Columbia, South Carolina, is known for its excessive heat, and that’s about it. The place has its benefits, and the weather is splendid for nine months out of the year, but like some other state capitals—Harrisburg, say—it’s not a destination. When I’m in Washington and tell someone I live in Columbia, the reply is usually something like this: “Oh, right. I’ve been to Charleston.”
And that’s the way I prefer it. A lot of new people can only mean more traffic and higher taxes and more stupid arts festivals.
Nonetheless, on Monday, August 21, Columbia was a destination. People from Atlanta and Charlotte and Savannah came here, and not the other way around, because the moon’s shadow passed directly over us. For weeks, the town’s media were filled with little but the eclipse—how to watch it, whether it was likely to rain, which highways were likely to be crowded on the big day, how the last total eclipse seen in Columbia happened 375 years ago, why you’d better do your grocery shopping beforehand because we’re expecting half a million visitors to the city, and so on.
Southerners are rightly ridiculed for stocking up on food at the merest threat of snow or ice; now we were doing it in the dead of summer. All this, together with the eclipse mania happening across the country, made me dread the whole thing. I wanted no part of the fun. Plus all the focus on scanning the skies seemed vaguely astrological or pagan to my admittedly hidebound Christian sensibilities. I don’t worship the moon or the sun or both together, especially when doing so might fry my retinas.
Still, a little Baptist church down the road was hosting an eclipse party as a kind of “outreach” to the neighborhood or something, so I went along with my wife and daughters. It was hot and intensely humid, but the very sweet Baptists served cold cans of Sunkist with Moon Pies (the latter a distinctively Southern confection made of marshmallow and graham cracker and sold in plastic wrappers—rather off-putting unless you’ve grown up with them). There were games and crafts for the kids. One of my children showed me a sun made of yellow construction paper with a dark sphere pasted partially on top. In the middle of the sun were the contrapuntal words of Psalm 136:
To him that made great lights: for his mercy endureth for ever:
The sun to rule by day: for his mercy endureth for ever:
The moon and stars to rule by night: for his mercy endureth for ever.
“Weather man talks like it’s gon’ rain,” an elderly man beside me said, and indeed it looked as though it would. Twenty minutes passed, and we thought we might miss the show. But at last the sun, or the two thirds of it that remained, burst through a hole in the gray clouds. The heat was notably diminished, having been partially absorbed by the moon. Some of the mothers shouted at their children not to look at the sun until they’d put on their ill-fitting cardboard glasses. The little ones tried to look up through their glasses but either couldn’t find it or, finding it, didn’t see the big deal.
I looked through my glasses and quietly gasped: a deep orange globe with a mysterious dark competitor slowly moving to intercept it. The obscurity was still only partial, but suddenly it made perfect sense to chase eclipses all over the world, as I’ve read some people do. I had seen a partial solar eclipse once before, in 1984 or so, and found the experience unmemorable; my mother allowed me to look at it for a few seconds through a piece of wax paper. This eclipse, though, still only halfway to totality, shocked me. It was a little like being lost and suddenly finding your bearings: At last you realized you’d been standing on this great sphere as it slowly rotates to give all its surfaces a measure of heat and light. The sky grew darker. The street lights turned on and the crickets (reluctantly I imagined) began chirping. The dimmed sun gave everything around us a tint of blue I don’t think I’d ever seen. Then the sky turned almost dark as night and we shed our glasses and there it was, a flaming ring suspended in the air. I felt I could almost put my finger through it.
For a few minutes after it was over I would have crossed the world to see it again, this inscrutable spectacle of the sun and moon ruling at once. The old man beside me clasped his hands, maybe in prayer. I kept my glasses on and pretended I hadn’t cried.
