Eclipse

Since coming on this road trip I've not been able to sleep beyond 6.30am. Today, despite being in a deeply comfortable bed, I was awake, and bolt upright, at 6.30am on the dot. I sat on a balcony, watching the sun rise. The crickets were scraping. The birds were chirping. There are very few song birds in the States. The birds they have over here seem to be more interested in emitting little squawks and noises which sound like lorries reversing. A couple of deer ran past. A humming bird swooped down. Everything was delightfully misty.

This part of the world is incredibly humid. Not humid like Tel Aviv, but after the dry heat of the desert states, it's been quite a surprise.

Today was the day we've all been waiting for. The day we'd organised our entire road trip around. This morning, we sat by Little Grassy Lake, just outside Carbondale, and witnessed a total eclipse of the sun. A total eclipse of the sun. It's still sinking in.

We'd chosen this place, and detoured like crazy to get here, because it's the point at which this particular eclipse, as it makes its way in a giant arc across the States, experiences the longest duration of totality. Lights out for 2 minutes and 46 glorious seconds.

We thought we'd never manage to park our car. The news over here has been filled with warnings of potential traffic chaos, and as we exited Carbondale where we were staying, we instantly got stuck in a tailback of cars waiting to park in an officially designated area.

We did try to visit the exact point where scientists had suggested absolute greatest totality would take place, but it was slap bang in the middle of a farmer's field which said "no trespassing" in huge letters on the gate. Besides, we decided it was going to be much more fun to sit somewhere beautiful, surrounded by other people experiencing the same thing. An eclipse should be shared. To hell with the 0.2 seconds of darkness we missed out on!

As it happened, we chose incredibly well. The majority of eclipse chasers in this area went to local towns and sat in parks where people were no doubt selling hot dogs and eclipse glasses for astronomical prices. Our lake was off the beaten track and had 360 degree panoramic views all the way to the horizon. We didn't even need to pay to park!

Most of the people around us by the lake were middle aged men. Perhaps there's a tendency for older folk to think they might not get a chance to witness an eclipse again. And perhaps an eclipse is a bit of a boy thing? Whatever the case, everyone was highly charming, very jovial and great fun to be around.

Nathan and I were brave enough to go swimming in the lake. It was a bit murky, but terribly refreshing in the insanely brutal heat. More crucially, it filled another half an hour during the long, long wait!

The moon started to creep across the sun at 11.52am, imperceptibly nibbling away at the top right-hand corner. We had spare pairs of eclipse glasses and made a couple of old guys very happy by passing them on. One of them sounded like Peter Griffin from Family Guy. Over the next hour or so, we put our glasses on from time to time to check the progress of the moon's shadow. It looked like a pitted olive to begin with.

Perilously dark clouds started to pass over the sun at 12.12. Bad weather was forecast for the afternoon, so we got in something of a panic. How dreadful to have come all this way and not ended up with the ultimate eclipse experience - or, worse still, experienced the eclipse in a thunder storm with the windscreen wipers on. The sun reemerged after a few minutes, however, by which point it looked like Pac Man. After disappearing behind another black cloud, it looked like a half moon, and from then on we weren't troubled by clouds.

The intensity of the sun's heat had vanished by this point and a slightly eerie wind was rising. A few minutes later we became aware that the light had started to fade. It wasn't like sunset. There was no orange or red tint in the sky. Everything just felt dimmer, somehow. It wasn't the light you'd associate with the sun going behind a cloud because the shadows were still very present. It merely felt like the sun was somehow giving up, and as such, was an incredibly moving experience. As the light dropped, the strangest shadows started to emerge. I was trying to take a picture of Nathan but realised his face was much darker than his chest. It was just a weird, weird light. The sky was loosing its blueness and turning grey. It was like someone had used a filter to desaturate the world. And all the time, the temperature was dropping, the wind was strengthening, and nature was getting quieter and quieter.

By 1.10pm, ten minutes before totality, nearly all the colours had drained out of the world. A group of people in the far distance started howling like wolves. It was an utterly eerie sound to hear over the silvery lake. Shadows started to grow. People about us were struck dumb.

And then, just like that, it happened. Sudden darkness. A three hundred and sixty degree sunset. Orange and purple clouds billowing up behind the blackened trees in every direction. Stars started shimmering in the deep mauve sky. Stars! I didn't expect to see stars. The world fell into silence, and then suddenly the crickets started shrieking. Terribly loudly. They'd declared night time!

At that point it was safe to look up at the sun without glasses. It was a perfect black disc in the sky surrounded by a beautiful bright ring of white light. Uncontrollable tears started to roll down my cheeks. I didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't know where to look. I just tried to take everything in. Totality lasted two minutes and forty seconds. Two minutes and forty seconds of absolute magic. Nature's mystical gift to the world.

And then the diamond ring... A flash like magnesium in oxygen as the first rays of sun burst out from behind the moon. The crowd yelped and gasped spontaneously. It felt utterly primal. You can shove what you like at us on a cinema screen, but when nature decides to put on a show, we lose all words. The sunlight flooded back in, seemingly faster than it had left us, and fairly rapidly, we were back in a world I recognised again.

We returned to the lake for a swim whilst the eclipse subsided. There are few people who can say they've swum during an eclipse. I feel utterly blessed to have been there and experienced an eclipse the way that we experienced one. I'm an eternal pessimist, and had assumed that it would in no way be able to live up to my expectations, but, without a word of a lie, it surpassed them all. Feeling blessed.