Free Lost In Place by Mark Salzman

say that it is like driving through a blizzard at night, and that it is the only time a person can actually sense the earth’s movement as it hurtles through space at nearly seventy thousand miles per hour. Despite his perseverance over the years, my father has never seen a meteor storm. One did occur in the early1960s, but that year the skies over Connecticut were overcast.
    All sorts of things can frustrate an astronomer’s attempts to observe a rare event or a particularly distant object. Even one’s own personality can get in the way. In 1970 my dad drove Erich and me down the coast to Norfolk, Virginia, to see the most spectacular of all astronomical events visible with the naked eye: a total eclipse of the sun. He had planned the trip several years in advance, the last three months of which he spent poring over maps of the eastern United States, even though Interstate 95 took us the whole way. He had three cameras ready, two handheld and the other fixed on a tripod, and led Erich and me through several practice sessions where we choreographed what stages of the eclipse to watch out for, who would be in charge of what camera, and what to do in case one of them jammed.
    At last the time came. Dad woke us up at 1:00 A.M. , tucked us into the back of the Volkswagen bus, and we drove all night. Erich and I tried to prove how big we were by staying awake, but by the time we reached Rye, New York, we were both snoring. I do remember waking up at about 4:00 A.M . when Dad stopped for gas and got his thermos filled with coffee. The smell of coffee in the middle of the night in a car on a highway, somewhere in a part of the country I’d never been to before, made me feel like one of the astronauts on his way to the moon.
    We drove and drove; we saw the sun come up in Maryland, and arrived at Cape Charles beach at around ten-thirty. We had a few hours to kill, so Erich and I paced up and down the beach, collecting crab claws for Rachel and poking at a huge dead seagull with sticks. We waited and waited for so long that I lost track of what exactly it waswe were waiting for. Dad had us look through strips of exposed film at the sun, and we could see that its image was now in the shape of a crescent. The moon really was there, and at least it was on track. Still, as soon as you took away the strip of film, the sunlight seemed just as bright as always, and the world didn’t look changed at all. Erich and I were getting impatient; so far this was not worth the drive.
    But then it seemed that at a certain point the world got dusky. It was as if a soft, brownish dye had been added to the atmosphere. My father began to get focused and told us to get ready. Ten long minutes passed; then he pointed out over the ocean and said, “Here it comes.”
    During a total eclipse the moon blocks out the sun entirely, casting a perfectly round shadow on the earth. Since the earth spins on its axis toward the east, the shadow always moves west; because we were standing on the Atlantic coast, the shadow raced over the water directly toward us, allowing us to see it from quite a distance. It was a distinct wall of darkness that spanned the horizon, and it was moving
fast
. When it reached us, everything changed without a sound.
    The whole sky went ultramarine, the color that appears in every child’s paint set, and which every child uses to depict the sky. No sky is ever really that blue, however, until you see an eclipse, and then it really
is
that blue. The color was so rich and deep that the stars shone through it, while the horizon glowed a luminous red. The air had been full of noisy seagulls, but when the shadow hit they went silent and dropped like stones into the water. I looked upward and saw, right in the middle of the sky, an indescribably lovely soft white glow. Right in the center of it was a perfect coal-black disk, the image of the moonin front of the sun. It was one of those rare occasions when reality becomes so absurdly unreal