We’re waiting for totality … sitting in the shadow of the moon.
It’s hard to explain how the light changes. It feels something like late evening at first, sliding into dusk. When we drove bumpingly down the short dirt lane into this field, the sky was deep vivid blue. Within a few minutes we could see the colors shift, as though the light were lengthening, the sky a shade more slate, a white glow on the horizon.
On Monday afternoon, between 3 and 3:30, we’re sitting on a fallen tree by the Connecticut River, in a town called Lunenburg. (The name may really come from old English if you look back far enough … but right here and now, up the road from Loon Mountain, it feels like a good place to watch the moon cover the sun.
It’s the closest I’ve ever come to a solar eclipse. And given how long it will be before the next one crosses the continental U.S., it may be the closest I’ll ever come. We watch the progress in glances through our (NASA-approved) glasses. Even when the day looks bright, the sun is covered except for a crescent like a new moon.
The light seems a different kind of straw-gold on the grass, the water rippling a different kind of dark amber under the tree. And then suddenly the sky is darkening into deep twilight.
The sky-view through glasses is uniform black. We get a quick flickering vivid glimpse of the white rim of light at the total eclipse. The horizon is glowing flame orange. At full totality, sunset is supposed to appear for 360 degrees.
And then … we’re sitting in a sunlit field again. We’re just off a country road, just about shouting distance from the New Hampshire line maybe 20 miles north of the White Mountains and south the Canadian border.
The trees along the river are showing a fuzz of early spring leaf buds, and we sit for awhile in the quiet. The road home will run a long way through spruce and pine, boreal forest with moose crossing signs. Apparently moose like to spend the winter in coniferous forests, and some day I’d like to walk up here in the fir woods, in the sun.
Light dances in the solar eclipse, along the Connecticut River in Lunenberg, Vermont …
Sunlight touches the Connecticut River under a vivid blue sky in Lunenberg, northern Vermont, half an hour before totality in the solar eclipse.
More events coming up …
