Wait Until Dark

 

You want to experience all four seasons? Spend a week in Cleveland.

What follows two days of rain in Cleveland? Monday.

I must say, nobody tells Cleveland jokes better than Clevelanders themselves. You can't depend on out-of-towners to tell them. They're still making cracks about the river catching on fire. That was 55 years ago, folks! We've moved on. There's a lot of jokes to be made of our weather, but outsiders get that wrong, too. People who never lived in Cleveland or never visited Cleveland think it's this 365-day snowstorm. If that were true it might actually bring some piece of mind as there would be some predictability and consistency to the weather. No, Cleveland is not colder or snowier than any other northern U.S. city that lies just south of Canada. Instead, as you may have gathered from the above two jokes, the weather is erratic. I don't know if it has to do with Lake Erie being the shallowest of the Great Lakes or what, but you just can't depend on the weather to stay cold or warm or rainy or dry or sunny or cloudy or snowy or non-snowy. It plays havoc with people's wardrobes. You can't put spring clothes away for the winter or winter clothes away for the spring because spring at any time could make a cameo appearance in winter and winter could make a cameo appearance in spring. You've heard of the January thaw? I think this year we had January thaws, plural, because every week of that month there was cold followed by warm followed by cold followed by warm again. Not this year, but I remember one winter when a snowstorm dumped a foot of snow, followed a day later with temperatures in the 50s, which resulted in massive flooding. Not that you had to worry too much about drowning, because the next day temperatures were below freezing, and the flood waters had turned to ice! When it comes to climate change, Cleveland has always been ahead of the curve.

I bring all this up because as you may have heard Cleveland was in the path of Monday's solar eclipse, and nobody in our humble little metropolis could quite bring themselves to believe that we were going to be allowed to experience this historic event because something somewhere was bound to fuck us over, mainly the weather. For the first time in my life, I think Clevelanders actually wanted two days of rain followed by a sunny Monday, but with our luck it probably would be the other way around.

Oh, wow, Holly's back on TV! That's almost as newsworthy as the eclipse (all you out-of-towners needn't concern yourselves with what I'm talking about.) As you can see, the prediction early Monday morning was a mixture of sun and clouds. In fact, I only remember the sun so it was a rare occasion of normally pessimistic ol' me seeing the glass as half full. What follows are pictures from around Northeast Ohio on the day of the eclipse, and after that some personal recollections. 

As with any historic event that you're fortunate enough to know ahead of time is a historic event (so that leaves out the eruption of Mount Vesuvius) there were souvenirs.

 

 

Does that mean I'm allowed to run a red light?

Wear special eclipse glasses and you won't go blind (not even if you're spanking the--well, this is a family blog, so I won't say.)

Edgewater Beach, about two hours before totality. See Downtown Cleveland in the distance? 

Downtown's center, Public Square.

 Cleveland Clinic Children’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). This infant girl is well-protected from the harmful rays of the sun.

Cuyahoga Falls.

Final score: Guardians 4, White Sox 0.

Terminal Tower. When I was a kid, this was Cleveland's tallest building. It's since been surpassed but is still the city's most iconic structure. 

 

Totality over Cleveland.

39 miles southeast from Cleveland, Akron also got to experience totality.

Totality over Akron. I know, it looks a lot like totality over Cleveland. Well, what did you expect? It's the same sun and same shadow of the moon, just taken with a different camera in a different location.

I was on the road by 6:15 AM, and it was raining. Just as I thought, I thought, Nature's Cleveland branch isn't going to let us see this thing. I arrived at work thinking this much-hyped eclipse was nothing but a celestial tease, God having the final say on who tells the best Cleveland jokes. However, when I emerged from the building later on, the sun was out with nary a puddle on the ground.

I headed home but I wasn't going to stay there for long. Despite all the dire predictions, the traffic hadn't seemed all that busier than usual. I figured I'd go watch the eclipse in the Cleveland Metroparks, a swath of which isn't far from where I live. I turned into the park and then into a picnic area, a place I'd been to many, many times before, and where there's usually ample parking. Well, not this time. Cars everywhere as well as people everywhere, the first real evidence I had that, yes, this eclipse was in great demand. I turned around to leave, which proved a bit tricky. As I said, there were people everywhere, including right in the path of my car. Somehow, I managed not to hit anybody, and was back out onto the parkway. Now, the Metropark system (dubbed the "Emerald Necklace") is countywide, so there are plenty of picnic areas to choose from, but I figured if this one is jam-packed with cars, by now they're all jam-packed with cars. So I left the parkway altogether and went back on the main road.

Not too far away was a suburban branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library. More cars than usual, but I easily found a parking space. From there it was just a short walk to a small park of sorts, really just an expanse of lawn, in front of this bedroom community's City Hall/Police Station. There were people, but not too many (I now pitied those poor fools who chose the crowded Metroparks.) I decided to try on my eclipse glasses:

What th--?! These glasses that were supposed to protect you from becoming blinded by an eclipse did that by blinding you before the eclipse! How the hell was I supposed to find the eclipse when I couldn't even see the sky? Sure, I could just lift my head up, but in what direction? I took off the glasses and looked at the people around me, and decided the best I could do was to look in the same direction they were looking. I put the glasses back on, and viola! There was the sun, or rather, a portion of the sun.

This was about an hour and fifteen minutes before totality. If you scroll upwards to that one picture of the various phases of the eclipse, the phase I first saw was maybe the third phase on the left. I have to admit I was a bit startled by the sight. In fact, I almost fell backwards. Seeing the sun with a bite taken out of it in a photograph just isn't it the same as seeing in real time. I almost felt like I was at Fatima (yes, I know that wasn't an eclipse, but still) and a LeBron James-sized Virgin Mary would show up at any minute and entrust me with three secrets, a responsibility I'd just as soon not take on at this point in my life. Somehow, I managed to compose myself. It helped that I took off the glasses.

Nothing I saw from there on in, including the totality itself, filled me with as much wonder and awe (as well as unease) as that first look at what was after all only a little bit of the eclipse, which is a good thing because it meant I could be analytical, my preferred state of being. Leave the visions and apparitions to the prophets. It's what they're paid for. Now, I didn't continuously look at the eclipse. The glasses went on and off. In my present analytical state, I wanted to see how dark it was getting at ground level as the sun gradually disappeared behind the moon (or the moon's shadow.) I was surprised to see it wasn't much. Even at the point where there was more moon than sun, it was still fairly bright outside. Shows you the power of the sun's rays. So why do clouds give it such a hard time?

Finally, maybe about 20 minutes before totality, by which time there was just a skinny crescent sun, was there a dimming of light that I recognized as "dusk". Then came nightfall. I looked up and actually couldn't find the corona at first. Only for a moment. Then there it was. As I said, I wasn't as transfixed as when I first saw the earlier more-sun-than-moon eclipse. Still, I was planning to spend the whole four minutes examining it when I heard a horn honk. Back here on Earth, the few cars on the road, headlights now on, made it clear that the vehicle's drivers weren't indifferent to what was going on. After that, I just marveled--my analytic state was taking a beating--that 3:15 in the afternoon looked like 9:15 at night. 

Then the natural light gradually came back on, and the artificial light gradually went off. I looked at the emerging sun maybe two more times, and that was it. I walked back to the library. As the Weather Channel guy says in the accompanying video, there was a poignancy to the eclipse's slow demise. Of course, if there was a solar eclipse every day of the week, or even once a week, there'd be no poignancy or wonder or awe or unease, and certainly nothing of a spiritual nature. It's the rarity, the out-of-the-ordinariness, the uniqueness of the event that warrants out attention.

 

Post-eclipse weather forecast. Also rare, out-of-the-ordinary, and unique--if you live in the Mojave Desert.