Before I know it, we have a hotel booked in Billings. Which is actually kind of fortunate, as I find out later that hotels, motels and campsites in the path of the eclipse have been booked, in some cases, years in advance. I guess there was a run on rooms in Casper last November. The only one I find online is a dingy motel selling its last available rooms for a mere $1500 US a night. Holy crap, Batman. So the $135/night hotel is Billings seems like a deal, even if we will have to drive four hours to get to Casper to see totality.
And totality is what it's all about. Only in the narrow zone of totality will you experience the shadow of the moon completely blocking out the sun. When this happens, you can look at the sun with the naked eye. Day turns to night. I admit it sounds cool. But twenty-six hours of driving! I had also promised myself that I would not visit Trump's America. I am not usually that political, but I've been watching what amounts to a hateful, misogynistic, country lead by a six-year old with-histrionics and an itchy Twitter trigger finger American political train wreck every single day on the news and what I see is troubling. I do not want to support that administration in any way. But I convince myself that the eclipse falls under the "Act of God/force majeure" clause in the contract as events outside of human control.
It sounds pretty cool to my 16-year-old nephew, too, so we invite him to come with us. His 19-year-old sister also thinks it sounds cool and so we have a full car. I stock up on Skittles, Hawkins Cheezies (the only real Cheezies), root beer, and my passport and hope for the best.
The line-up at the border crossing is longer than might be considered normal, almost an hour. You would think that they might have anticipated heavier than normal traffic. We inch forward to the Coutts/Sweetgrass crossing, the air around us hazy from smoke drifting in from the BC wildfires. Once across the border we can see the Sweetgrass Hills looming out of the haze, erratic and insubstantial.
Unsurprisingly, Northern Montana looks a lot like south central Alberta. Huge fields, pretty flat, some badlands. But there are differences. I've thought about it and the word I'd use to describe much of Montana is ramshackle. It looks a bit like an untidy attic. The difference is population: Whereas southern Canada holds most of the Canadian population, the Northern States are kind of like that attic, scarcely populated and with some older assets.
As we approach Billings, the flatness is interrupted more and more often by treed gullies. Billings itself is in a large, badlands-rimmed valley. It's quite beautiful, rimmed by vantage points over those rimrocks looking down at the city. It's still a bit hazy though, possibly still from those wildfires. I'd been here when I was a child, on an international Girl Guide camp (Camp Canusa, I think it was called). I remember making knick-knacks to trade with other campers out of that plastic stuff you stick in the oven that shrinks and hardens, little cowboy hats with "Calgary" written on them in black felt pen, with a pin-hole so you could fix it on your hat. I didn't remember anything of the city, other than I and two other girls were billeted at someone's house the first night, pre-camp, and we ran around the neighbourhood and through people's yards in the dark with our pajamas on, screaming and laughing hysterically. I was probably about twelve. That is my one memory of Billings.
The next morning we stumble out of bed unreasonably early, in order to make it to Wyoming in advance of the eclipse. It would be devastating to drive all this way and miss the zone of totality by a few miles. I am also praying that it will be clear, because here in Billings it's still quite hazy. We break out the Skittles quite early (it's a road trip, after all and besides the Cheezies are all gone) and hope for the best.
While Montana might be ramshackle, Wyoming is beautiful, in a rolling, green, empty kind of way. Montana is the attic; Wyoming is the guest bedroom, pristine and a bit austere with not too many guests. At some point on our right (to the West) we can see, beyond the Bighorn hills, the snow-covered peaks of the Tetons. We pass a sign directing us to Yellowstone. One day, we will go. But not today. We set the cruise control for 80 miles/130 km/hour and watch the scenery flash by. There are quite a few cars with Alberta plates on them, also evidently eclipse-chasers, but the traffic isn't heavy by any means.
As we approach Casper, the traffic gets a bit heavier. We start to see cars pulled over on overpasses, and realize we have reached the zone of totality. Charles has picked out five possible viewing spots on Google Earth, with their precise GPS coordinates, which he has programmed into his GPS unit. However, as we get closer to Casper, those overpasses and secondary roads start to fill up with more and more cars. We decide to ditch his original plans and just pick a secondary road that doesn't have too many cars on it. We don't want to miss the main event.
We join the few dozen cars on our selected road, pulling off onto the grass and opening the tailgate to sit on. My sister had the foresight to source eclipse glasses several months ago before the run on them, and so we have ISO-certified viewing glasses. A few minutes after we pull off, we can see the tiny bite of the moon's shadow on the face of the sun. Without the glasses, you wouldn't know anything at all was happening. It's still bright, and warm, and sunny. Through the glasses, the sun is a lot smaller than we were expecting it to be. So small, and yet all of our life depends on it shining, not too cold, not too hot, but just right. Our Goldilocks.
But that shadow keeps taking tiny bites out of the sun. When three-quarters of the sun is gone, you can feel that it is no longer quite so warm, nor quite so bright. I think of the first Narnia book, The Magician's Nephew, when two children visit a dying world with a dying sun. With the naked eye, it's just barely noticeable, as if a cloud was obscuring the sun. But it continues. The temperature drops noticeably. If this were a hundred years ago, or a few hundred or a thousand, I think what happens next would be seen as a sign from God, perhaps of wrath, or perhaps even as the end of the world.
The moon's shadow takes a final bite out of the sun. The world goes twilight dark, and some of the brighter stars can be seen in the sky. But I barely notice as I whip off my glasses. The sun has become a dark-centered glowing black daisy in the sky, its white petals flaming out with the sun's corona. It is fantastical, magical, awe-inspiring. Someone else sees a black hole into another dimension. For two minutes, the world holds its breath and we do, too. Then there is a brief bright flash of corona and someone shouts, "diamond ring!" and suddenly the sun is too bright to look at again without protective glasses.
My husband hugs me. His face is joyous. "Thank you for being here with me. I am so glad I got to share it with you!" And now I know why some people become eclipse-chasers, travelling the world for two minutes of totality. It is in fact other-worldly, awesome, mind-blowing. We are so small in this universe that a shadow can throw us into a twilight world. It makes me feel that we must do a better job of protecting this fragile world. We are a shadow away from all that we know.
I forget that we still have a thirteen-hour drive to get home. "When did you say the next one is? 2024? Maybe I should book something now," I say, as we climb in the car for the journey home.
