.
*
I was skeptical about the trip north. We had experienced a whole year of the worst weather I had seen in almost forty years of living in Maine, our annual precipitation average exceeded by over ten inches. The rain and clouds would not relent. We ended winter with almost no snow–until the end of March and into April. As if to warn me not to go, eighteen inches of lard fell out of the sky from April 4th through the 5th. By the morning of the 7th our power had been restored, but every elm tree standing around the house had lost limbs, and several apple trees in our little orchard were broken or tipped over. This was damage we hadn’t seen the likes of since the Ice Storm of 1998. The clear weather forecast for April 8th seemed like a joke.
Still, I cancelled my classes and drove the two hours up to Mexico, Maine, a little New England village where the picturesque and the dilapidated dance cheek-to-cheek. It is a haunting landscape of flat river bottoms and farmers fields nestled between low mountains. Small Cape Cod style houses and camps stand right next to the road. From Mexico, Route 17 heads into one of Maine’s jewels, Rangeley State Park. Even in April’s tattered brown raiment, northern Oxford County’s mountain wilderness is arresting. On this day, though, it was a travelling circus.
Seeing that the traffic in this usually remote outpost was going to be intolerable, I backed my little pickup into a plowed turn-out about a half a mile below Height of Land overlook alongside about eight other vehicles. This was the trail head of snowmobile Trail A in Township D. I couldn’t stop at Height of Land as I had intended to: Height of Land was already mobbed. This was by about 11:30 AM. For the next four hours I would watch bumper-to-bumper traffic crawl up the steep hill on the one access road to Rangeley State Park.
Drivers just arriving balked at the crowds up ahead–this was still about 22 miles below the town of Rangeley proper–and began using the turn-out to back up and reverse direction. Groups of spectators walked through the turn-out to reach a clear-cut on the ridge above the road, one woman saying, “If people didn’t park like assholes, you could get a lot more cars in here.” A short, stout, bearded guy, who called himself a Connecticut truck driver, parked his family’s little Jeep Grand Cherokee next to my truck, his adolescent daughter stimming in the back seat the whole time. He said we should pull our vehicles right up to the shoulder of the road to prevent anyone from pulling off there and blocking us in. I agreed as I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible after totality.
The traffic jam continued. It was like Maine’s Fryeburg Fair transported to the wilderness. Bored and a little terrified, I decided to stroll up the road to get a load of the action at Height of Land. I saw license plates from all over New England but mostly from Maine and New Hampshire. There were plenty of the big truck dudes, of course, with garbage-can-sized mufflers that made their vehicles sound like cement mixer trucks. People walked their dogs, played cards on portable tables, breakdanced on the pavement. Observers were perched on the cliffs above the overlook, reserving probably the best seats in the house. A young woman held up a sign, HONK IF YOU LOVE WEED. People were stomping off into deep snowbanks and going into the woods towards makeshift latrines. Cars could barely squeeze by the pedestrians in the road. I could not reach the overlook itself for the vehicles and mobs there.
The misanthrope in me began rearing his hairy head. Like locusts, I thought. People ruin everything. But the misanthrope has a wise-ass sidekick: And you’re one of them!
I walked the half mile back down to my truck and moped for a few hours. The mob experience brought to mind the anxious crowd I had seen at a supermarket back in March of 2020: The checkout lines were packed, and I was the only customer NOT carrying rolls of toilet paper. Mere rumor had brought them to this state of panic . . . I thought back to my former gig as a rescue worker and saw the crowd in the wilderness as every EMT’s nightmare: cardiac arrests and remoteness from hospitals do not go well together . . . I remembered the few road trips I had taken in the US, how every place I had visited turned out to be the same–a traffic shit hole.
I love the people in my life, but I hate people in the plural. This is my paradox, my curse.
*
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. (Sylvia Plath, again.)
The afternoon was looking mighty wan, and the Connecticut kids had donned their cardboard goggles. The adolescent daughter had ceased stimming and was standing outside the Jeep in a t-shirt with the periodic table of the elements printed on it and the caption I ONLY WEAR THIS T-SHIRT PERIODICALLY. The kids were excited as we had entered the bitten cookie stage of the event, as confirmed by a glance at the disrupted orange blob through my own shades. The temperature dropped, and time seemed to crawl as we awaited totality.
“What is that?” the Connecticut truck driver, goggles-free, was saying to his kids. “I’m seeing all these white things floating in the air!”
I thought, What the hell is he talking about?
At that moment, a utility truck–its flank as large as a drive-in movie theater screen–pulled up alongside our turn-off. It was a tree service vehicle, with a large cherry-picker and bucket folded on top, the driver, no doubt, a local worker taking time off from cleaning up after the recent snowstorm to join the sky-gawkers. “If you guys would just back up a little, I should be able to pull in here. You can get up on my truck platform to watch!”
“I don’t want to get on your truck,” I said. “I can see fine from here.”
But the Connecticut truck driver, being a Connecticut truck driver, complied, backing his Jeep further into the snowbank of the turn-off. The utility truck backed in beside me, reverse alarm shrieking all the while. I would not be able to see oncoming traffic to my right whenever I decided it was time for me to get out of there. I was livid. He let the Connecticut truck driver’s kids clamber up top, the periodic table girl going up there first.
The tree service guy came down off his truck and was chatty with me. “Why are you taking pictures of the road?” he said. I pointed out the little white crescents in the shadows cast by the spruce trees. He seemed amazed that something so awesome lay at his feet.
“I can’t wait to see it go dark,” he said. I couldn’t help liking the old guy. In spite of being in his fifties, he was boy-like, with graying hair so curly it was almost kinky. “I hope this spot is as good as the overlook.”
I made the mistake of telling him the crowd at Height of Land had hogged the overlook in the hopes that they would be able to watch the massive, planetary shadow swooping in over Mooselookmeguntic Lake.
“I’ll raise up my bucket, then. I should be able to see the valley from there.”
God, no! I thought. “Those trees are pretty tall,” I said.
“I can get seventy-five feet up.”
So, with just a few minutes left to totality, he got the kids off his platform, fired up his lift, climbed into the bucket, and launched himself in the cherry-picker, way up into the twilit sky. I feared this would be my lasting memory of the event–a stinking utility truck roaring beside me. Luckily, he wasn’t up there long: The valley and the lake were nowhere near his line of sight. He folded up his bucket and shut off the truck.
The light was now absolutely queer, the sky a blue so deep it looked fake. As the last wriggle of orange disappeared from our cardboard goggles, a white moth tumbled upwards out of the woods, catching the last fading ray of light before totality.
“Hey,” I said to the guy from Connecticut. “You were right about those white things–moths are rising out of the forest.” He saw the moth and smiled, happy to have his observation confirmed.
Suddenly, the diamond ring flashed into view, and the black disk appeared. I got out my birdwatcher’s glasses and looked right at the disk. Magenta flames rimmed the edges. “I can see the prominences!” I said to the kids. “Take a look!” I handed the glasses off to the periodic table girl. The kids all took turns gazing through my little binoculars. The group got pretty quiet as the minutes elapsed. Soon enough, the diamond ring appeared again, bringing the show to a close.
At that moment, a cry went up from Height of Land overlook, and I was outta there.
_____________________________
Images
Photographs by the author.