Peek-a-Boo
Somewhere on Earth, there’s a total solar eclipse every eighteen months or so. Once in awhile, it’s the turn of our hood to be awed into awareness of how much we take our dependable old superstar for granted, as it plays scary peek-a-boo for a few chilling minutes.
Ancient sky watchers knew enough about the heavenly bodies to predict eclipse patterns, but not enough to figure out the best earthly locations to encounter them. But in 1715, the astronomer mathematician Edmond (the Comet) Halley deciphered the necessary celestial mechanics to open up a whole world of burgeoning travel opportunities for future ecliptomaniacs, who can now make accurate vacation plans up to a thousand years in advance.
So - in June 1972, 834 passengers and a cat boarded the luxury liner Olympia, bound for a mid-Atlantic rendezvous with a few minutes of solar blackout. Fortunately, the skies were clear when the object of their attention switched off, whilst the ship’s band played “You are my Sunshine”. Not to be outdone was the group of scientists who in June 1973 left a Gran Canaria runway to chase the sun at 55,000 feet in Concorde, equipped with four specially modified roof portholes. Remarkably, through some miracle of precision engineering, they clocked up the perfect ongoing interception to experience no less than 74 minutes of constant solar obliteration.
Today’s eclipse chasers plan their encounters for years in advance, and for many it becomes an addictive way of life. One 105 year-old Texan amateur astrologer has pursued and witnessed thirteen ‘totals’, his latest last week, from his own backyard. A week in which some 34 million people experienced the awe of watching the raw mechanics of our solar system across a select strip of America. For the many communities that lay in its path, the awe was somewhat overwhelmed by the equally raw mechanics of fleeting hyperpopulation. And as a side-effect, Texas (with America’s second largest solar capacity) lost a massive 60gigawatt drop in solar energy production in those few precious minutes.
Way back, on Wednesday June 30th 1954, our school lunchtime was oddly irregular. We ate earlier than usual, before being stood in line in almost military manner, to be issued with pieces of smoked glass. After a list of behavioural rules and a cursory explanation of the impending event, we assumed our positions, spaced along the painted lines of the playground netball court. I recall the deep inner Quiver of Significance, and the assuming of a suitably dramatic rooted stance as I found myself peering up at the sun through the compulsory and apparently protective shard. It seemed to take forever, but then it got so very cold, and I was a mess of goosebumps both outside and in when the corona finally appeared. Some of the children started to cry, and Roger Grant peed himself. And then we were ushered back inside for dead flies rolypoly and custard, followed by a Maths lesson. As if nothing had happened. That evening, my father enthusiastically explained it all with diagrams and lots of strategically placed Maltesers.
He and I often sat out in our small garden gazing into night skies so much darker and unblighted than now. In 1957, with binoculars, cocoa and hot water bottles, we witnessed the sparkly bimbling path of Russia’s Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite. Just a month later, Sputnik 2 was launched, carrying a small stray Moscow mongrel called Laika, triggering me for many nights of tearful shivering stake-outs, even after she’d perished on the fourth of her 2,000 orbits. This too was around the time that I’d started to wrestle with the concept of infinity and beyond, and general what’s it all aboutness, as do we all …
In August 1999, I was visiting dear old dad in hospital, and though aware of it, the pending eclipse wasn’t on my agenda. It was ward lunchtime, when suddenly there was an influx of doctors and nurses, clutching and distributing old X rays, as they headed for the fire door at the end of the ward, leading to a long balcony & fire escape. Their repressed excitement was palpable, so for just a few perfectly timed and snatched minutes, I left dad fiddling with his box of Maltesers to join them. Perched on a fire escape with a huddle of dedicated multi-coloured uniforms was a fine way to bear tingly witness once again to the surreality of an absentee sun. This time my eyes were protected by an old X-Ray of somebody’s skull.
Across the millennia, eclipses were random and alarming phenomena, which fuelled mighty legends and fired up bargaining rituals and contracts twixt men and gods. Most of those legends involved the devouring of the sun by mighty mythological beasts - from dragons in ancient China, to a naughty black squirrel in native North America. But I want us all to believe in what may be the most fanciful of them all: the ancient Battammariba peoples of Togo and Benin in North West Africa still believe eclipses to be initiated by human anger and conflict, which causes the sun and the moon to fight. It is thereby the duty of human beings to end their feuds and to make peace with one another.
Amen to that. Might there never be another eclipse …