Why the eclipse was like the Tour de France + Paved Paperback

Today is release day for Paved Paradise, the paperback. I know I’ve asked you all to buy this thing many times over (and you have, bless you), so all I’ll say about the one-year anniversary is that a. I fixed all the mistakes and typos and b. it weighs exactly half as much as the hardcover, so this might be the perfect format in which to read what Nolan Gray in the Architect’s Newspaper calls “the first (and only) parking beach read.” Oh, and it’s a measly $18—you can barely get lunch in Midtown for less.

Above: a drawing I made, with vine charcoal and eraser, that expresses my concern about the effects of climate change on the ecology of Fire Island.

Below: Notes from the eclipse. Media recommendations. Books I read.

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We were somewhere around Lawrence on the edge of New Hampshire when the eclipse began to take hold. Not the disappearance of the sun, which was hours away, but the certainty that we were participating in a mass human migration and escalating infrastructural breakdown. In the rest center off I-93 the atmosphere was jubilant. The ladies at the White Mountains tourism booth, with a direct view of the wheels slowly turning in the northbound lanes, said traffic had been worse on Sunday. The sandwich-makers at the Common Man Roadside Cafe & Deli were working frantically. Kids in NASA shirts streamed in from the parking lot, where TV news crews were trying to do interviews, and failing, since everyone wanted to get back on the road. I felt the thrill of a pure monoculture event: Where were you when… 

By the time the moon began to slide across the sun we had entered the sacred band of totality that bent from Mexico to Newfoundland. I had never experienced a total eclipse but the spectacle gave me an instant flashback to the Tour de France, another event that requires an all-day commitment for three minutes of action. Three minutes if you’re lucky—the day we saw it in the French countryside, the peloton passed in the span of a couple breaths. 

But what really made me think of a bicycle race was the total human occupation of all the leftover space of the automobile environment—medians, parking lots, shoulders. If you could park a car there, someone had, and it was almost as if we late-arrivers were the main event, driving up roads lined with families milling around their coolers, folding chairs, and barbecues, tailgating for the sun. The sight of people looking at a partial eclipse has the same goofy quality of any crowd whose eyes all point in the same direction at once (see also: tennis match, air show). With their slack necks, open mouths, and paper-rimmed black glasses they looked like they had all just sat down in the front row of a 3D movie. 

I was charmed by Lyndon, a town we chose on the map as a compromise between eclipse excitement and fear of traffic—sufficiently far into the totality to get our two minutes of darkness but not so far in as to make it impossible to get out. The center of town was pleasantly crowded, reminiscent of a black-and-white photograph from rural America’s better days—people crossing the street every which way, parked cars along every curb, the bandstand park sprinkled with families on blankets perfectly distanced from each other.

The sun was already half-covered by the moon, though you wouldn’t have known anything was amiss. I saw the solar eclipse in 2017, an event I remember principally for the photo of Donald Trump looking at the sun, though I also remember standing on the sunny sidewalk watching a colander cast crescent-shaped shadows by my feet. But as Annie Dillard says, the difference between that and this is the difference between kissing a man and marrying him. Things began to get very weird as the moment approached. We felt the cold come up, and the wind, and the birds began to chirp in the trees. With the sun mostly hidden, the light turned silvery and the color drained from our faces. It was unnatural, like our friends were not in front of us but on a computer screen and a hidden hand was adjusting the hue. Like a man on the verge of a hallucination, I looked with suspicion and wonder at my hands. Something was off. 

Then the dusk. Permission to look at the midday sun, a flare the size of a planet shooting off on the downward edge. Splendid dark disk of the moon, corona glaring behind, awareness of the earthly miracle that the sun and the moon appear to be the same size in the sky. (No other planet in the universe is so lucky, as far as we know.) The streetlights flipped on. The library windows were glowing. We shrieked with delight, everybody was talking, mostly to themselves. Then the sun came back and the crowd clapped and whooped. I had regretted that we were not in some more spectacular place, on top of a mountain, but I did not see it that way anymore: I was pleased to be among our fellow eclipse-goers, at a ritual whose wondrous power tied us to each other and to our ancient ancestors. Imagine you didn’t know such a thing was coming. 

The aftermath was a kind of visual Doppler effect, in which all the escalating strangeness of the sun’s vanishing produced, now in reverse order, a different tone altogether, mundane and familiar. Some people were bounding towards their parked cars the moment the sun came back, which I thought was a little dramatic, but I was wrong. Moments later we were part of the greatest traffic jam I have ever experienced in my life, and hopefully ever will. 

We half-tried two routes to the main road before committing to a third, which turned out worse. Once again we were part of a parade for the assembled locals, but this time at a walking pace. My wife said it was a wonder no one had set up a lemonade stand, but we would see that soon enough. It took a half-hour to travel the two miles to the interstate, and then another hour and a half to make it 15 miles south to St. Johnsbury, traffic slow enough to put the car in park and read a book. Kids ran barefoot up and down the highway. Google Maps threw us one last crazy maneuver, a dusty detour down a rutted dirt road that ran parallel to the interstate, before both of our phones died and we resolved to stick to the big road. Just as well: New England seemed to have reached total traffic saturation, and there was nothing legal you could do to avoid it. 

Hours later in White River Junction, we saw the most crowded versions of Five Guys, Burger King, and McDonald’s we had ever seen, and resolved to eat granola bars for dinner. At the gas pump (there was still gas, at this point, anyway), an older woman from Fall River and I shared a contemplative moment—weighing the once-in-a-lifetime eclipse against the once-in-a-lifetime traffic jam. I had thrown that phrase out unthinkingly, but I became aware that for some older eclipse-goers, the momentary death of the sun was, in fact, a reflection on mortality. The next U.S. eclipse is in 2044, and she simply said outright, hoisting the dripping nozzle back on its perch, “I won’t see another one of these.” Sublime, we agreed, and parted ways to lurch home in the red glow of the brake lights. 

***

Media recommendations:

Lauren Collins’ omnivorous French newsletter is back

Two past HG recommendations win Pulitzers: Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama and Yohance Lacour’s Chicago podcast You Didn’t See Nothin

The 99% Invisible Power Broker Book Club is a laugh-out-loud good time, whether you’ve read the book or not

The New York Times rundown of the assault on the UCLA student protesters

Are Arab-Americans in Michigan seriously going to vote for Donald Trump? Aymann Ismail went to ask them

A Baltimore County high school principal was framed by an AI-produced recording of his own voice

John Sterling, voice of the Yankees and voice of my childhood, has retired

What I’m reading:

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Couples by John Updike

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen