{"id":42,"date":"2017-08-28T00:47:28","date_gmt":"2017-08-28T00:47:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/?p=42"},"modified":"2017-08-28T00:47:28","modified_gmt":"2017-08-28T00:47:28","slug":"totality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/2017\/08\/28\/totality\/","title":{"rendered":"Totality!"},"content":{"rendered":"

For several days starting even before we got to Eugene, eclipse plans were part of every conversation. \u00a0Our friends Anna and Jose who had moved to\u00a0Eugene from Long Beach told us they had a camper. \u00a0We told them they should take it up into the path of totality, and stay in it the night before (they did). \u00a0Colin\u00a0and Natacia planned a week camping in various wilderness areas, and witnessing totality there. \u00a0The other Eugene residents had various\u00a0plans to drive on back roads up to a town just west of Corvallis. \u00a0Most of the Sunriver crew saw the eclipse in Madras or Culver; a dozen flew up there\u00a0on a little plane which had gotten one of 500 landing spots, spaced 50 seconds apart, for which an air traffic controller had been brought in specially.\u00a0\u00a0The inmates near John Day, already being almost on the centerline, were hopeful they\u2019d get a chance to see the eclipse; we gave them some glasses\u00a0to help. \u00a0Our friend Mark from Seattle met some of his friends on a forest road near John Day. \u00a0And a couple of the guys at Clear Lake went to\u00a0Oregon, one to a big festival with 40,000 people, and the other to a hayfield in Culver.

I had long viewed the eclipse as a good excuse to see Jill, my sister, who I hadn\u2019t seen for a few years. \u00a0My cousin Carole suggested a family reunion\u00a0in Kansas City, but I talked her into doing it in Boise where the weather prospects were better (clouds kill eclipses; fortunately there were no clouds\u00a0anywhere in the West, not even at the coast.) \u00a0Her brother Hugh and his wife Rita live in Boise, and their house became a base of operations. \u00a0Carole\u00a0and her husband Larry flew up from Garden City, Kansas; cousin Scott from Phoenix flew up; and cousin Ryan from Santa Clara flew up with his family\u00a0(though their flight was overbooked, and his wife Beth didn\u2019t make it until Sunday morning, after being incorrectly rerouted, fixing it herself, and spending the\u00a0night in Portland with Ryan’s sister Larissa.) \u00a0And Jill drove down from Bozeman with her daughter Annika, who had rather dramatically changed from\u00a0being 9 when I\u2019d last seen her, to being 14. \u00a0Hugh and Rita fixed dinner for all of us for three nights, assuming that restaurants would all be too\u00a0crowded.

On Sunday<\/strong> we did a reconnaissance trip with Ray\u2019s college friends Bob and Joyce and their son John. \u00a0We went north out of Boise up highway 55,\u00a0which was a narrow river canyon. \u00a0I wanted to check out Garden Valley, which Ryan had told me was a \u201cwide valley\u201d after looking at Google Earth.\u00a0\u00a0So we turned up highway 17, another narrow river canyon, turned left at Crouch, and went up the road through the valley. \u00a0Most of it was pretty\u00a0unfriendly (lots of \u201cprivate road\u201d signs, and even one that said \u201cGet Bent\u201d) but there was a county road across the valley, and as it started up the hill\u00a0we saw a place called \u201cDino\u2019s Taxidermy\u201d. \u00a0Our curiosity was piqued, because it was in such a perfect spot. \u00a0We stopped; Dino came out and said\u00a0\u201cAre you OK?\u201d \u00a0Bob said \u201cwe\u2019re looking for a place to watch the eclipse\u201d, Dino said \u201cI don\u2019t care where you watch it\u201d. \u00a0He was incredibly friendly and\u00a0funny and had tons of stories, and we agreed we\u2019d be there in the morning. \u00a0Our recon was complete, and we drove back to Hugh and Rita\u2019s for\u00a0dinner.

Sunday afternoon it clouded up, but they were afternoon clouds. \u00a0I worry about that, anyhow.<\/em>

At 6am Monday<\/strong> morning, five cars including the 13 family members and the 3 college friends headed up to Dino\u2019s. \u00a0There were many cars on the road,\u00a0but we were able to drive the speed limit all the way there. \u00a0We ended up with a little time to kill, and headed back to Crouch to shop for more eclipse\u00a0shirts. \u00a0We returned to Dino\u2019s and set up chairs out in the middle of his horse pasture, and waited for the eclipse to begin. \u00a0Dino joined us when it did.\u00a0\u00a0At one point Ray told him that an eclipse phenomenon was that birds go roost a little while before totality as it starts getting dark and cooling off. \u00a0And\u00a0a few minutes later, Dino pointed out \u201cthere go the magpies roosting in their tree. \u00a0And there go the ravens to their tree. \u00a0And there go the doves.\u201d \u00a0We\u00a0passed around Verizon phones to talk to a few family members who were elsewhere (AT&T doesn\u2019t really do rural much.)

And then totality happened. \u00a0There were easily visible shadow bands that many of us saw (I forgot to look, I was concentrating on the sun.) \u00a0The\u00a0corona looked to me like a devil\u2019s head, with pointy ears and a very long pointy beard, probably the longest corona I remembered. \u00a0Prominences at 12\u00a0and 3 bracketed a solid stripe of chromosphere. \u00a0Regulus was visible near the sun with binoculars, and Venus is always visible, but I didn\u2019t see\u00a0Mercury or Mars. \u00a0Of the 17 of us there, it was the first total eclipse for all but three, and I was happy to have helped get them to that place to see it.

After the sun came back, we took a little tour of Dino\u2019s house and taxidermy studio. \u00a0He has an elk and three antelopes mounted in his living room,\u00a0which he shot and stuffed decades ago. \u00a0Modern taxidermy consists of ordering a foam form from one of the companies that make them, and\u00a0stretching the hide and antlers over it, with perhaps a plastic jaw and tongue, and glass eyes.

As heavenly as the eclipse was, the ride back was hell. \u00a0It took four hours to drive back to the hotel. \u00a0The narrow river canyon roads had become\u00a0parking lots. \u00a0Ryan and I walked 20 car lengths to each other\u2019s car, and he gave me back a radio so we could at least talk to each other on the way\u00a0back. \u00a0When Ryan got back his cell coverage, he learned that his flight the next morning had been canceled, and he ended up having to rent a larger car\u00a0and drive 11 hours all the way back to the Bay Area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For several days starting even before we got to Eugene, eclipse plans were part of every conversation. \u00a0Our friends Anna and Jose who had moved to\u00a0Eugene from Long Beach told us they had a camper. \u00a0We told them they should take it up into the path of totality, and stay in it the night before … Continue reading Totality!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}