Eclip's Rock's

There was a sign in Condon, Oregon read, "Eclip's Rock's." I think there were rocks for sale and it seems they don't know how to spell eclipse and they love using apostrophes. I don't know if they thought the rocks belonged to Eclip's or the eclip's belonged to the rock's.  

There is a large cast of characters in this story and at numerous geographic locations. I am pretty sure it’s confusing. That said, this story holds more truth than some. While I was away from home religious zealots came to our house. Twice. They left cards on the door with a picture of a red haired guy that was supposed to be Jesus and I am pretty sure Jesus wasn't a Scandinavian surfer. Hashtags showed how to find God on twitter. It’s a messed up world. At least I am not under water in Houston.

Tomorrow I go back to work, 7 days AE.

Eclipse, photo Sam Reese

The eclipse was cool enough that time is now reckoned as BE and AE (Before Eclipse and After Eclipse). My brother did a good job of organizing a complex family event that focused around the solar eclipse. He picked Sydney and me up at the Portland airport and he had done grocery shopping the night before. This was two day BE. We went to his house and arranged some stuff for camping. My sister and two of her daughters flew to Portland the previous night. Things were coming together. My sister reserved a rented cargo van for the trip and we picked it up at 11AM. By noon we were headed east through the Columbia Gorge. We stopped for pizza in The Dalles and got gas even though we didn’t need it. We had heard that some things like gas might be tough to find in the smaller towns. Someone planned a rave during the eclipse in the little burg of Prineville and 40,000 people bought tickets. We didn’t go to Prineville; we went to a campground just north of Mitchell, Oregon, population 130. If you count my Portland brother, his wife and kids, my Arizona sister and her two kids, my British Columbia sister, her husband and two kids, and my Arizona brother, our group alone was 8% of the population of Mitchell. Ultimately, the campground had about 800 people. I think it was wise to get gasoline as I don’t know how big the storage tank is at the Mitchell gas station. 

Sunset Priest Hole, Oregon.

We didn’t hit any traffic going down there and I was beginning to think the predictions of mayhem might be wrong. Then we pulled into the Priest Hole campground and lo and behold folks trickled in all day and previous days BE. Some arrived Sunday, 1 BE. The crowd spread over about a mile in a campground along the John Day River. On its busiest day prior it might have had 30 people. Most days less. Waits for the one outhouse were up to an hour. If you didn’t bring your own toilet paper you were shit out of luck. Literally. It was almost impossible to find a private tree to poop behind on the campground side of the river because peoples’ camps were strewn everywhere. I swam the river to find privacy. I  dug a hole with a stick and did my business. That’s the bad part of the story.

John Day River

Priest Hole is a BLM campground in a vast expanse of wide open space. The “hole” is a fishing and swimming hole on the John Day River. It’s a Wild and Scenic River with no dams.  The landscape for hundreds of miles around Mitchell is either sagebrush of short grass prairie. There are way more cattle than people in that part of Oregon. There is something to be said for that. We got settled into camp and made some dinner. Sometime the next day my sister Paulette’s family and my brother Dean showed up. Sunday night we sat up and played music by the light of a lantern. Camp fires were restricted because it’s dry, dry out there. Dry is why we were there. Clouds mess up the view of an eclipse.

Solar telescopes set up by more serious eclipsers. 

Note the smaller telescope on left is on crutches, though it’s still serious technology.

Sam picked a great locale. It’s not too hot nor too cold this time of year. In the afternoon we swam in the river. We had inflatable kayaks and other water toys to get us through the afternoon heat. Highs were in the upper eighties and lows in the low fifties. The landscape is hilly to the point of almost mountainous but not. The most noticeable feature out there is the HUGE amount of wild space. Yet, Sunday afternoon when I climbed a mountain to get a view, there were dozens of people camped up there for the eclipse. Along the river there were cowboys, nudists, serious astronomy geeks, and all manner of folks.  Nothing like it will ever happen again in Mitchell, Oregon.

The morning of the eclipse my nephew got sick. He is a trooper and didn’t complain even though he was camped out in the dirt with no plumbing. The bathroom had an hour wait and it was an outhouse. Pablo just sat in the shade and did his best to ride it out. He vomited three times. As the eclipse time approached, my sister in law helped Pablo to a chair by the river where he sat the whole time. I think he was glad he went.

Pablo feeling pretty good.

The Reese clan when 10% of the sun was gone.

As I said, we were not remotely alone. A group near us cranked out Pink Floyd music with a big stereo as soon as the first sliver of sun slid behind the moon. At first it bugged me but by the time half the sun was gone I was liking it.

And all that is now

And all that is gone

And all that's to come

And everything under the sun is in tune

But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

Eclipse, Photo Sam Reese

My sister in law didn’t share my love for listening to Waters and Gilmore during a spectacular natural event. I can see her point of view. She asked them to turn it off during totality and in a human act of spectacular, they did.  So we all sat there, the Reeses, the Pink Floyders, the cowboys, and the nudists and watched the whole world change hew. When the sun went black the temperature dropped about ten degrees almost immediately. I was shocked at the difference between totality and 98%. With a thin sliver of sun it looked mostly like day and then it wasn’t. I have never seen Venus so bright. The moon looked like the sun was a black hole. The sun was a black and the landscape looked like nothing I had ever seen. I have seen a solar eclipse before but it was annular so the sun was a ring, not covered. This was amazing. I couldn’t contain hoots and hollers, nor could anyone else. That part was weird.

Sydney with the Pink Floyd Camp in background. 

Our camp was just uphill.

There is a lot of buzz in the media these days about a group of people called the Flat Earthers. You know the folks. They amuse us. Most of the time I don’t give much thought to global curvature denialist but when the sun covers the moon it’s hard to mentally shake the fact that the universe is bigger than we can ever grasp. Global curvature is not a hoax and neither is global warming. That celestial bodies are round isn’t even the most important part. We are spinning on a ball in space circling the sun and the sun itself is a bit player in the Milky Way.  The Milky Way shone like a rock star in the Oregon sky every night. From a calculus perspective the human race is nothing at all. When you count up the number of stars the significance of one planet asymptotes toward zero and the significance of one species of apes wearing clothes even less.  Does it really matter what shirt I wear tomorrow or what religion folks belong to? The sky is way too large to care how many wives Joseph Smith had or that ten of them were married to somebody else or whether people think the earth is flat. The human race isn’t quite as important as we think it is.

Syd and Fern

I could have done without the other people at the campground. I know some experience an eclipse as a social event and I can see that point but not entirely. The sun and the moon didn’t do a dance for us or even for themselves. The sun and moon don’t even like each other and we are completely insignificant. I think part of the allure to many people is that you can’t put an eclipse on TV or any other media with any success. That media fails is part of what’s cool about it. The eclipse was viscerally real and uncopiable. There are things I don’t want to only read about or hear about. You can read about a moist wet kiss but it never stacks up to experience. Even lousy experiences exceed vicarious ones. In this case I felt I had to see the total eclipse, not just watch it in film or read about it. Totality lasted about two minutes and it ended in a white flash and all of sudden it was hot again. Over the next hour or so the sun returned to being a full sun. The moon and the sun finished dancing. Indifferent to us as they always are.

Pablo said it was the coolest thing he had ever seen even though he blew chunks again before the eclipse was completely over. After that we sort of hung out for the rest of the day and hit the road the following morning. Dean went back to the Grand Canyon, taking a couple days to get there. Sam and his family, including Pablo headed to the Medford area to my sister in laws family’s home. Pablo got feeling better and they went on a raft trip. Paulette and family went back to Canada. Janette, her two daughters, Sydney and I went back to Portland. We ate Thai food that night and slept at Sam’s house.

Wednesday morning, 2 days AE, my sister flew home and Syd and I were in Portland solo.  Sam was still on the river in southern Oregon.We rented a car and drove to Leavenworth, WA. It’s a strange and cool place. We went to Leavenworth because we wanted a road trip. It’s a four and a half hour drive from Portland.  Juneau folks don’t have a road and you gotta drive when you get the chance. Leavenworth has at least two attractions, climbing and it’s a cheesy mock Bavarian village. The latter is so cheesy that it’s fun. We ordered bratwurst and beer in big mugs. The rock climbing is phenomenal though we didn’t do as much as we wanted. Both of us were feeling ugg. I think we may have had I smidgeon of Pablo’s nausea. We sat in the shade. We had hammocks. We swam briefly in the Icicle River, no surprise that it’s cold.  That said, we climbed about two hours each day on a rock called Eight Mile Rock, which had all the elements we needed. It had climbs that were difficult for us but eventually within reach and we were camped nearby. Before we left Leavenworth, I finally climbed the route I was working on.  

I bought a guide book to climbs in Leavenworth and would like to come back. This trip was a scouting trip. We got back to Portland Friday night, 4 days AE. 

Leavenworth, Washington 

Saturday, 5 days AE, we flew back to Juneau.

It’s good to be home.