This article is part of a special report on the total solar eclipse that will be visible from parts of the U.S., Mexico and Canada on April 8, 2024.
I couldn’t bear to look outside.
After more than one year of planning, scrapping those plans, replanning and scrapping again, my perfectly-laid third plan to watch the solar eclipse in Texas was in the most dire of straits because of a blanket of clouds obscuring the 9 A.M. sun that normally flooded my office.
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The National Weather Service in Fort Worth said in a tweet that maybe, if we were really lucky, the clouds would part long enough to see totality. I was in space-nerd despair.
We’d decided a few weeks ago in my household to forgo the trip to the Hill Country and watch the eclipse together, as a family, in Dallas. Then, that plan unraveled. I decided to send my toddler to school, rather than fight with him over wearing glasses to safely see something he would likely not remember. A few days before the event, my older child started vacillating between coming with me to NASA and NOAA’s eclipse event at the Cotton Bowl stadium and going to school to watch with her classmates. Once the prognostication included clouds, clouds and more clouds, even my partner threw in the towel, thinking he would probably go to work. And so, after reading all the stories about how eclipses bring us together in our shared humanity, I’d likely be watching it alone.
There is nothing wrong with being alone, of course. Even in a crowd, how we experience any event is so very singular. Celestial events are no different; they give us momentary escape, our available senses narrowing in on a moment, our brains focusing on the significance of how insignificant we are, and yet how significant we are in being in this exact place at this exact time to see this exact confluence of things we measure in millions of miles.
There is something about witnessing history with other people—a sort of existential affirmation that indeed, I am real and I am experiencing this event because all around me, other people are seeing or hearing or touching and tasting the same thing I am. Undoubtedly they are interpreting this event differently than I, but we are truly flesh and bone, not a simulation, not the dream of some otherworldly being, sharing the here and now.
But among the small crowd at the Cotton Bowl, an open-air football stadium in Dallas that holds more than 90,000 people, we were all reminded how little control we have over life, how the clouds we will be soon be desperate for in Texas were robbing, changing, doing something to the moment we were all hoping to have. I have nothing against clouds; my first name means clouds, yet, as they dissipated right as the moon crossed the sun, the music went dim and the voices hushed, I was engulfed by the most joyous solitude. I stood shaking my head, laughing and crying at the same time, as the temperature dropped, and birds suddenly started flitting about.
What must our ancestors have thought in the minutes when the skyward objects we sometimes worshipped behaved so erratically? We know, from history, that there was panic. Awe. Joy. Violence. And what must have the astronomers of yore (especially the female ones whose observations have been overlooked or erased from history) thought as they gazed into the sky during moments like this, ascribing natural processes to these formerly supernatural events? I don’t think language can adequately describe the biochemical surge of serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine, and the inner workings of a hypothalamus and pituitary gland simply responding to existence. I’m certainly failing to find the right words.
But this is the beauty of curiosity, of science, of the seeking of knowledge and the experience of the natural world that drove so many millions of us on Monday to abandon our plans, to skip work and school, to stand in fields and stadiums, and on front porches and highway shoulders, in unison, to be completely alone in a magnificent thing.
As the partial eclipse began, I wandered the stands of the Cotton Bowl, talking to people who had made this choice. Kimberly Werth, who had come to Dallas alone from Asheville, N.C., amid a massive life change, dignified in her solitude; and a family of four from Dallas, celebrating a birthday of one of the children, celebrating another child’s love of space; and the curiosity of a third on a day when her college professors had given her and her classmates freedom to satisfy their curiosity. The children’s mother, Ana Rivera, explained to me in Spanish how coming to the event was the best way for her daughter to learn and understand what was happening in the sky above her. To best appreciate her own moment of totality.
After the event, I sat with Werth for a few minutes, in her gratitude, talking about how much she had changed from the solar eclipse in 2017 and how much she had grown in that time to fully appreciate that Monday in Dallas, in 2024, in time and space.
I recognized the same—the events that had transpired in my life in those nearly seven years, and who I was on Monday compared to 2017: an editor at Scientific American; a mother of two kids, missing their presence in the magic of the afternoon; a caretaking daughter who had just spoken to her mother, watching from home because a stadium was just too hard to manage; a friend, answering texts from the people in her life sharing these four minutes with her remotely; and a partner to an amazing person who was standing next to me when totality struck. During totality, though, all those parts of me disappeared, and I was completely, wonderfully, gratefully, by myself.
Deep in his own experience, trying to be completely present, my partner took a short video of the blackness before putting his phone away. One of the hosts of our event, her voice projecting the fundamental affirmation of our very existence, said: “Enjoy every minute.”
I did. I still am.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American