For a weekend, the eclipse was everywhere. If you were making the drive from Fayetteville (98.5 percent coverage) to Hot Springs for its four delirious minutes of totality, you would’ve started picking up on eclipse vibes circa Alma. The local Valero was selling glasses at the counter, but you had to wait for the cashier to return from out back, helping someone buy minnows.
The impression driving south on Saturday was of a state rallying to support and to milk a local attraction. Usually in Arkansas you see this sort of roadside siren call as you approach a famous cave or a natural spring: for-sale fudge, antiques, shiny mineral bits, or some combination of the lot. The eclipse got people working an old playbook in new ways. A visitor to the area might assume this is a local hobbyhorse, a routine occurrence, not the area’s first such eclipse in a couple of centuries.
Heading further down, eclipse anticipation gathered more force. In Russellville, yard signs popped up like mushrooms: “Welcome, eclipse chasers!” Roadside swag shops made parking lots resemble fireworks season, with $20 eclipse T-shirts for sale in a Rotary fundraiser. Schoolkids in Dardanelle were out for both the 8th and 9th, a four-day weekend that, as much as any celestial watchwork on display, was proof of a divine presence.
If you wanted to see the eclipse as a sign, church marquees were primed. National Park Church in Hot Springs subtweeted the eclipse with a quote from Psalms: “The heavens declare the glory of God! And skies proclaim the work of his hands.” Out on Highway 270, the Lake Ouachita Baptist Church marquee took the opportunity to co-brand with the Almighty. “Eclipse parking here,” the marquee read, “is like salvation in Jesus: free.” By a kindred instinct, Oaklawn hosted a party whereby folks paid $20 to watch the eclipse from the race track’s center field and someone would win a Mitsubishi Eclipse.
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You had to ask, at every turn, what are the odds? The odds, for starters, that we’d be so lucky as to be in the path of totality? The last big American eclipse, in 2017, cut its swath north of Arkansas, gracing southern Illinois and western Kentucky with totality (for a relatively modest 160 seconds). What are the odds that you and the people you love will be around for the next cross-country eclipse in August of 2045 — which will also cut right across Arkansas? The odds that our planet would happen to have a moon one-400th the width of the sun and one-400th as far away, a ratio that makes a total eclipse just barely possible? The odds of this version of the universe, the one with you at the center, gazing back into the clockwork void, existing at all?
Also — it’s not really going to rain, is it? Forecast for Monday said 15%, most of that late in the day. Sunday began overcast and drizzly. Tuesday would’ve been a wash. Monday, though … Monday looked, well, like everything was falling into place.
Nothing to do till then but look at the sky, or stop by Ecliptic, the joint venture between Valley of the Vapors Independent Music Festival and Atlas Obscura, which drew a mix of astronomy nerds and crunchy music lovers (about 2,500 in total, across its four days) to a grassy hilltop at Hot Springs’ Cedar Glades Park. Adam Savage, the former co-host of “Mythbusters,” was among a few dozen folks who sipped from little cups at a lecture on local sake on Saturday. Then there was a presentation about the nature of time by LD Deutsch, which is a matter you, too, are welcome to debate.
Once the sun set, the phalanx of high-end telescopes in one corner of the big hilltop field fired up. Orion’s belt appeared in the southwest sky, hovering over a horizon dotted with the winking red dots of broadcast towers. Alt rock shoegazers Blonde Redhead played the last set of the evening, and before their final song lead singer Kazu Makino said the trio had been overjoyed to play this festival … but realized later they were two days early for the eclipse. You could hear the near-miss in her voice.
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You were alive on Monday, so you probably saw some or all of the eclipse. The afternoon’s Facebook posts from northwest Arkansas and elsewhere around the country often said something like, We got 98 percent here. It was neat. But I don’t see what the big deal is.
If you saw totality, the words that come to mind are some variation of oh, bless your heart. There’s a reason why you take a copy of a house key back to the hardware store if they only got it 98 percent right. Why you don’t file your taxes as soon as they’re 98 percent done. Why no one cares about the time you hit 98 percent of a hole-in-one. Why you don’t wrap up your wedding ceremony before both parties say “I do.”
The sun did its part by sitting still. The moon announced itself as a baby nibble on the lower-right portion of the sun and then spent a solid hour scooching its way across. The temperature dropped. The daylight seemed to kink.
At Ecliptic, a harpist named Mary Lattimore plucked on the stage as totality neared. One song was dedicated to a dead whale she found during an artist residency in California. Harp music for dead whales is exactly what you want to listen to as an eclipse deepens, it turns out. Then she played a song she wrote in honor of Scott Kelly’s yearlong stay on the International Space Station, around the time she suffered a broken jaw in a fall and couldn’t talk for two months, and pondered isolation. She emailed the song to NASA and heard back that Scott Kelly listened to and enjoyed it. Broke-jawed music for long-orbiting astronauts is also a perfect eclipse soundtrack.
A few minutes from totality, a man wearing a welding helmet joked to his friends, loudly enough for all to hear, “Who’s got the knives …? For the human sacrifice …?” People laughed.
The music stopped a few moments before totality snapped into place. Venus peeped out from the navy-blue sky. Then the sun became invisible behind the solar glasses, and everyone took theirs off to look around the dusky field, the pink-fringed horizon, and one another. If you saw it on Monday, you know: The backlit moon looked like a smoking bullet hole in the sky. The sun’s light curled around the stone-black circle like electric smoke. It was neat. I see what the big deal is.
People gasped; then they laughed at their own sense of wonder; then they laughed at the sound of other people laughing. Cannabis smoke wafted. People murmured; people kissed. Someone howled like a wolf, and a few other folks howled like wolves in response, yet somehow the actual dogs on the field kept their composure. Four minutes passed, and then the tiniest scrap of sun peeked out, absolutely blinding. Within a few minutes, the catfish food truck reopened, and the lady at the tent selling crystals was telling folks her quartz was now supercharged. Bob’s Food City in Mount Ida already had its marquee teed up for the long drive home: “WE GOT MOONED.”