TOTALITY
Totality
By Taney Roniger
Looking at it today, I marvel a bit at the meticulousness of the arrangement. Across a long wooden table draped in a white blanket, a phalanx of cameras, lenses, tripods and binoculars forms a perfect semicircle around an interior arc of four empty wine glasses. In the center of this smaller array stands an unopened bottle of wine, in front of which four pairs of plastic eclipse viewers lay neatly folded in two columns. Behind the table, a set of bay windows frames the scene, the slope of its perspectival curve echoing that of the semicircle in front, the center of its middle pane aligned perfectly with the bottle. It’s an august photograph, and one whose geometric precision, meant to honor the event in anticipation of which it was made, now strikes me as comical, or poignant, depending on my mood. “Bring it, Universe,” I recall saying at the time.
It was August 20th, 2017, and my husband and I had driven down to Cashiers, North Carolina to meet my parents. We had come, of course, to see the solar eclipse. It was my first ever, and my parents,’ and my husband’s first total; he had seen an annular years before we met. On that afternoon before the day the sun was to disappear, we had driven up the mountain where our rental house was located and, going on a tip from the house’s owner, found a sprawling Christmas tree farm near the top of the peak. With its vast swaths of open meadow punctuated only by knee-high evergreens and a few small ponds, it was the perfect setting for the next day’s event. Relieved to have so quickly established our site, we rehearsed the whole thing again, this time in situ. We would arrive at 11:00 in the morning, stake out our territory with lawn chairs and ice chest, set up all the camera gear, and enjoy an anticipatory meal. Then we would wait. We’d wait and watch as the sky grew darker, from 1:09, the moon’s first advance, to 2:34, when the world would go black. During the two minutes of totality there would be silence—we’d taken a vow—after which we’d open a bottle of wine and exchange reflections.
I’d been the one to banish language. During our months of planning, I’d decided that not only would words be inadequate to the experience but that indeed they would contaminate it, imposing a cheap scrim of inanity between us and the object of our awe. I’d seen it happen too many times: in museums, before great works of art; in sublime spaces, like Chartres Cathedral; even at the 911 Memorial, for God’s sake, where anything but a hushed silence seems nothing short of sacrilege. In the purity of silence and from the privacy of our own perch, there would be no banter and no wows or oh-my-gods, even – as there surely would be – if there were the impulse.
But by the time we’d returned from our mountaintop scouting, a certain unease had begun to set in. Setting up my tabletop still-life, I was keener than ever to get the angles just so. There was talk of other people. Other people who, surely thinking the same things we were, would go flocking to the same Christmas tree farm at the top of the same hill. Hordes of them, we speculated—there would surely be hordes. After all, the town had been advertising its prime location, and people from all over had come in for the occasion. And then there was the issue of private property. Colin, my husband, was the only one to consider it absurd, but the rest of us worried that the farm’s owners would object to our setting up on their land. Colin was insistent. “It’s not like we’ll be doing anything wrong,” he scoffed, “and anyway we’re going to be silent, remember?” My father, already agitated over the prospect of a mob scene, pressed to establish a plan B. “The roads will be nightmare,” he said several times. “Best to have another plan and to implement it early.”
That night, after taking one last trip into town to stockpile groceries, we agreed over dinner to play the whole thing by ear. If there were people, we’d leave, and we’d drive somewhere else. People there, and we’d do it again. Time was on our side, and anyway we’d been planning this for too long to settle for anything sub-optimal. Now our concerns turned to the weather. The forecast had called for a partly cloudy day, so with a window of just two minutes it could go either way. One hears of it happening: swarms of people traveling halfway around the world for their moment of transcendence, only to have the whole thing sabotaged by a couple of cirrus clouds. We joked that it would be a single cloud—one nasty little renegade in an otherwise perfect sky—that would waft in at the last minute and steal our experience. We drank and joked, and drank some more. By the end of the evening it was “that one little motherfucker.”
The day began auspiciously. Taking the trash out to the curb, my father was told by the garbage man that the skies would be clear all day. And who doesn’t believe a local, we all cheered. The sky did look exquisite, with a crystalline brightness that made its blue almost turquoise. We ate breakfast, packed our lunch and all our gear, and, much to everyone’s surprise, got off early. The roads were eerily clear; where were the hordes? Had we mistaken the day? But mostly there was excitement—the car was charged with it, and the energy was exhilarating.
When we arrived at the Christmas tree farm, we were again surprised to see no other cars. There had emerged, however, one unforeseen problem: during the night someone had set up two rows of orange stanchions along either side of the road. We pulled over to the narrow shoulder and parked to confer. Colin was adamant: “What’s he going to do, ask us to leave? We’ll just set up here by the road and move into the meadow when it begins.” Though apprehensive, the rest of us agreed.
It was only 11:00, so now there was nothing to do but wait. We read, and fiddled with the cameras, and sat in the hot sun. My father sang Cat Stevens’ Moonshadow for the third time that morning while the rest of us rolled our eyes. Before long we noticed some clouds on the horizon—not a whole mass of them, but enough to raise concern. But the greater concern came when just across the pond where the road receded into a bend a red Subaru began making its way toward us and, pulling over just inches from our car, came to a stop. It was a woman in her thirties, alone but for a dog. “Mind some company?” she beamed.
It wasn’t a good sign. If she was here surely there’d be more. After giving an obligatory “Not at all!” and doing our best to conceal our disappointment, we exchanged furtive glances. She got out of the car and, looking around, asked if this was private property. We all shrugged in unison, exaggerating the gesture in feigned innocence. “Doesn’t say so, does it?” I smiled. She set up a blanket right off the road and joined us in the wait.
I wondered where she was from. Glancing over at her a few times, I noticed she wore a nose ring. A loose bun on the top of her head barely contained a mop of curly, reddish hair, and everything about her exuded New Age. I wondered if she was into crystals. She was reading, and proving none too loquacious, so feelings toward her began to soften. Eventually we struck up a conversation. She was a writer, she said, and had only decided at the last minute to drive over from Asheville. My father asked her if she’d encountered traffic, and she said she hadn’t, that everything had been fine. We told her we’d come all the way from New York, that we’d been planning this for months, and that we were growing concerned about the clouds on the horizon. After thinking about it for a bit, she replied that she’d be fine with anything that happened, and that even without a view of the sun the strange light over the meadow would be enough of an experience. Bearing witness, she said; she’d just come to bear witness. Half asking, we told her about our vow of silence. She laughed, and then said she’d be fine with that too.
Just as we were beginning to feel better about our company, a large tractor pulled around the same bend across the pond and began heading our way. Here we go, we all groaned. It was burly guy in his mid-forties with a smile that stretched across the width of his face. Pulling up beside us, and with the kind of Southern accent that can disarm the unexpecting, he introduced himself as the farmer’s son. He said he had a predicament. While he and his family had no problem letting us set up on their land, they were worried about liability. He said they'd been laboring over it for some time, their suddenly finding themselves hosts for the occasion, and in their uncertainty about how to handle it had checked with local authorities. And of course the law had confirmed what they’d already suspected: any injuries incurred on their property would be their legal responsibility. Then, laughing uneasily, he added a caveat: "But apparently, twelve feet from the center of every road is public property by law. I'm just telling you what they said."
I imagined us driving back into town for a tape measure. I imagined us drawing a line in the grass or laying out a row of little sticks, and then wedging our chairs up against it facing the meadow. I wondered what would happen if one of us were to sustain an injury and fall right on the line.
The poor man was inordinately apologetic, repeating again and again that it was just the law they were worried about. “Now on some of the other farms up there,” he said, pointing further up the hill, “people are selling parking spaces along the road, but we wouldn’t feel right about that. We just couldn’t do that.” After several more apologies he said he’d go back to his parents for a final verdict. While he was pulling away, my father reassured him that we would behave, and then added that we’d driven hundreds—nay, thousands—of miles to get here. I wished he’d stop pressing it. The girl from Asheville thanked the man for his kindness, and we followed suit.
After the tractor disappeared around the bend, we realized we were sitting on the wrong side of the stanchion—just a few feet away from it, but there was no telling where the illegal zone began. One of us cracked a lawyer joke, and others ensued. But at this point I’d begun to feel uneasy; what must the girl from Asheville think of us? Did she see us as coarse, arrogant, urban types? Me in my black garb and all our shit-shooting; my father’s incessant concerns about traffic and crowds. I changed the subject to get off the lawyers and tried to steer us toward kinder things. Saying something about Southern hospitality, the girl from Asheville suggested it would be a sign of respect if we moved to the other side of the tape until the guy returned. We all hoisted our chairs over the stanchion and sat on the gravel by the cars.
When the tractor came back some twenty minutes later, we all stood up to greet it. “Now if it were up to me, I’d say y’all could just use our land, but…” I wished there were something I could do to ease his conscience; the man, a total stranger, had been so unnecessarily kind. “It’s the lawyers!” I smiled up at him. “We understand entirely.” He wished us well and said he hoped we’d see it one way or another, and we said we hoped he and his family would too. He apologized again, and we all waved goodbye. I got the feeling that if we were to stay he’d keep coming back to apologize.
It was noon now, and while we’d been dealing with one threat to our experience another had emerged. Several giant balls of billowing white cloud had drifted in on us unawares and now hovered directly above like so much oversized cotton candy. Failing to detect any movement, it was impossible to determine which direction they’d come from. Now they were gathering quickly, as if out of nowhere; no sooner had we noticed the first couple of these reprobates than almost every bit of blue sky was covered with them.
To stay or to leave? My father was insistent: “I’m telling you, fellas, traffic in town will be bumper to bumper. We can’t risk getting stuck somewhere and missing the damned thing.” My mother seemed anxious to move on but equally anxious to defer to him. Since we still had over an hour to go before the moon’s first move, Colin and I were adamant about plan B. The four of us argued a bit, and unkind words were said. Finally I took it upon myself to make an executive decision: for the rest of the day Colin would be the Decider, since it was he, after all, who had initiated the trip. Much to my father’s consternation, it was decided that we should head north. We said goodbye to our Asheville friend and wished her well. Waving us off, she returned the wish. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was relieved to be rid of us.
The drive back through Cashiers was astonishingly easy. There were cars, but nothing in the way of back-up, and certainly no mob scene. We headed west toward Highlands and took the first road we could northward. I drove while Colin navigated with his i-Pad, my parents in the back like a couple of overgrown schoolchildren. Passing through town, there were scores of people standing by the road offering their driveways for $50. “Capitalists,” I scowled, but quickly regretted it. We don’t discuss politics on family vacations. I was relieved when neither of the schoolchildren said anything to defend them.
Up ahead was blue sky, but there was no telling how far away. Before long the road grew narrow and somewhat treacherous. The hills had become steeper, and for what seemed like hours we wound up and down through hairpin turns. Soon we were immersed in a thick canopy of green through which the sun would occasionally pierce in shard-like slivers. It was like driving through a rainforest, or some damp, earthen tunnel. All around, that rich soil smell you only get in the south wafted in through the windows. Enveloped in this lushness, I forgot all about the eclipse. But the tension in the car was mounting, so I snapped back to: it was now 1:00. “We really should stop now,” my parents implored from the back. “We’re going to miss it. And all this winding and weaving is making us sick.”
There were few opportunities to pull over, but finally we came to a clearing in a valley that housed some kind of power plant. It was a large, unsightly structure from which a rat’s next of cables stretched across the road and disappeared into the sea of green. Next to it was a sizable gravel parking lot with only a few cars. It was hardly ideal, but with the clearing in the trees we would have a decent view of the sky. And although there were cars, we saw no people. We pulled over and unpacked the car; by this time hunger had set it, and we decided even if we weren’t going to stay we should at least eat. Somewhat cheekily, I suggested we set the chairs up in a sacred semi-circle. This we did, planting the ice chest in the middle to serve as a table. We ate hurriedly, and with some agitation. Colin kept looking up at the sky. “It’s not good,” he said between bites of his sandwich. “We’re staying,” countered my father between bites of his.
A few minutes into our picnic, a pick-up truck pulled into the lot and, much to our horror, parked just a few feet from our sacred array. It was a couple in their mid-50s. I guess it was the shade they were after, because as soon as he got out of the truck the man sat down on the gravel just behind us where a tree leaned over the lot and cast a cool shadow. Then they began to talk. They were loud, and spoke with a twang that sent splinters through my nerves. She lit a cigarette and shouted something about their being better off sitting on the wooden platform that was lying in their truck bed. The man agreed that the rocks were uncomfortable, so she began to drag the thing over. It was heavy, and I could see that she was struggling. I wondered why he didn’t get up and help. It occurred to me that we had several blankets in our car that I could easily offer them to sit on. But still reeling from the sudden intrusion and not wanting to open the floodgates to a conversation, I muted the impulse and kept eating.
I wondered where they were from. Both were wearing shorts and sneakers, and the man had a bright red shirt covered with terrible flowers set against some kind of garish tree motif. Their chatter bounded from one topic to the next as if they had a colossal case of horror vacui, but before long I was able to determine they were from Charlotte. I wondered where Charlotte was. I wondered if they’d voted for Donald Trump. The more they spoke the more quickly I ate.
When we were nearing the end of our picnic, I signaled my annoyance to the rest of the group and gestured toward the other end of the lot. As we rose, the man addressed us: “Watch out for all those cops out there now, will you?” We too had noticed the police presence in the area, and since he seemed jovial, we responded in kind. “Yeah, what do they think, we’re going to steal the damned thing?” He went on to concede that it was probably a safety issue, that people do dumb things at a time like this, adding, “Hell, we almost ran over some guy standing plum in the middle of the road!” The floodgates now open, we continued our back-and-forth while we packed up our meal. “Not that it’s anything to us if we hit him, but it does kind of ruin your day now, doesn’t it?” he chuckled. We laughed. “Yes,” I agreed, “it would rather ruin your day.”
Meanwhile, the clouds had been conspiring against us again. Now instead of cotton candy they were gunmetal grey and spread across the sky in thick, angry blankets. Every now and then a pocket of blue pushed through, and, throwing our filters to our eyes, we could see that the sun had lost a small piece of itself. It was exhilarating. It was really happening. There was still 45 minutes to go before totality, but now finding clear skies was a matter of great urgency.
But where to go? “If we keep heading north we’re going to leave the path of totality,” my father said firmly. It was a reasonable point; we were running dangerously close to the edge. We’d lost cell service with our descent into the rainforest, so now the next move was anyone’s guess. We debated options, and argued. Precious minutes ticked by. Just as we were nearing exasperation, a familiar voice shouted over from across the gravel: “It’s Sylva—you can go as far as Sylva! Just keep heading north!” We went back over to the pick-up truck and thanked them profusely. We asked what they were doing in the area, and they said they’d just dropped their daughter off at college and were heading back home. “Thought we might just be able to catch the eclipse on our way!” she shouted through her cigarette. We thanked them again, and then one last time. Pulling away, I thought again about the blankets.
It was 2:00. Now there was no time for sensory immersion; my task was to drive—carefully, but with haste. Winding through the hairpins, I wondered about the path of totality, about how precise a thing it is. Would it be possible, I wondered, to stand with one foot in it and one foot outside, so that a swift pivot in either direction would yield a different eclipse? Could we find that edge if we drove all the way to Sylva?
Finally we reached a clearing where the road opened into a straight shot across flat terrain. There were traffic lights now, and with them more people. “Just go—book it as fast as you can,” Colin said, and against voluble protests from the back, I did. The skies were remarkably clearer here—mostly that same brilliant turquoise we’d seen in the morning, only scattered here and there with a few white plumes.
Before long we came to what looked like an elementary school with large swaths of cut grass surrounding a one-story building. There were six or seven cars there already, but the fields were promising; surely with so much space we could claim an acre to ourselves. We all agreed, and I made the turn. By now it had become like clockwork, our unloading routine: Colin would grab the tripods, cameras, and binoculars, my father the chairs and ice chest, and my mother and I the batteries, iPads, cellphones, and eclipse glasses—all of it performed with military efficiency. The midday heat had gotten intense, so my parents set up in the shade near the car. “This is it, fellas,” my father announced, and I knew he meant it. But with twenty minutes to go, the rest of us were less convinced. For now the clouds seemed to be behaving, however, so I set out for the middle of a field I’d spied from the highway, thinking that if it was right I’d call the others over.
For the first time that day, I noticed my nerves were jumpy. Although I’d set up my chair exactly where I wanted it, I couldn’t sit still. A palpable strangeness had set in that made twenty minutes seem an eternity. The sky was noticeably darker now, and what remained of the light had acquired an aspect of foreboding. It was as if the world were shifting into some other dimension—one that felt inhuman, like a betrayal, nauseatingly illicit. Glancing back at the parking lot where more people were beginning to gather, I felt a penetrating ache come over me, and all at once I knew I had to head back. Leaving all my gear on the chair, I started toward the cars, and when I’d made it about halfway across the field I heard a booming, “Hello, stranger!” It was the couple from Charlotte. “Well, fancy seeing you here!” I shouted back to them, the genuineness of my affection confirming the death of the old world.
“We need to leave,” Colin said when I returned. “The clouds are coming.” And coming they were; I’d been so rattled by the strangeness that I hadn’t bothered to look at the sky. Although directly above us it was blue, the angry masses we’d left back at the power plant were catching up swiftly. I signaled to my parents that it was time to pack up again, but now the resistance was fierce. My father said he would stay, that we could come back to get him later. The two of them argued, and then my mother got in the car. “We’re going to see this goddamned thing,” I assured her. “Don’t worry about him.”
Now it was time to barrel down the highway. The roads were almost entirely clear, so it was easy to do 80. With each passing minute the sky grew darker—not dark like night, but an ever-colder and weirder blue that made everything under it inhospitable. I felt bad about leaving my father alone in the strangeness—a strangeness that was mounting and accelerating and consuming more and more of the world. Soon it would have all of it, and he would be alone in the void. But he had insisted, and there really had been no time to launch a campaign of persuasion.
With just under nine minutes to go, we spotted a traffic circle at the top of a small hill off to the right where some people were gathered. Audibly anxious about the speedy driving, my mother urged me to pull off, and since it looked promising, we agreed. Climbing the little precipice, I realized that the elevation would serve us well, even if there were people. The sky was clear now but for a single cluster of clouds, so with the final countdown imminent the mood was cautiously hopeful. I pulled over behind a police car parked on the grass, and the three of us performed our seventy-five percent of the equipment routine.
Against my usual impulses, I found myself pacing toward the small crowd in the center of the roundabout. They were teenagers, mostly, punky and tattooed, and behind them near the overpass was a cluster of cops. We were to be fellows in witness, all of us gathered here, and with the strangeness pressing in harder I felt an overwhelming urge to connect with each one of them. Coming to the teenagers first, I issued an energetic hello. I noticed that all they had were cellphones, so I made a teasing comment about their forgotten cameras. None responded. Even my hello was met with suspicion—I was, after all, emphatically not one of them. Disappointed, I went on to the cops, who were mercifully more welcoming of my unsolicited chatter. One of them had a tripod set up with a solar filter-outfitted video camera, and he invited me to look. I hadn’t seen the sun since we’d left the elementary school, and when I looked at the screen I gasped out loud. It was now almost entirely gone, and in its place was an enormous black disk as majestic as it was horrifying. “Oh my god, it’s so beautiful!” I exclaimed, and we exchanged ebullient smiles.
I couldn’t stop pacing. Back by the car Colin had set up his tripod, and he and my mother were busy shooting the sky. That’s when I realized I’d left all my equipment at my perch in the middle of the field. But I didn’t care anymore; all of that now seemed a meaningless distraction. All I wanted to do was bear witness, with my own eyes and ears and in the full presence of my being.
But now with just four minutes to go, the cloud was threatening again. I mentioned it to the teenagers to see if I could yet engage them. Receiving nothing but blank stares, I looked back at Colin and asked the question with my eyes. He waved me over in a hurried gesture and hurled the tripod through the hatchback. We’d come this far; there was no way we were going to let that cloud deny us this experience. Now my mother was vociferously resistant, but when I suggested she could stay on her own she scrambled into the car. “Please be careful!” she pleaded, and I stepped on the gas.
By now my hands and legs were shaking, and several times I thought I might vomit. By some happy accident occasioned by my compromised state, the audio record button on my cellphone got pressed, preserving for posterity our final few minutes. Mostly it's the din of the engine as we hurtle down the highway, but every fifteen seconds or so Colin announces the diminishing number.
"When?" I ask each time.
"Not yet," he says again and again.
"Soon!" my mother begs. "Please, now!"
With what was left of the sun was behind us, it was impossible to know if we'd escaped the pursuing cloud, but when Colin announced the one-minute mark we knew we had no choice. Just then, as if out of nowhere, an intersection appeared with a road leading off to the left. The light was red, so I slowed to meet it.
"Blow it?" I say to Colin.
"Yes, blow it," he says louder.
"Careful!!!" comes the shriek from the back of the car.
Colin saw it first—no cloud—and we all cheered triumphantly. There was no time to park, so I stopped in the middle of the road and flung open the door. I looked up to see that we'd landed in a Wal-Mart parking lot amid a swarming mass of electrified humanity. Bare feet scraping against sweaty pavement, everything we'd so scrupulously rehearsed evaporated in an instant. Colin managed to get his gear out, but that was it, and since I'd left my eclipse glasses in the car I had to keep glancing over at him to see when it was safe to look up. Then came the shouts from across the sea of people: "Here it comes! Here it comes!" and I looked back at Colin one last time. "Goodnight," I remember saying as the lights went out.
Forget the pictures. There’s absolutely nothing in them of the nature of the experience. It’s much smaller than you think, the little ring of fire in the sky, but its utter magnificence defies even analogy. While others would later describe seeing the haze of the corona, I did not; all I saw was a perfect black disk hovering magisterially in the sky surrounded not so much by a linear ring as by an exquisitely radiant edge. Its perfection was so stunning that I emitted a loud cry, after which came “Fuck silence!” and litany of oh-my-gods. And then there was the applause. The instant we sunk into totality, the entire parking lot erupted: there was clapping and cheering and howling and shouting, all of us together in ecstatic communion. Applause. What were we applauding? I kept asking myself. The sun and the moon for the spectacularity of their performance? For their coming through on a promise on which we half expected them to fail us? Some of it was mere release, of course— anticipatory energy finally let loose. But in those two sunforsaken minutes I was sure it was something else too: the body’s expression of a feeling for which there is no language. It’s a feeling so warm and deep and penetrating that you find yourself dissolving, every rigid fiber of your being melting into something other, something tremendous.
Overcome with this hot flush of emotion, I kept gazing around at the throngs of people, unable to stay still and concentrate on the subject. I ran back to Colin and punched him lightly in the arm. “Can you believe it?” I shouted. “Is it not the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life?” And “We did it! We did it!” and many more things. I did the same to my mother, and then, knowing there was precious little time left, I took off to immerse myself in the crowd. I saw tears, and hugs, and all manner of ecstatic faces. I saw the liquous eyes of the similarly dissolved, and suddenly it occurred to me that the feeling was love. I don’t think I ever looked back up at the sky; by then I’d recognized that the whole thing was about us.
Colin would later say that he saw the “diamond ring”—that first piercing ray of the sun from behind the great disk—but I missed that too. The air just suddenly got brighter, as if someone had opened a shade on the other side of the sky. The applause continued for a time, then dwindled, and little by little the world was restored. The experience had been so unlike anything I’d imagined that by now I was in a mild state of shock. Colin suggested we move the car so that others could use the service road, and the idea struck me as astonishingly sensible. I wondered if he’d been dissolved, and if my mother had too.
After we parked, I insisted we go find someone to take our picture in front of the Wal-Mart, and soon we came upon a family packing up their car. There was a grandmother and a grandfather and five or six kids, and we greeted each other with smiles and exclamations. Holding up a finger, the grandmother explained that she had arthritis, but said that her granddaughter would be happy to take the shot. The girl did, and we returned the favor, the grandmother beaming inside the little arc of her family. As we were leaving, I locked eyes with the grandfather. They were a pale limpid blue, piercingly alive and swollen with emotion. They were wordless eyes. I knew he had been dissolved. I knew he wanted to hug me, but now the world had returned.
Driving back to retrieve my father, we were mostly silent. I worried that he’d missed it, that the clouds had come in and obliterated the great disk. Colin wondered aloud why he’d insisted on staying. I thought about the picture I’d taken the day before, the one with all our gear standing at attention. How like fallen soldiers they all seemed now, all those tripods and cameras, defeated by a force far greater than they.
By the time we reached the elementary school the sun had almost reclaimed the sky, and everything below had been reconstituted as if nothing at all had happened. He was still seated where we’d left him under the shade of the tree, the look on his face none too assuring. Approaching, I asked cautiously, and when he confirmed he’d seen it we all exhaled in relief. Now we had permission to return to our ecstasy. Colin got the bottle of wine out of the ice chest and we pulled around to make a toast. There had been clouds, my father admitted, but everyone had seen it. I thought about the couple from Charlotte and imagined their delight.
Walking back into the field where I’d left my chair and cameras, I tried to recapture the strangeness that had sent me running from my perch. What, exactly, had been all that terrifying? It was difficult to conjure again now that the world had returned, but it had felt, very palpably, like imminent death—and like birth. Now I remembered. Strangely, it had made me think of childbirth, about what that would be like. All the anticipation, all the planning, all the anxious excitement. All the hoping and praying against the specter of the unspeakable. Would everything go as planned and turn out how it was supposed to? Or would something go terribly wrong and annihilate your world? Closer and closer and closer it comes, the threat of darkness pressing in with the agony of your body. And then it happens—it arrives—and there’s absolute euphoria. Something so perfect, so miraculous. Something so utterly beyond the smallness of your self that you feel you’ve been given a gift you’re sure you didn’t deserve. Yes, I said to myself, that’s probably what it’s like. I picked up my camera, folded my chair, and headed back toward the others.
