We had driven from Colorado to East Texas for the eclipse. The only other people in the vicinity were the guests of the other cabin on the forested property, a family of four who arrived in a white pickup with Texas plates. All of them wore jeans. The son, probably about sixteen, was practicing his form with a wooden katana the morning of the event.
The forecast had not been promising. Overcast was expected, and thunderstorms.
We—the Texan family and my wife and I—were watching the sky, which was not quite overcast, from a clearing on the property. I was observing the motion of the clouds and checking my watch constantly.
When the time of totality finally arrived, the sun was invisible behind a cloud. Crestfallen, I was looking not at the sky but at the silhouettes of the trees against the twilight that had engulfed the world.
The daughter of the Texan family said, “Look! Look!”
There it was. A black sun. It gave me the distinct impression of a strange jewel. What I learned later were solar prominences were twinkling around its periphery like red glints off the facets of a stellar diamond.
The father said “The ring of fuckin fire.” Then he said it again. “The ring of fuckin fire.”
People say that pictures don’t do it justice. What do they mean? What they mean is that if you are there you are actually there. The black sun is actually there in the sky and you are actually standing there in the twilight.
The pictures are, incredibly, true to life. The actual sight of it is only different from the pictures in that the pictures are taken through telescopes zoomed in on the impossible object so that it takes up the entire frame, making it seem somehow more impossible, whereas in real life the thing is up there in the sky, the size of a quarter, and you are down here on earth, and it is happening to you.
An hour later, a vague panic. I felt that I could not remember what it looked like. I was angry at myself for not making a greater effort to encode the experience. I strained to conjure the image in my mind; it was impossible. I could articulate details of the memory: the fact of the impression of a jewel, the fact of the blackness of it. But the actual image was as elusive as if it were from a childhood dream. I felt as if I had failed some important test.
That night, a vicious thunderstorm came over East Texas, one of the most intense I’ve ever experienced. I could not sleep for anticipation of the thunder, which was so close I could hear the texture of the rips it made in the atmosphere, and I could feel the energy it imparted to the earth.
We rose at 4:30 in the morning for the journey home, and it was still raining and thundering in the dark as I loaded the car, a little afraid, out there away from all artificial light save for the one on the cabin porch. It rained all the way into the afternoon. In Amarillo there were floods.
We listened to the audiobook of The Road, which was a little too on-the-nose for the desolation we were driving through: half a dozen dying towns along the Texas-Oklahoma border separated by hours of nothingness.
“Why would anyone live here?” I said. “Why don’t these people just leave?”
“They are leaving,” my wife said. “That’s why it’s like this.”
There’s a quote from The Road that I can’t reproduce perfectly now because I didn’t have the text in front of me from which to copy it down. But it was something about how when you remember something you are damaging the actual thing. Which is true. Every time you access a memory you are altering it slightly, weakening it and imbuing it with new context, and so our memories are not so much the record of our lives as they are an aspect of them that changes fluidly along with everything else.