Free Lost In Place by Mark Salzman Page A

that you feel as if you are watching a movie, and worry that you aren’t truly grasping the experience while it is happening.
    It was the moment of a lifetime. I snapped a few pictures and turned to make sure my father was taking pictures with the big camera, only to see him frantically trying to communicate something to a group of European tourists standing a few yards away from us. After all his planning and staring at Rand McNally maps he wasn’t looking at the eclipse; he was trying to get someone
else
to look at it. At the instant of totality, they had all turned around to face the wrong way! Somebody had obviously told them that if you look at an eclipse it will hurt your eyes, which is only true of partial eclipses; during a total eclipse the harmful rays of the sun are blocked, and you’re treated to one of the greatest spectacles on earth. Dad was pleading with them to turn around, trying to explain why it was safe, but they didn’t understand English and looked as if they thought he was some kind of maniac. Eventually they got angry, clopped off in their strange-looking sandals, got into their rental car and drove off without ever looking up.
    The eclipse was spectacular, but I don’t think I would remember it so clearly if it hadn’t been for that hapless group. The fact that they had made the trip to the beach to see the eclipse and then didn’t dare look at it made the sight of that velvet-black disk seem especially rare and beautiful. It also provided me with a memorable image of my father. Totality during that eclipse lasted just over two minutes, and he spent fully half of that time trying to get a bunch of strangers to enjoy it. I suppose it revealed something about my own odd sense of priorities that I feltobliged to spend that whole minute watching him miss the damn thing.
    No sooner did we make it back to Connecticut than my father began preparing for our next trip. This time the whole family would go. The next total eclipse visible in North America was predicted to occur two years later, in July 1972; after that, the eclipses for the next century would all occur in places like Africa, the Indian Ocean or the Arctic Circle—out of range for us and our Volkswagen—so a sense of finality hung over this adventure from the start.
    Dad calculated that the best place to see the eclipse would be Cap Chat, a town, once again on the water, on the Gaspé Peninsula in northeastern Canada. Our route this time was more complicated, involved several highways and even some local roads, so Dad began examining his maps over a year in advance.
    We put a tent on top of the Volkswagen and camped our way north, finally reaching Cap Chat late one morning and having to ask a chain-smoking, French-speaking twelve-year-old to direct us to a spot where we could pitch our tent. We settled on a site in a large, barren field on the outskirts of town. By the next morning we were surrounded by hundreds of tents, each one with a fabulous camera, telescope or other type of instrument perched in front of it. This was a scene entirely different from the one in Virginia. There were no hapless tourists anywhere, but instead hundreds of professional and serious amateur astronomers from all over the world. I had never seen such a variety of technology or heard such a variety of languages.
    The third day was the day of the eclipse. At six thatmorning we woke up to blue skies. There was only one small cloud on the horizon, so small and distant that most people ignored it, but not my dad. He squinted at it for a long time. Finally he shook his head and said quietly, “It’s going to kill us.” He crawled back into the tent looking defeated, which seemed awfully premature.
    By noon that cloud was a lot closer to the sun, it looked bigger, and it was no longer alone. People around us were beginning to get nervous, but by no means did the situation seem hopeless.
    At three o’clock the clouds joined and covered the whole sky, and from