The Path of Totality

How many once-in-a-lifetime events is a person meant to see?

I am in a traffic jam near a taxidermy shop on the highway of the blues.

It is 4:00 and I am leaving Cape Girardeau, where I saw the sun blotted out of the sky. Cape Girardeau is the hometown of Rush Limbaugh and a stop on the Trail of Tears, where the Cherokee were forced into exile. Darkness has come to Cape Girardeau many times.

In the morning, we took Highway 61 because it promised an open road. Highway 61 is the Mississippi River byway where blues artists make deals with the devil in return for musical mastery.

In Missouri, the highway of the blues is the scenic route. It is a longer drive south than the interstate, but a better one.

We rolled through lush green hills, passing farms and churches and ads for drugs and Jesus and guns. At a stoplight, a faded billboard on a skeletal signpost asked, “IF YOU WERE TO DIE TODAY, WHERE WOULD YOUR ETERNITY BE?”

According to the internet, my eternity would be in Cape Girardeau, because the solar eclipse signals the end times.

The apocalypse was nigh — but it always is, these days. Looming and dooming, never resuming. Forever nigh and dry.

We are stuck in a time loop that feels like a sleigh ride on a Möbius strip through hell. The same elections with the same candidates and crises. The same Biblical checklist: plagues and floods and wars and multiple contenders for the Antichrist.

We never get to check anything off the list. Nothing is ever over enough to let us get better.

My problem with the apocalypse is the same as with the traffic; it moves too slow.

That’s why I take the back roads. If I’m destined for doom, I’m going to enjoy the ride, and let nobody get in my way.

This was our second solar eclipse. In August 2017, St. Louis was near the path of totality. My husband and I drove our children, then six and nine, to a park with an endless sky. We stood with other young families, in awe of the gradual then abrupt darkening followed by a brief interlude of blazing halo in the black, one you could see with your naked eye.

That was my first solar eclipse. I wondered then if my children, so young, would remember it. I was glad another eclipse was coming in 2024, and we would be in the path of totality for that one as well: the only region where this overlap occurred.

I remember August 21, 2017, as a day of national reprieve because the news no longer revolved around Donald Trump. Americans blotted him out of the sky and bonded with each other instead. This did not happen again until covid emerged, and it was the most horrific bond that did it, the bond of fear: a bond destined to break.

The 2017 eclipse was one of the last days I had hope some bad things in America could be undone, if they were exposed and rectified in time.

Now, in April 2024, there is no way out but through. If the 2017 eclipse was a reprieve, the 2024 eclipse feels like a reckoning.

You get a lot of tourists when you live in totality. For months, I got questions from nervous travelers about whether they would face hostility in conservative regions of Missouri. I was pretty sure that everyone would mind their business and stick to the sky.

I was right, but the tension, the build-up — I could feel it, too.

The apocalypse rolls slow but the people who want a manmade version work fast. It is hard to tune them out, especially when you carry around a device that they created to control you.

When we got to Trail of Tears State Park, there was no cell service and no internet access. I breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone would be nicer now.

My teenage children put on their eclipse glasses and rolled the car seats back, lying down and looking through the sunroof. I remembered 2017, when they were so small they gripped my hands in the dark, and felt wistful.

I wandered into the woods to see what was blooming. I was the only person there. Everyone was busy tailgating with the sun.

I climbed through the thicket and found morels without looking, the way it tends to go. Morels are the most democratic of mushrooms. They cannot be planted or controlled, only encountered by chance. A morel hunter staggers through the forest like a zombie until a morel emerges like a brain. There is no better treat: nothing tastes as good as serendipity.

But solar eclipse morels! I felt like the luckiest person in the world.

I brought my loot back to the car and looked to the sky. It was turning from a crystal-clear blue into something fainter, like a Polaroid fading too fast. It was strange to recognize the patterns of a rarity, to remember them from 2017: the black sphere creeping across the sun, the rustling of animals adjusting to the darkness of day.

How many once-in-a-lifetime events is a person meant to witness? I wondered, thinking of all we had endured, and how two solar eclipses felt like a well-earned reward.

We look to the skies because everyone on earth is lying. We look to an eclipse because it shows deception clearly. Here are how the pieces fit together, here is how fast darkness can come, and here is how fast it can depart. The world is not changed when it is over — but you are.

Sometimes, when people talk about the apocalypse, I wonder if we are already in hell, and days like this are glimpses of the heaven we squandered. That we had everything we needed and lost it in lust for lesser things. And I wonder how to get heaven back.

The surprise of the morels, the predictability of the eclipse: both beyond my control, and I liked it that way.

I have no words to convey what I saw for four minutes in the sky on April 8, 2024. You had to be there, and I’m glad I was.

*          *          *

The drive back to St. Louis was smooth until an abrupt stop. The police were diverting Highway 61 renegades to Highway 55, the interstate. We would be on the normal highway with the normal people in the normal light of day.

On the normal highway, there was internet access. I texted a friend to see if the world ended. Nothing of note had happened, he responded, beyond the usual horrors.

I wondered if the Rapture fiends were disappointed, or if they would just kick the date on down the line, the way televangelists did when I was little. 1980s kids were weaned on the apocalypse.

I live at the intersection of two solar eclipses. I also live near the most dangerous earthquake zone in North America. And this summer, I will live at the intersection of one trillion cicadas. They come from two different broods, and they will meet in Missouri, swarming in unison for the first time in two centuries.

Cicadas are large flying insects that can live underground for over a decade, emerging in massive numbers at once. I’ve lived through a periodic cicada invasion before. I’ve heard their wings whir like a wind of razors, their corpses crunch under my feet. I hated every minute of it.

But this year, I’ve decided to welcome them. I will walk through them and get used to them. It would be ironic of me to reject an honest creature from the underground just trying to live its life.

On the highway, we crawled home. We were in a swarm of curious people seeking the cosmos. In a year politicians seek to tear our country apart, a year doomsday fanatics seek to make our last, there are worse places to be than with people willing to drive to remote regions to find natural heaven in a manmade hell.

When we reached St. Louis, it was almost dusk. I watched the sun set for the second time in one day, for the second day in my life.

I have seen too many things that are unprecedented and too many things that repeat on an endless loop.

I have seen too many disasters in too short a time. The word “disaster” literally means “ill-starred,” as if made by cosmic decree. I would say I’ve seen catastrophes, but “catastrophe” is Ancient Greek for “a reversal of what is expected,” and I have long expected the worst.

But I have also seen miracles. The word “miracle” has no inherent meaning. It is in the eye of the beholder. “Miracle” derives from Latin root words meaning “to wonder or marvel at” and from Ancient Greek meaning “to smile”.

You do not need divine intervention for a miracle. A miracle depends on your willingness to receive it.

Thank you for reading! If you like my work, please hit subscribe so that you’ll get it regularly! If you want to ensure I can keep this newsletter going, consider a paid subscription — this is my primary source of income, and generous readers make it possible.

Eclipse at totality. Photograph by my husband.

Nearing totality at Trail of Tears State Park.

The woods of southern Missouri.

Free subscription for those who can spot the morels! (Just kidding — it’s already free!)