Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and follow the stars.
Or in this case, the Sun, which is a star, too. Michael and I are headed to Arkansas in a few days, where totality will be crossing right through the parents’ backyard. How could we not go?
I kind of don’t love traveling, though, after a life where traveling for music was completely normal for years. Nearly every weekend we’d pack, load the car, and take off for several days of boredom, bickering, annoyance, straight up fighting, endless driving, arguing … Ah, yeah. Maybe that’s why. Even as a kid my family traveled extensively for music, though with far less bickering (less, but not none, I was a teenager don’tcha know).
So Michael and I, who hardly ever bicker at all, decided to go for it, booked the last hotel room available in Arkansas, and away we go, just like that.
Well, not just like that.. He’s got major work stuff going on so part of his time will be spent working. The parents sleep about 16 hours a day and have no concept of time, so who knows when they’ll be awake to hang out with. The tiny town we’re staying in has nothing a heathen city girl can get her teeth into, so I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing most of the time. I’ll take my laptop and a guitar and some books …
Because sometimes you have to go and see the Thing.
I remember an eclipse happening when I was in … well, might have been high school. I remember not being allowed to go outside because … reasons? I remember being in the stairwell going between classes in windowless rooms, noticing that it was the dark of night in the middle of the day, and wanting to be anywhere other than where I was (well, that was kind of my ground state, honestly, no big surprise there). But no, we could not go outside and observe it because this is a school, dammit, and we don’t do that sort of thing here … No wonder I hated it there so much.
The eclipse in 2017 was a bit too far away for us to make it with everything else going on, but we observed here as best we could, though we had total cloud cover without a break, and of course the moon barely got her teeth into it from our perspective, so major anti-climax here. But this is the last one for a long long time on this continent anyway, so …
Gotta go see the Thing.
There are things I want to do and see, sure. I want to go to Iceland and spend a night in one of those clear domes watching auroras. I want to go to Scotland and Brittany and search for Merlin’s grave. I want to see some Roman ruins and flip them the bird (fucking Romans, what have they ever done for us?). Newgrange. Stonehenge. There are some Native American ruins in Louisiana I’d like to go see, and of course, Cahokia is right down the road, and that was a major metropolitan center not so long ago.
And you have to start somewhere, so … eclipse. Maybe we can stop in Cahokia on the way back.