Fueled by pure cold brew concentrate and the obvious Pink Floyd album, we arrive at the Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge at 4am the morning of the eclipse. We find a stretch of gravel where a car isn’t already parked and we pile out to see the stars. Too caffeinated to nap, we take off down a trail into the refuge. To our left a field of reeds, to our right a windbreak of blackberry shrubs. They’re covered in Pacific chorus frogs, and surely also the excretions of those frogs, but we make them breakfast anyway, and they’re delicious when you don’t think about them too hard.
Someone is trying to time sunrise with Also Sprach Zarathustra, and eventually they play it enough times to get it right. The first hours of morning bring a lightening that soon gives way to a different darkening, unlike nightfall. The shadows grow longer and sharper, even the hairs on my hands cast shadows now. Through our glasses the sun goes from a circle to the face of a cat, a banana, a toenail clipping, then a thin smile that seems to say: “Goodbye, planet Earth. I’ll see you when I see you.”
The darkness now is unreal, a thin horizon of sunset under a dome of night. It’s cold, and the wind sounds like rain. The moon is a black orb over a white arrowhead, the corona of the sun a halo of tendrils. Nearby, someone proposes to their partner, someone else dashes into the bushes to drop their bowels. From every corner of the refuge, people scream, cry, howl like wolves. Suddenly our god has abandoned us—the conditions which permit life on earth have ceased. And just as suddenly, they return. The moon is very small, but when positioned right it blocks the massive sun. So set yourself in a place of strength, and you’ll conquer the mightiest of rivals.
It’s been five years to the day since my brain surgery. I love coincidences like this.
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