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Sandra Lynn Hutchison is a writer, teacher and the editor of elixir-journal.org. She lives in Orono and teaches in the Wilmette Institute and the Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education.
We were sitting in chairs on top of a hill in Island Falls. The signs along the highway had been kind, encouraging: “Eclipse traffic. Please be patient.” and “Don’t get caught in the dark. Turn on your lights.” The latter addressed to anyone who might not be aware that, as they drove north on Interstate 95 in the middle of the afternoon, they would pass through the path of a total solar eclipse. Was there anyone who was not aware? I had read that more than 40,000 people would be streaming into Maine from all parts of the country to place themselves in that path.
It was a perfect April day. The skies were clear. All we had to do was wait. And we did, with a remarkable sense of camaraderie on that remote hill in Island Falls. People had arrived early to put up tents, unpack picnic lunches. At noon, my husband heated homemade pea soup in a solar cooker. Our granddaughter played with toy horses in a patch of snow. Some children down the hill blew bubbles. As the children played, the adults counted the hours, then the minutes.
It came earlier than we expected, with the moon seeming to bleed like a pool of black ink into the fiery orb of the sun, gradually snuffing out its light, until it was gone — utterly. People clapped. My granddaughter ran between our chairs, calling out, “Dark! Dark!”
Perfect night at 3:30 in the afternoon. Not the usual night, but a darkness that was eerily wonderful. A couple of stars began to shine in the sky. Shadow bands raced along patches of snow. We looked through our glasses at the burning corona. We removed them so we could take in the darkness and view the sunset that surrounded us on every side.
As we looked, we stepped outside time, outside our ordinary lives into the rupture that is awe — awe in response to this trick nature was playing on us, a trick that was not really a trick but a phenomenon deeply integral to the vast and complex design embedded in the natural world, a world that many of us on that hill, I suspected, took for granted most days.
Now here it was: a total solar eclipse. A reminder. But more than a reminder. A call. To what if not to maintaining a sense of awe at the miraculous, dare I say magical, capacity of the natural world to unveil itself in countless diverse forms before our eyes?
I had almost said no to the eclipse, to being here, on this hill, with three generations of family and people from all over the country. I needed the time to prepare for a seminar I was leading on Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” — such an important book, I told myself, with a pivotal role in launching the environmental movement.
But in the end, I said yes to the eclipse. Instead of merely talking about the awe Carson felt for nature and the deep respect she calls us to in our relationship with all life on our planet, I had lived it, on that hill in Island Falls. And in living it, I was reminded that Carson’s call to humanity to preserve the fragile ecosystems of our planet is one that must be translated into action. As Carson wrote 63 years ago:
“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
