On the eclipse, a mechanical bull except it's a shark, and the resurrection of awe
Or: HOLY $#%@! LOOK AT THAT! IT'S $#%@ AMAZING!
Thank you for being a subscriber.
If you enjoy this newsletter, please recommend it to others and consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get dispatches about travel, adventure and #dadlife that will sometimes be heartfelt and profound, sometimes peel back modern parenting life for a look inside, and sometimes be, well, whatever this is. If you support my work, I would appreciate it.
HOLY $#%@! LOOK AT THAT IT’S FREAKING AMAZING!
A fraction of a second before totality, everyone shut up.
At totality, that silence continued.
A fraction of a second into totality, everybody cheered for the moon.
CHEERED!
FOR THE MOON!
Count me among those moderns who lament the death of wonder in our culture. We think that because we know/can explain more than ever there’s less to be amazed about. We have conflated the ability to know with the inability to be impressed.
We are bored with the incomparable beauty of creation.
But on Monday we resurrected wonder.
On Monday we looked up in astonishment, in amazement, in awe.
Even though we know exactly what an eclipse is, exactly when (down to the second) and where (down to the street level) totality will happen again, we still looked up on Monday and said HOLY $#%@! LOOK AT THAT! IT’S FREAKING AMAZING!
Or at least I did.
And so did millions of others who gathered along the line of totality on Monday.
We drove south from our suburban St. Louis home to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a city that sits on the banks of the Mississippi River. It is home to the campus of Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO). Someone there had the utterly brilliant idea to host a campus visit of high school juniors to coincide with the eclipse.
Seriously: UTTERLY BRILLIANT.
Before I could look up in awe, I looked around … and wondered what the …?
I don’t know what I was expecting from SEMO’s eclipse party, but I wasn’t expecting to pose for a photo with someone in an inflatable Martian outfit. Students climbed an inflatable rock wall, played in a bounce-house shaped like a spaceship and rode a mechanical bull, except the bull was a shark.
I can pretty easily explain the sequence of events that creates an eclipse. But I’m at a loss to even guess at the sequence of events that led to the invention of a mechanical bull except it’s a shark.
I can only wonder, and be grateful, because I hadn’t truly lived until I watched college students get thrown off a bucking shark while the moon inched its way in front of the sun far over their heads.
Brief aside: The next eclipse in Cape Girardeau won’t happen for 300 years. There was talk of burying a time capsule full of items to explain now to people then. I hope whoever makes the time capsule mentions the mechanical shark so that 300 years from now someone can read those words next to each other and wonder what in the sam hell a mechanical shark is and furthermore why did they ride one during an eclipse?
Back to now: Hundreds of people sat on a hill in front of SEMO’s administration building. A DJ played bad classic rock too loud (but I repeat myself). He redeemed himself by playing as his last two songs Dark Side of the Moon and Total Eclipse of the Heart and telling the people running the bouncy houses and mechanical shark to shut off their generators so we’d have silence once the totality started.
I sat down on our blanket and couldn’t decide where to look—at the moon as it slowly blotted out the sun or at the people around me and the hill upon which we were sitting, because that sun-blotting had changed what the world looked like.
Good news: both views were awesome.
People often say it gets dark during an eclipse—that animals get weirded out and think it’s night, etc. But dark is not the right word. I’m not sure we have a right word because we see light like that during an eclipse and no other time. Said my daughter: “It feels like a dream because the lighting is so weird.”
The change was not the presence of darkness but the absence of intensity in the color. If normal color is set at 10, eclipse color on Monday afternoon was a 6. It looked like the angel who God assigned to create color turned in his first draft and didn’t go far enough. “Not bad,” God said. “But give me MORE!”
The temperature dropped, sometimes slowly, one step down at a time, sometimes as if it leapt down a whole flight of stairs at once.
I put on my eclipse glasses on and watched the sun disappear as if it was a timer. The sliver of light got smaller and smaller until finally it winked completely out.
TOTALITY!
I waited a beat before taking off the glasses.
It’s a popular way of thinking to say how gobsmacked the ancients must have been by this because they didn’t know it was coming. That’s fine, I suppose, but I did know this was coming, and I was STILL gobsmacked by it. So was everyone around me.
I joined the cheering, and forgive me for writing about awe and describing the eclipse like this: It looked like a black hole was wearing a full-circle Einstein wig … only massively and incomparably majestic. It was engrossing, stupefying, hypnotic. It lasted four minutes or four hours or four lifetimes.
We cheered at the end, too.
Awesome and awful were once synonyms. On our drive home from SEMO, they converged again. The 120-mile trip took six hours. We were in bumper-to-bumper traffic for almost all of it. At one point a teen-ager was walking along the shoulder of the interstate. We were side by side for 20 minutes.
That was, of course, awful.
But the joyful conversations—among ourselves and friends and family we called while at a standstill—were awesome. So, too, was looking around at all those cars and knowing the people inside of them had hearts as full of wonder as mine.
I contributed an essay to a powerful anthology called “Notes from Dad,” and it’s going to be released May 16. The brainchild of my great good friend Jason “Cherry Limeade” Meinershagen, who is famous (or should be!) for doing burpees in the bucket of a firetruck, “Notes from Dad” is full of inspiring essays on fatherhood.
Contributors include 14 F3 men; a handful of them are readers of this newsletter. My piece is about passing on a spirit of adventure to my kids … and living to regret it. At the launch, I will offer “Notes from Dad” for the special rate of $1.99. Watch for the link as that date hits.