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. Read more »