I cannot deny it is a small world. There is no way around it. I don’t know if over one million out-of-state visitors came to see the total eclipse in Arkansas. What I do know is I saw thousands of Arkansas license plates as people traveled from the edges of the state into the interior to get a glimpse of the moon completely blocking out the light of the sun.
Harrison—a small town in north, central Arkansas with a population of around 13,000—had its traffic arteries clogged like someone ate straight cholesterol. From the moment my wife and I came into the town from the west, we hit bumper-to-bumper traffic. The GPS told us it would take over 45 minutes to get through the town.
My attempt at capturing the moment
I refused to accept that. Some may call me stubborn or strong-willed. But I reject any such moniker when it comes to getting from point A to point B. More than being obstinate or willful, I loathe the prospect of remaining static. Even when standing in a line at the grocery store or in the airport, I am swaying or moving back and forth in my little area.
Out came the maps. We ended up cutting the 45-minute duration down to around 12. Not bad. It was even worse on the way back—I’ll get jump into that quagmire later.
SOME PEOPLE JUST AREN’T VERY NICE
People seem inclined to take advantage of others. Is it opportunity? Or is it callousness? As we wound our way through twisty rural roads, we saw several places offering camping and a place to view the eclipse in totality. They were charging $100!
What? Not this cheap bastard. We drove through the small town of Mountain View and noticed a nice, tranquil-looking venue next to a large pond. They had a musician playing from the back of a trailer. Kids running around playing. Wide open sky above. A food truck.
My wife had said she wouldn’t be opposed to something like that earlier during the trip. However, when we pulled over and asked the cost of such a place, the reply brought a quick but polite reply from me.
“Okay. Thank you.”
We went on. Both of us said to the other that we would not be paying $100 in order to see a celestial event. I know businesses and governments have learned how to charge for water—and they will soon have the market for clean air cornered—but charging to watch the sky? Come on. It didn’t matter that Mountain View calls itself the Folk Music Capital of the World.
THE PERFECT LOCATION—FREE OF CHARGE
So, we could enjoy the once-in-a-lifetime experience (actually, my second in less than a decade), we drove a little south of Mountain View—seeing next to no traffic going in our direction—and pulled off onto a country dirt road.
The lane snaked its way up the mountain. We saw a farmer setting up a table and grill, waving as we passed by. Finally, we reached the place I had chosen many months prior. A wide, flat area atop the mountain in the parking lot of an old country church.
During our time there, some people came into the field beside us—not staying for the whole duration—and only three vehicles passe by on the road. One was a Fed Ex truck which came and went. No one bothered us. No one charged us $100. And we left no sign that we had ever even been there. If we packed it in, we packed it out.
Arriving over an hour before the event started, my wife took a nap in the back of the truck while I ate a peanut butter-jelly sandwich and read a few chapters of Robert Jordan’s Warrior of the Altaii.
My reading entertainment
As the moon drifted through the vacuum of space between the earth and sun, we enjoyed the time together and the changes to our environment around us. As it reached totality, what happened on the horizon amazed me. To the west, it looked as if the sun had set. To the east, it looked as if the sun had begun to rise.
Crickets began calling to each other. Frogs came out and sang. Day birds settled down for a nap, and night birds began their carols. The breeze settled to nothing. The world around us felt as if it had gone to sleep. But energy and excitement coursed through us.
While we were packing up, my wife thanked me for asking her to come. She didn’t know what she would see. Now, she understands why I “geeked” out about it. Some of her own pictures are of me enjoying the event.
Alas, it ended. The moon journeyed along its orbit. The wind picked back up, and the temperature started to rise—we stopped on the way back at one place and grabbed an ice cream bar.
What struck me most was how this grand astronomical event made our world smaller.
I wish I had better equipment.
AN APOCALYPTIC SOLAR ECLIPSE BRINGS OLD NEIGHBORS TOGETHER
Just before we reached Harrison, we stopped at a grocery store to get a snack and use the restroom. Apparently, others had the same idea because a line of people waited to use the restroom.
My wife continued to the end of the line, while I stopped because an old neighbor waited at the head of it. We sold our house over a year earlier and moved 15 minutes away. What was the likelihood that we would see a former neighbor and his wife and two sons—they lived three houses down on our street—in a grocery store over a hundred miles away? What was the likelihood we would cross paths as thousands of people made that same trip?
We caught up, answering and asking questions about how things were going. Their two boys had to have grown a foot in the last year. It was great, but we didn’t have time to visit long. Both families were in a bit of a hurry. They went their way, and we went ours.
FRUSTRATING AND WONDERFUL DRIVE BACK HOME
A destination that took us just under four hours to reach turned into a nearly seven-hour return drive. And it was an adventure. It began innocuously enough as we ran into little traffic. We made it to Leslie, Arkansas without much trouble. But the 4-way stop in that little town of less than 500 persons had a line scores of cars deep.
Again, we took a short cut. Not many choices in a town that size, but we managed to get around the traffic jam and stopped at the Brick House Artisans shop—a place that sells products produced by Arkansas artists. They now have two copies of my poetry collection Newspaper Reading and one of the anthology Project Moonbase, where I have the lead story.
Brick House Artisans in Leslie, Arkansas
We met the mayor of the town—he owns the shop with his wife. We met a man from Long Island, New York. We visited a few antique shops. At one, I found a collection: Ella Sings Gershwin. My wife and I had Ella Fitzgerald’s Someone to Watch Over Me at our wedding. These four records will join the two of hers I already have.
The new addition to my vinyl collection
After roaming around the little town for an hour, we figured the traffic on our route home would have diminished. Oh, were we ever wrong. Long before we reached Harrison, the traffic had come to a complete stop. No movement—not in the direction we wanted to travel.
Not one to sit idly in a line of traffic, I whipped it around and we headed down these twisty roads with amazing vistas and over the course of two hours saw perhaps three cars at the most. People sat on their porches, worked on their farms. What we also noticed was how few homes had satellite dishes attached to them.
These people had it right. No streaming television, no distractions. No internet, no procrastination. The mere thought of how much I could write or how much I could read and learn without worrying about catching the first two episodes of Sugar on Apple tv thrilled me. Good show, by the way.
Much of those two hours, we couldn’t even get a signal for satellite radio. We had to converse with each other. After 26 years of marriage, we enjoyed the experience of simple conversation. It was like we were in our twenties all over again.
At the tiny general store we stopped at for the ice cream, we met a man who had driven up from Mississippi with his daughter for the eclipse. The old post office used to be in the store, and I had a chance to look through an old ledger with people’s signatures to receive mail. I bought a bar of homemade natural soap scented with oak moss and amber. It smells nice.
We stopped in the town of Huntsville—where I had graduated from high school 35 years ago—for dinner. She had a cheeseburger and I a Philly cheesesteak sandwich. Both were excellent. By that point, it was time that we returned to our home.
When we had left, the sun had not yet lifted her shoulders above the horizon of the world. By the time we arrived back home, the stars were shining and lightning flashed in the west. And the world was smaller and better for it.
