A Meadow on the Edge of Eternity

Witnessing a celestial magic act

In just over a week, millions of spectators across a wide swath of North America will have the chance to view a total solar eclipse — the last such opportunity in the contiguous United States until 2044. My partner Leslie and I had the good fortune to witness the total eclipse of August 2017, the most recent to be visible in the U.S., from a remote meadow in Oregon. It was a life-altering experience, and I wrote a lengthy essay about it shortly after our return home. None of that writing has been published before, and it seems appropriate to do so now, in anticipation of this year’s event.

To say that Highway 95 unspools across a swath of lonely countryside in Nevada is to engage in both understatement and redundancy. Very little of Nevada qualifies as anything other than lonely; vibrant human settlements are scattered across it about as sparsely as dust bunnies in a NASA clean room. But long stretches of Highway 95 traverse terrain that is dramatically empty and stark even by Nevada standards.

Its southern terminus is in the California-Arizona border town of Needles; from there it punches north through the sprawling mess of greater Las Vegas before meandering across monochrome desert dotted by towns that may once have been corporeal but now are little more than ghosts: Amargosa Valley, Beatty, Goldfield, Tonopah. Between them are sand dunes and alkali flats, tortured rock, stunted vegetation and the beds of vanished lakes dusted with a bitter mineral snow.

Eventually, the highway reaches the town of Fallon, a desert city rendered improbably humid and buggy by the Newlands Reclamation Project, one of the nation’s first. The project’s dams and canals capture and divert flows in the Truckee and Carson rivers onto 57,000 acres of  heavily irrigated pastures and cropland, much of it devoted to alfalfa. All that evaporating water can generate fog even on a summer evening when the temperature is above 90. A thick mist of insects, rising from the flooded fields, spatters windshields and draws acrobatic squadrons of birds and bats into the twilight.

Beyond Fallon, Highway 95 briefly becomes wedded to Interstate 80, but the relationship does not last and 95 breaks it off in Winnemucca to make a beeline for Oregon. That’s why we were driving it on Aug. 18 and 19 of 2017. Highway 95 is a key segment of the most direct route between my home in Ojai and the remote site in eastern Oregon, nearly 1,000 miles to the north, where I and my partner, Leslie, planned to view the total solar eclipse of 2017.

Any summer improves with a road trip and, as a native Westerner in the sixth decade of a lifelong love affair with the region’s landscapes, I have embarked on my share of them. With little prompting, I can leaf through a mental slideshow of beautiful, magical sights and experiences drawn from trips across the Great Plains; through the deserts and canyons of the Southwest; among the ice-carved peaks of the Rockies, Cascades and Sierra Nevada; down dozens of turbulent rivers and across scores of placid lakes. Those experiences form a rich tapestry woven around and through my life.

Yet nothing I have experienced during a lifetime of wandering among beauty was as intense and deeply moving as this journey.

Doing the homework

The trip began months earlier, as most good trips do, with research. When I first began taking lengthy trips across the West, the most sophisticated navigation aid was a paper road map. This time, the availability of digital tools such as Google Earth and Google Maps, coupled with traditional highway and National Forest maps — all cross-checked against a terrific interactive online tool available to plot the path of totality across the United States — made for a much more sophisticated planning experience.

There was no doubt that millions of people from across the globe would be converging on that path, promising traffic snarls, gas station lines, and a shortage of places to eat and sleep. The path across the U.S. would be 70 miles wide and 2,500 miles long, and within those 175,000 square miles a nearly infinite number of experiences were possible: Giant eclipse parties hosted by planetariums, communal gatherings in towns and cities, roadside pullouts packed with RVs, solitary lookouts on backcountry trails. I needed to narrow things down. So I made of list of location criteria as I searched for a place that would offer us a scenic setting for the celestial event, without crowds or clouds.

I decided the preferred spot would be on public land open to camping outside developed campgrounds, which narrowed it to places managed by the U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management. It would be accessed by narrow, unpaved roads, and would not be hemmed in by horizon-blocking mountains. There would be few towns in the area, and they would have little to offer in the way of motels and restaurants.

I figured that with no real visitor services in the area, anyone headed that way for an overnight stay would have to be self-supporting, which in my experience typically means folks driving big recreational vehicles or hauling trailers. Those wouldn’t be able to navigate the kind of roads I was looking for, whereas I would have no trouble in my small pickup.

Wyoming was an early contender. Vast swaths are empty, and there’s plenty of interesting scenery. But we only had a week, and I did not want to spend six of those days driving. Idaho is closer, but the region in the path of totality that best satisfied my criteria was mountainous and nearly inaccessible wilderness.

My attention then turned to eastern Oregon. I’d been through that area before and knew it to be arid, guaranteeing low probability of cloud cover on eclipse day, and sparsely populated. It would be a long drive, but it was a full day closer than Wyoming. And there were several areas where National Forest or BLM land were crisscrossed by primitive road networks that could be accessed readily.

After a bit more detective work, I focused on Prairie City. It's a rural ranching community of about 700 people not far from the Idaho border, with few businesses beyond a gas station and a couple small markets. The Malheur National Forest lies just north of town, and can be reached by a county road that ties into a network of old dirt logging roads. I dropped myself onto Main Street, using Google Maps’ Street View feature, and confirmed that sightlines toward the horizon were good. Street View stops where the pavement ends, but Google Earth let me zoom in on the national forest outside town to confirm that there were clearings and meadows suitable for camping.

It would still be a gamble. Despite all the plans and predictions posted online or reported by the news media, the truth is nobody really had any idea exactly how many people from outside the region would show up, and where, to watch the show. The last time there was a nationwide band of totality was in 1918, when there were 103 million people and 5.5 million automobiles in the U.S. That’s not a good baseline from which to forecast the behavior of 326 million people with more than 260 million private vehicles in 2017. Not to mention the ease with which eclipse fans from abroad could fly here, rent a car or hail an Uber and join in the fun. There was a chance that even Prairie City would be overrun, and the nearby forest clogged with stranded RVs.

Worrying about it would not help, and planning can only get you so far. Eventually, you just have to pack and go. So we did.

On the road

Leslie and I loaded my truck Thursday evening. It has a camper shell on the back, with a sleeping platform and storage for camping gear built into the bed. Once we stow food and clothing aboard, the rig allows us to camp comfortably just about anywhere we can park. We hit the road Friday morning, driving through the Antelope Valley and across the edge of the Mojave to link up with Highway 395, which heads north along the eastern front of the Sierra and provides one of the best drives in California. In Bishop, we doglegged onto U.S. 6, which carried us into Nevada and our rendezvous with 95.

From there, it was a long drive to Fallon, which we reached at nightfall. It was hot and humid, and we were grateful for the air conditioning in our motel room. We were back on the road Saturday morning, bound for Oregon.

Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that I had forgotten a key piece of road-trip prep.

“Damn, I forgot to make an eclipse playlist. We could be listening to it now.”

“That would have been great.”

“What would be on it? Bad Moon Rising, for sure. Moonshadow.”

“Moondance.”

“House of the Rising Sun.”

“Dark Star. Claire de Lune.”

“Here Comes the Sun.”

We went on like that for a while, then settled for podcasts of “This American Life.”

Traffic was mostly thin, although we did have a few anxious moments after 95 split away from I-80 in Winnemucca and approached the Oregon border. We were suddenly overtaken from behind by speeding caravans of vehicles, all sizes and shapes, insanely leapfrog-passing each other on the two-lane highway. This went on for about a half-hour, until we found ourselves enveloped by a miles-long parade of RVs, trucks pulling trailers, minivans — clearly an eclipse-driven transient mob, since in that stretch of country the typical local vehicle is a dusty pickup truck with a rancher at the wheel.

Just over the Oregon border, however, 95 veered east toward Idaho and we turned west onto County Road 78, bound for Burns. The traffic kept on toward Boise, thankfully, and we were once again left mostly in peace.

Burns was the last big town on our route outside the path of totality, a lively ranching and farming hub crowded with visitors. It had plenty of gas stations, however, so lines were not long. I’d done the math and figured out that if we filled up here, we could reach our viewing destination and make it all the way back with gas to spare, thus avoiding the prospect of pump lines and shortages in the smaller communities beneath the moon’s shadow. We filled up and grabbed a bite at the Broadway Deli before heading north out of town on Highway 395 toward John Day.

John Day was the largest town in that area directly beneath the path of totality. It was actually within a few miles of the centerline — the most desirable place to be, since totality lasts longest there — and it’s where we first appreciated the true impact of the eclipse on communities in its path. Vendors had set up impromptu parking-lot markets everywhere to hawk eclipse glasses, eclipse T-shirts and other memorabilia, and every school athletic field, vacant lot and pasture along the highway had been transformed into a temporary campground full of tents, vans, campers and RVs. It looked as if half the portable toilets in the state had been hauled in to serve the crowds.

We crept through town, and then turned east onto Highway 26, heading toward Prairie City. Traffic thinned out again, but the highway passed more roadside campgrounds, most only half full. It was two days until the eclipse, though, and we were glad we would not be on the road Sunday, when we presumed the balance of the anticipated horde would arrive.

Prairie City is not far from John Day, and we reached the edge of town quickly. We turned onto the county road I had identified during my weeks of obsessive Google Earthing and Google Mapping, and headed north toward the Malheur National Forest. After 3 miles the pavement ended, and we continued on gravel for about 4 miles along a small stream called Dixie Creek, which flowed through a beautiful forested canyon. At the national forest boundary, the road got a bit rougher and steeper, eventually turning to dirt, as we continued to climb.

We passed a few encampments along the way — tents, mostly, set up in small meadows near the stream — which worried me a bit. Anybody could use the tools I had to find this place, and my choice of destination was based on a prediction of human behavior that might turn out to be wrong. But we pushed on, exploring a side road where I thought I had identified a suitable clearing, only to find the Google Earth imagery was out of date and the logged-over area had regrown.

Backtracking, we continued about a hundred yards farther along the “main” road until we came to a faint track leading toward a clearing. We followed it to a stand of lodgepole pines on the edge of a meadow and parked.

It was beyond perfect.

The meadow. (John Krist photo)

The meadow was big, 10 acres or more, surrounded by forest. I’d researched the angle of the sun above the horizon in this area at 9 a.m., just before the eclipse would begin, and was fairly certain we’d be able to see it above the trees. We wandered through the tall grass and found the channels of rivulets that earlier in the season had watered the meadow as they made their way toward Dixie Creek. There were dry now, and the grass was turning from green to gold, but their course was lined by blooming camas lilies, brilliant blue to match the sky.

And it was empty. Not a soul was visible, and all we could hear was chickarees loudly protesting our intrusion into their private foraging ground. I pulled out a Forest Service map and pinpointed our location, part of a string of clearings named Dixie Meadows.

We found a spot on the edge of the meadow with an old fire ring and chainsawed chunks of tree set up as seating. A horizontal log roped to a pair of nearby trees to serve as a crude game hoist indicated this was probably used as a hunters’ camp, but it was not yet hunting season and it appeared no one had been there in months. We moved the truck into position and leveled it, set up chairs, tables, cook stove and kitchen, and settled in with martinis to watch fading sunlight set the meadow aglow.

Yes, martinis. We’re campers, not barbarians.

Camas lilies. (Leslie Leavens photo)

Prelude to magic

The next morning, we rose, made coffee and watched sunlight edge across the meadow. At 9 a.m., we checked the angle, and confirmed that we’d have a perfect view of the next day’s celestial show, so we relaxed into a lazy Sunday. I hung hammocks, we read, dozed, explored our surroundings and savored the silence — and tried not to be anxious about a possible influx of neighbors later in the day.

They never arrived. A couple vehicles drove past the meadow on a road that led to a small private inholding a few hundred yards away, behind a locked chain. We could not see them, but we could hear dogs from time to time, so we concluded that a small group had gathered there for their own eclipse event. But no one followed us into our Dixie Meadow.

I spent part of the afternoon setting up and testing the camera gear I’d brought — one DSLR attached to a telescope with a solar filter for the sun itself, a second DSLR attached to a wide-angle lens to shoot our surroundings during totality, and tripods and remote shutter releases for both so I could enjoy the eclipse with my own eyes while snapping a few exposures. Before the trip I’d read photography blog posts in which veteran shooters warned against getting so caught up fiddling with gear and trying to frame the perfect eclipse shot that you forgot to simply watch the event itself. I was determined not to fall into that trap.

Gear check. (Leslie Leavens photo)

That night, as we retired, I asked Leslie to set the alarm on her phone to make sure we were up early enough the next morning.

She looked at me like I was nuts. “It doesn’t start until after 9 a.m.”

“I know. But all this planning, the driving, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It would be horrible if we somehow overslept and missed it.”

She indulged me. She’s a patient woman.

The next morning we were out of the camper around 7:30, no alarm needed. The day had dawned clear and bright, not a cloud in the sky. Morning light was already slanting into the meadow as the sun cleared the hills and trees, warming us as we drank coffee and I retrieved my equipment from the cab of the pickup.

According the eclipse app on my phone, the partial eclipse would begin at about 9:09 a.m. at our location, totality would begin at about 10:22 and last 2 minutes, 6 seconds, and the entire show would be over around 11:40 a.m.

I practiced with the telescope rig, making sure I had the focus and exposure dialed in so I could simply press the remote a few times without have to pay too much attention, other than to make sure the sun was more or less centered. I moved tripods around the meadow until I was satisfied with their positioning, and we sat down with our eclipse glasses on to wait.

Solar shades.

A few minutes after 9, I began watching the sun through the telescope-mounted camera. Through the special filter on the scope, the sun was a dull orange ball, an archipelago of sunspots clearly visible arcing across its surface. It was a curiously arresting sight. The sun is, after all, something we see every day, and yet we do not see it; it is just a blinding glare if the sky is clear and a diffuse glow if there are clouds. The filter revealed it to be an orb like the moon or any other familiar celestial body, but one hidden in plain sight. I knew that of course, but to see it myself for the first time felt like a small revelation. How many other obvious things do we not see?

Around 9:10, the perfect circle of the sun’s disk no longer seemed perfect, a barely perceptible irregularity having appeared in the upper right edge. And then it became more and more obvious. For the next hour we watched with fascination as the dark bulge representing the moon’s leading edge claimed more and more solar real estate.

It was surprising how much of the solar disc could be occluded without any perceptible change in the quality of sunlight bathing our meadow; not until about three-quarters of the sun had disappeared did we notice the light slowly dimming. Not the kind of dimming that accompanies sunset, as the sun’s angle above the horizon changes, causing shadows to move and lengthen. None of that happened. Shadows remained where they were, but all the light everywhere began fading at the same time, as if the sun were attached to a cosmic dimmer knob that someone was slowly twisting.

After an hour of snail’s-pace preamble, the climax came swiftly. We watched in fascination as the slice of orange disc grew thinner and thinner, and then we gasped as a burst of white light — the last flare of sunlight before the moon blocked the entire disc, what eclipse-watchers refer to as the “diamond ring” effect — lit up the darkness. And then, seconds later, we cried out again as the sun suddenly became a black hole in the sky surrounded by the glowing lacework of the solar corona, an ethereal halo of plasma as delicately detailed as the filigree of ice that forms on a windowpane in winter.

The progression. (John Krist photos)

I’ve been processing this event, and trying to describe it to family and friends, for several weeks now, and this is the point where words generally fail me. Just the bare physical description of what occurred, and how we reacted to it — that gasp, at a moment almost literally heart-stopping in its beauty, followed suddenly by tears, as what was already beautiful became sublime — does not fully convey what it felt like. As the 126 seconds of totality passed, Leslie and I found ourselves clutching each other, tearful and gripped by wonderstruck joy, while we stared at something that had been thoroughly predicted, described and expected, yet which turned out to be wholly unexpected all the same.

Somewhere along the way I was apparently triggering camera shutters, because I have photographs. But I barely remember that. I do recall noticing that it wasn’t really dark — more like a night illuminated by an extremely bright full moon — and that the stars didn’t really come out; we saw Saturn but no other heavenly bodies. And it grew cold, middle-of-the-night cold, whereas mere moments earlier it had been a warm August morning.

All too soon, without warning, there was a second burst of light, another diamond ring, and night slowly began to recede. For the next hour, we monitored the process as it ran in reverse, the dimmer knob turned gradually back to full intensity. Then the black edge of the invisible moon slipped away and returned the sun to us.

Front-row seats. (John Krist photo)

Afterglow

After it was over, and I’d packed up the photographic gear, we sat in the shade of spindly lodgepole pines, celebratory beers in hand, and struggled to make sense of what we had just experienced.

I had expected beauty, although not of such magnitude. But I had been utterly unprepared for the emotional wallop it packed, and for the euphoria that followed. For the remainder of the afternoon, I felt a sense of clarity and calm wrapped in a cocoon of awe. After lunch, we retired to hammocks suspended from the trees shading our camp, and at times I had the sense that, just as my body was floating above the ground in a shroud of nylon, my mind was suspended in its own invisible hammock, floating weightlessly above the thoughts and concerns that usually fill it.

I am still at a loss to explain it, but I think I understand why so many people become addicted to the spectacle and chase totality like junkies on a perpetual quest to score. There was something drug-like about the experience, although absent any sensory distortion. In that way it was something like the runner's highs I used to experience when I was training for marathons, an endorphin-fueled dissociative state triggered by the physical intensity of a long, hard run. So perhaps that explains some of it: The eclipse was not exclusively a visual experience; it was a full-body sensory immersion, one that triggered the same cerebral chemical cascade as strong physical exertion. Only without the sweat and sore hamstrings.

That night, we stayed up late to enjoy the stars. We were camped many miles from the nearest town of any size, and the new moon had left the heavenly stage as soon as its dance with the sun was over, so the sky was extremely dark and the display spectacular. Nearly every point of light was a sun of one kind or another, many of them having far more exotic characteristics than our own, and it was easy to imagine an infinite number of cosmic alignments even more beautiful and strange than the one we had just witnessed, occurring beyond the field of human vision. Above us bloomed an eternity of stellar births, lives and deaths, a display that long predated our species and will continue well after we have gone.

The next morning, still feeling slightly euphoric, we packed and prepared to leave the meadow that had been our home for three nights. We were still alone, and the squirrels were still hectoring us. Scattered clouds and a slight haze had moved in, and visibility was no longer as good as it had been on eclipse day, making us feel even more fortunate. Good planning helped, but ultimately luck also played a role in the success of our journey. That’s the case with most road trips.

We drove back into Prairie City, restocked the ice in our coolers at a small market that looked like it had been ransacked by fleeing refugees, and began the thousand-mile drive home. As we retraced our route back to John Day, we passed empty fields where the temporary campgrounds had been. Crews were loading scores of portable toilets onto trailers, and overflowing trash bins awaited emptying. By waiting to leave until the next day, it appeared we had managed to avoid the mass eclipse-day exodus of visitors, along with the inevitable traffic jams and gas-station lines.

In John Day, we turned south on Highway 395. We planned to take our time on the return, heading next for Lassen Volcanic National Park for a few days of camping and hiking, and then to a stop in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest outside of the Owens Valley town of Big Pine.

The post-eclipse euphoria, or at least a kind of inner peace that lives adjacent to it, stayed with us throughout that long journey south. Our final night on the road found us in a campground high in the White Mountains, within Inyo National Forest. Nearby were groves of bristlecone pines, among the oldest living things on Earth, some specimens having survived for more than 4,000 years in the harsh conditions at 11,000 feet. Our camp was a bit lower than that, and set in a group of Utah junipers and pinyon pines on the edge of a sagebrush flat.

Bats swooped overhead that evening as the sun set, twilight gathered and the stars crept out. And then the barest sliver of moon became visible, glowing pale against the blue-black sky, its first appearance since playing a feature role in the drama four days prior. Suddenly we were back in that empty meadow in eastern Oregon, a haven of solitude where sun and moon performed a celestial magic act for an audience of two.

Some part of us will always be there.

Mid-morning dusk in the meadow. (John Krist photo)