Eclipse!

Early this year I heard about the coming eclipse and decided I would go see it. We were lucky because the path of totality was pretty close to the cabin, so we could make a nice trip of it.

I was expecting big traffic, so the morning of the eclipse when we drove from I.P. down to Rexburg, I was surprised by how quickly we got there -- traffic was not bad!

Scott, Heidi, and Kim had been away for a week in New York with the Hillcrest Theater class. They flew back the night before, arrived about midnight in SLC, then drove to Rexburg in the middle of the night and spent the night in the truck. They found a spot along a country road from which to watch, and we met them there.

Across the street from our view point was an out-of-place yet unusually fitting road-side ornament. Also surprising, in the same out-of-the-way spot we ran into Lori Wagner, with whom I worked for several of the early years at BioFire/ITI.

As the sun converged on the moon, we all donned our glasses and gazed upward.

As the moon started to eclipse the sun, the solar sliver got smaller and smaller. It took many minutes for the moon to block the sun. We watched with rapt attention. Then all around us it started getting dark. The feeling was almost eerie - it was getting dark and cold, yet the color spectra was not red-shifted, so the lighting seemed somehow wrong. To me it even seemed quieter out, but maybe that was my imagination.

When we finally reached total eclipse, the aura around the moon was spectacular. It was easy to gaze upon the moon without glasses, and the sky was seemingly backlit in a way that I can't describe. I was unable to capture with my camera -- it was one of those things that has to be experienced to comprehend it. 

After the total eclipse was over, we saw the process backwards, as the sliver grew larger, but no one was interested now. The minutes of complete eclipse were so spectacular that looking through the glasses was no longer interesting.

On our way home, we stopped to see the 'boat house'. The story is that after the Teton Dam broke and all the houses were ruined, these people decided to build a flood proof house. In the middle of the valley. In the Idaho desert.

It is certainly unique and fun to see.

The traffic returning home was as I had expected it to be on the way there. It took us HOURS to get from Rexburg back to Island Park. Fortunately, we had expected it and were not too bothered.

Although I thought the eclipse would be nice, I expected an event more than an experience. I was surprised. It was one of the highlights of the year and far more moving than I expected. I've talked with several people since who all felt the same way.

We were really glad we made the effort and had the opportunity to see this possibly once-in-a-lifetime event.

PS. At the end of the summer I asked the girls what their favorite thing of the summer was, and they all agreed it was the eclipse.