In 1979, there was a total solar eclipse across the Pacific Northwest. When I was a kid, my answer to, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was always, "Astronomer". Since this would be the last one on US soil for 38 years, I was determined to go. I was 24 years old, nominally going to Golden West College, and working part time at minimum wage in its library, which somehow paid for my half of an HB ghetto apartment, bad food, and 63 cents/gallon gasoline.
I asked my buddy John to come along. He foolishly agreed. We'd take my 1968 Ford longbed Econoline with "The Blatzmobile" emblazoned on the side, take turns driving, sleep in sleeping bags in the back, catch the eclipse, visit some friends in Seattle, and come on home -- what could go wrong?
The eclipse was due to occur around 8 a.m. on February 26th. We stocked up on "Red PVC" (aka "Red Vines" (never "Twizzlers"!)), and left on the 24th.
We make good time that first day, with one exception. Johnny's driving and awkwardly trying to fiddle with the tape player that's on a shelf behind his head, and swerves a little in the process and gets pulled over. The cop ascertains that he's not drunk, just driving like it, and lets us go with a warning.
Later that evening, we're cruising through the forest and coming up on Bend, Oregon. Johnny is driving, and "Steeleye Span" is on the tape player. All is right with the world. The highway through the forest is one lane each way, and we're trapped behind a slow-moving camper truck. Johnny decides to pass him, and creeps out to the left to check on the oncoming traffic.
Background Info: In a normal car, the driver is sitting well behind the wheels that steer the car, and that's how we all learn to drive. In these old-school vans, the steerable wheels are directly underneath the front seats. This has the effect of causing people who aren't used to it to oversteer.
Johnny isn't used to it, so when he sees an oncoming car and turns to bring the van back into our lane, he oversteers. It's February in Oregon, and, unlike quicksand, "black ice" is a real thing, not a Hollywood invention. The back end of the van starts to slide.
Johnny does the exact right thing: steers into the skid, but, again, oversteers, and now we're skidding in the other direction. He (over) corrects that skid, and the next one, and now we're spun around almost 180 degrees and we slide off the road, down a 6 or 8 foot embankment, rolling over all four sides and back onto the wheels again, dead stop.
Side Story: Ever since I'd known him, any time anyone took a turn kinda fast, Johnny would yell out "We're gonna ROOOLLLL!" Here it was actually true for the first time, and he neglects to say it. What a blown opportunity...
The old van just has seat belts, not even shoulder straps, but we're both fine, although unconvinced that "Permanent Press" is the proper setting for a full-sized Econoline. The engine has died, but Maddy Prior is still singing away on the tape player in the otherwise spooky dead silence, which seems wildly inappropriate given the circumstances, so one of us slams the player off. The van's heater barely works, so we've got a lit propane-burning catalytic heater sitting between us, which it seems prudent to shut off, too.
Since we were going backwards when we left the road, the roll goes towards the driver's side first. The initial impact on that side takes the normally square cross section of the van and makes it a right-leaning parallelogram. The rectangular windshield no longer fits in its parallelogramed frame, and gets spit 30 feet away across the clearing, shattered. The passenger door flies open partway through the roll, and is sticking out like a flag in the wind when that side comes around to the dirt, shattering the window, folding the door in half, and breaking it off its hinges.
The stuff in the back of the van looks like it was once mounted on the wall, but the hooks all simultaneously broke and it's on the floor now. My metal toolbox has visited on all four surfaces during the roll, and left triangular holes punched in the cheap paneling on the walls and ceiling. The school's telescope is, luckily, completely unharmed in its well-made footlocker case. It's too bad I won't be sending in a testimonial letter to the manufacturer.
It's Oregon, and for miles in either direction, the highway is bordered by trees. Amazingly, exactly where we left the road there's a clearing for the entrance to a logging road. A hundred yards sooner or later, and we'd'a been smashed into a wall of trees instead of barrel-rolling in the soft thin snow. Nice aim, Johnny!
It's 1979 and even if there were cell phones, neither of us would'a been able to afford one. But the guy in the car behind us, who musta had a great view of the van wagging its fanny and then rolling down the ditch, stopped and said that he'd send a tow truck back once he got into Bend, just a ways up the road.
The tow truck shows up, winches the van back up the embankment (pulling a tire off its rim in the process), and drives us all back to town. We don't know what else to do, so we leave the van in the parking lot of the (now closed) Ford dealer, and, without a van to sleep in (well, without a van with *windows*), we walk across the street to a motel to get a room for the night.
In the morning, we go back to the Ford dealer to explain the busted heap of a van that had magically appeared in their parking lot during the night. At minimum, we'll need a windshield, the tire re-mounted, and to figure out why the engine won't start. They'll look at the latter two, but they don't have a windshield for an 11-year-old van.
But we had an eclipse to get to tomorrow morning anyway, so the plan became to rent a car -- which, small town, they handled -- and fetch a windshield from a junkyard in Portland on the way back.
The path of the eclipse runs off the Pacific and through Washington and Idaho, west to east. We're looking to be anywhere along the path that has clear skies. The Cascades run north-south, cutting Washington in half. The radio tells us that the mountains will hold the clouds that form over the ocean on the left hand side, so we go up the right.
By that afternoon we're in central Washington, but the radio has changed its mind -- now the winds off the ocean will keep the western side clear. So we make a left turn toward the mountains.
But as we approach the pass through the Cascades, we hit a traffic jam, completely stopped. Turns out, being February, there's been an avalanche and the pass is closed. We sit there for a while, but finally make a U-turn out of the jam, and find a Washington Highway Patrol office right there at the foot of the mountain, and pull in. We go inside and tell the lady at the front desk that we'll be waiting in the parking lot, and maybe she could come out and let us know if/when they manage get the pass clear.
Which never happens. We spend the night trying to sleep, freezing to death in the parking lot in a Ford Fiesta. I don't recommend it.
In the morning, the pass is still closed, but it doesn't matter 'cuz the radio has changed its mind again -- we're back to the Cascades will block the clouds, and Central Washington is the place to be, the further east, the better. So we defrost the windshield and we're off again, as fast as we can go.
The eclipse is due about 8:15, and we're halfway to Idaho in the middle of nowhere when it comes around, so we just pull over in a likely spot at the side of the road, set up the telescope, and wait.
If there's even the tiniest bit of sun still showing from behind the moon, it's not "total", and you can't look at it. Except with the solar filter on the telescope. But that's boring -- just a shrinking sliver of sun, looking just like a crescent moon. So we just hang around, waiting the last few minutes.
But finally... Since we were in the middle of nowhere in the central plains, there was a small valley in front of us. I guess I should have realized it would happen (it being, like, the definition of an eclipse), but as we looked out across the valley, the Shadow Of The Moon raced across and over us. It Blew. My. Mind. The actual shadow. Of the moon. Cast by the sun. Came racing over our heads.
Suddenly the flat "bowl of the sky" was a 3D *apparatus*. Tangibly. The moon was *here*, and the sun was way out *there*, both zooming around, and we were underneath them. They weren't just glowing circles rolling across the sky every day, they were *things* up there, with relationships to each other in 3D space. You just don't/can't get it, feel it, own it, until you see it happen under an eclipse.
But of course the shadow passing over also meant: totality. I yanked the solar filter off of the telescope. It was amazing. Binoculars, too -- amazing. You can't decide whether to look at the sun, or marvel at the world under the eclipse. It's not exactly "dark", but it's gloomy. Stars are out. The light is weird, silvery, and the world has literally never looked like that before.
But it's just two and a half minutes, and the sun peeks over the opposite edge that it disappeared behind, and it's over. You can't look at it anymore, the corona and stars are gone, and the view through the solar filter is just like the pre-show, but backwards, and even more boring than the first time.
So the telescope goes back into its box, and minds blown or not, it's a quick U-turn and off to Portland. I just doesn't seem right to have a Life Altering Cosmic Experience, and then immediately head out for the Junk Yard, but life likes to pull crap like that.
After an old-school session with Yellow Pages and paper maps, we find a junk yard in Portland and are the proud owners of a used, but unshattered, windshield. Getting it back to the van is another problem. It's too long to fit in the back of the tiny Fiesta, so we have to slide it in standing up between the seats, where it forms a "Cone of Silence" barrier between us. Conversation sounds like shouting down a well, all the way back to Bend.
When we get back to the Ford Dealer, they've fixed the tire and reconnected the coil ground wire that was preventing the engine from running. The new old windshield won't properly mount in the now-parallelogram windshield opening, so the guy sticks it to a fat bead of caulking, and covers the edge with duct tape. "You can take it to a real body shop and get it mounted better when you get home." (Which, of course, never happens.) All this goes on Johnny's credit card 'cuz he feels guilty and I'm broke.
When we go around the other side of the building to turn in the rental Fiesta, the lady hands Johnny his copy of the already-signed and now-filled-in form we'd left behind, and says, "You're lucky. There was something wrong with the odometer. It said a thousand and sixty-six miles, so we only charged you for sixty-six."
We're confused by this, but it slowly dawns on us as we walk away that we'd been gone for less than two days, and they couldn't believe that we'd driven over a thousand miles in that time, so they blamed the "mistake" on the odometer. Now, if they'd'a said something to us before writing the total we'd'a probably 'fessed up, but, since the credit card transaction was done already, and all the rest of this is costing (Johnny) a broke-college-kid's fortune, we just accept the gift and let it slide.
So the van runs and has four wheels and a windshield, but the passenger door is windowless and folded in half, and the driver's door is still straight but the van is leaning away from it by 4 or 5 inches.
We drive to a hardware store and buy a rubber mallet and a lot of duct tape. In the parking lot, we set the folded passenger door on a concrete parking berm and jump up and down on it until it's straight enough to duct tape back into its opening, and then fill the entire window cavity with more tape. The driver-side window is miraculously fine, but we have to tape up the 5-inch gap at the top to keep out the February-in-Oregon cold.
The back doors are jammed and unopenable in their parallelogramed frame, so with both front doors taped closed, the only way in or out of the van is through the side doors behind the passenger seat. And since the engine is in a big box between the front seats, that means climbing over it every time. But we're young and flexible, so no big deal.
We get back on track by driving up to Seattle to visit some friends that have moved there. Not much to tell, except the part where the clutch is dying, so we're on a vertically undulating country road on the way to another junk yard to get a clutch, and it gives up entirely and we end up powerless, rolling back and forth between two small hills like the shoop-shoop B-B's in a Hula Hoop.
I have no idea how we made it to the junk yard and got the new clutch, but somehow we were finally on our way home. But then, somewhere in the middle of the Central Valley, barrelling down I-5 just after dark, we get lit up by the CHP. Not *again*...
I'm in a sleeping bag in the back and Johnny's driving again, but not particularly speeding, so we're mystified. He pulls over, and I reluctantly climb out of the entangling sleeping bag and get my shoes on. Johnny has to wait for me to clear the area before climbing over the engine to follow me out the side door.
The sleeping bag and shoe delay, the rigmarole's silhouette on the backdoor window curtains, and the unexplained side door egress freaks the CHP guys out, so they pull their guns and put us "up against the wall" (van).
They run our licenses and all that, but we have nothing, and have done nothing. They only stopped us 'cuz my registration sticker is still sitting in an envelope on my kitchen table back home, and not on the license plate, but they radio in to see that I'm paid up, so they let us go. First and last time I've had a gun pointed at my head. Wasn't on my Bucket List to begin with...
Late that night, we finally make it home -- in one piece, broker, but also richer. Wondering when the next total eclipse is. Best, worst, road trip ever.
6 comments:
Yep. That's about how I remember it. My sense of the "sky getting smaller" was similar.
Once darkened, it felt like the sun was just a few hundred feet across, and just a a few thousand feet up... which is probably how people perceived it in ancient times. Another thing: When the shadow hit the valley, the air cooled enough to condense a light fog near the ground.
Only one thing astonished me more than our surviving the roll without injury.. It was all the cars and trucks that whizzed past us on the highway during the eclipse - without stopping to take a look!
Once again Keith, your writing abilities astound me and I am totally impressed. You are a writer, a really good writer! I'll be in line to get an autographed book from you!!!
What an amazing adventure and your story put me right there re-living it with you. You are not only a talented musician but a gifted writer. Thanks for sharing.
I love the story of that adventure. Is it any wonder I have loved you two guys for all these years? I loved the Blatzmobile.
Ah! Oh! Of all the shadows of the moon photos, I never saw any like that. Loved this.
The Shadow of the Moon picture is, as noted, entirely bogus. I hunted around to find a landscape pic that looked kinda like the valley I remember, and 'shopped the shadow in, also the way I remember it. If I was really clever, it'd'a been an animated GIF, but since only about 10 people read these things, that would probably have been overkill.
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