Welcome to the ‘Oclipse’
Reading Time: 5 minutesI Watched the ‘Oclipse’—I Can’t Believe I Almost Missed Out On It, I trekked to Oberlin to watch the eclipse, where the forecast was looking cloudy. I can’t believe I almost didn’t go., Eclipse in Ohio: What it was like to watch at Oberlin College.
Over the past few weeks, I spent an inordinate amount of time considering whether to travel to northern Ohio for the eclipse. Each morning I reloaded the tab in my browser that contained the Washington Post’s eclipse cloud forecast, and each morning I despaired as the forecast for northern Ohio got a little cloudier: 45 percent cloudy, then 51 percent cloudy, then 57 percent cloudy. ‘It’s a coin-toss,’ the Post noted of Cleveland, the nearest major city to Oberlin, where my daughter attends college. I’d reserved a hotel room in nearby Elyria six months before; I’d purchased eclipse glasses from a reputable dealer. But did I really want to go all the way to Ohio just to stare at a bunch of clouds, then have to drive six hours home?
I posed my dilemma to an actual advice columnist—MediaDownloader’s Michelle Herman, of Care and Feeding fame—and she strongly implied that if I was considering not visiting my daughter at college because it might be cloudy, I was an idiot. OK, OK, I said, and arrived in Oberlin Saturday afternoon.
Oberlin has branded the eclipse the ‘Oclipse’ and, like all towns in the path of totality, had scheduled an entire weekend of events around it. Unlike those other towns within the path of totality, Oberlin’s events included a concert Sunday night by student ensembles dedicated to nontraditional composition and improvisation, playing a piece they devised called ‘Eat the Sun.’ ‘EAT THE SUN,’ they chanted together, while making cacophonous sounds with their instruments. Oberlin had also commissioned work from the contemporary composer and ‘text-sound artist’ IONE, which involved turning out the lights in the concert hall. Lyra and I sat there in the dark as a cello growled, a saxophone blared, and cosmic waves of sound washed over us. The only light came from the blue-glowing faces of electronic musicians fiddling with their laptops onstage. ‘That was cool,’ Lyra said.
As we left the concert hall, a group of students had started a campfire in Tappan Square. The lobby bar at the town’s only hotel—usually so desultory on non–parents’ weekend weekends that it closed around 8—was jammed with visitors from surrounding states. The forecast may have been grim, but an atmosphere of good cheer prevailed. The bar had run out of a number of beers.
Back at my hotel in Elyria—a Red Roof Inn that was in only marginally better shape than the boarded-up Days Inn across the street, whose sign now read AYS INN—the desk clerk was selling eclipse glasses for $5. In my room, I taxed the hotel Wi-Fi to its limits planning routes to the west. In Oberlin, the day was supposed to start out cloudy, with bluer skies peeking through as the day went on and a front passed through. The farther west you went, according to the forecast, the better the chance of clear skies, with Indianapolis sitting at a glorious 25 percent cloud cover. I flagged in Google Maps the locations of small towns in the path of totality: Tiffin, Findlay, Lima. If necessary, I thought with determination, I would kidnap my daughter and her roommate, Fern, and hit the long, pencil-straight Midwestern roads to Indiana.
I dreamt of dark clouds and the groans of discordant strings. But when I woke, the sky was entirely clear. It was going to be perfect. At the crowded coffee shop in Oberlin, three employees were swamped by hordes of cheerful customers in eclipse-branded T-shirts. They were clearly having the worst day of their working lives, but at least, like every other business in town, the café would close at 1. I sat next to a family who had also come to visit their daughter. They were debating whether to go to the official Oberlin Oclipse event on the school’s athletic field or to head out to a nearby state park. ‘If we don’t go to the field, we won’t be able to meet those boys,’ the girl said. Simultaneously, her father said, ‘What boys?’ and her mother said, ‘Oh, that’s a good point.’
On campus, kids walked around, blinking in the bright sunlight. ‘Is the eclipse just here or is it, like, everywhere?’ I heard one student ask another.
‘It’s only along the path of totality,’ her friend replied.
‘Oh, wow.’
At the gate to the football field—Oberlin does have a football team; they’re called the Yeomen and they compete in Division III—administrators handed out Oberlin-branded eclipse glasses. A jazz trio swung gently by the concessions stand. Yeobie, the school’s mascot, an albino squirrel wearing Birkenstocks, wore his own gigantic shades. A professor of astronomy made periodic declarations about the eclipse and invited people to look at his Oclipsinator. Lyra laughed. ‘Perry the Platypus, you’ll never stop me and my Oclipsinator,’ she declared.
Lyra greeted her Japanese teachers, sitting nearby. They told us that the Japanese word for ‘eclipse’ is nisshoku. ‘Nichi is ‘sun,’ ‘ one said, ‘and oku means ‘eat.’ ‘
‘EAT THE SUN,’ we replied.
The moon had eaten about half the sun and it was getting noticeably cooler on the field. Students who had shed layers an hour before started putting them back on. This was very apparently the greatest day of the astronomy professor’s life. ‘Astronomy 100 students, if you want observing credit—and this is the easiest observing credit you’ll ever get—you gotta sign in,’ he said. He sounded a little manic. ‘Don’t just tell me you’re here. There’s no way I’ll remember.’ I walked over to the Oclipsinator, a large pinhole camera that projected the eclipse onto a white card. A girl posed by the eclipse image. ‘Point-5 me,’ she instructed a friend taking her photo.
Totality approached. ‘Excitement is in the air,’ the astronomy professor intoned. And it was true! The light was dimming noticeably by the minute, as if we were all wearing sunglasses. Lyra commented how badly eclipses must have messed cavemen up.
The light became unearthly, hollow. I boggled. Totality arrived. The world went dark. A great cheer arose from the crowd, a sound of surprise as a thousand college students could not believe that this thing was happening. Next to me, Lyra said, ‘Oh my God! It’s 3 in the afternoon!’ I put my hand on her back. Imagine if I hadn’t come!
Over the three minutes of darkness, students cheered, went quiet, laughed at the madness of it all. Someone shouted, ‘TOTALITY!’ A pinpoint, brilliant solar prominence appeared at 7 on the sun’s rim. When the sun appeared again, along the bottom of the moon, we cheered once more. We marveled at this cosmic event so singular that everyone, even professors, even bosses, agreed that you should just stop everything and look at the sky for a while. ‘There should be more things like this,’ Fern said. ‘Times when everyone can just stop.’
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