We left at 7:30 a.m. Central Time for a 3:04 p.m. Eastern Time date on the centerline, 20 miles south of Indianapolis. It’s only a 3½ hour drive, but we heard there would maybe be some traffic and due to a series of traumatic childhood events, I tend to be highly fearful of completely anticipatable problems leading to lateness. It’s not like you can call a total eclipse and plead that you need it to wait.
Canine endocrinological fun fact: Current thinking discourages spaying girl dogs of certain breeds until they are full-grown. I have mentioned before that there is a puppy. The puppy weighs a hundred pounds at nine months and is a ways away from fully grown. She is at the eye-rolling, door-slamming, sassing-back stage of dog puberty, which means no dog park and, more crucially to this story, no boarding.
So five entities — three human, two canine — packed into a 4Runner and headed southeast. First stop was a McDonald’s in Hobart, Indiana, for three of us to get breakfast sandwiches and four of us to pee. The puppy is still learning things like “Come!” and “Sit!” and “Come back here, dammit!” and therefore travels like Hannibal Lecter: several leashes attached variously to a harness, a collar, and an anti-pulling gizmo that is basically decorative. When not being handled, she is zipped in a crate in the cargo area of the back of the car. (She loves all of this, presumably because it signals a ride in the car.)
We hit some modest traffic on the way down, which we had been warned about. We were not surprised, and it was actually kind of nice to think that a few thousand more people than usual would be going to Indianapolis that day specifically because they were interested in seeing a total solar eclipse. It’s always pleasant to feel like people share your interests.
Speaking of which, we saw a rarity: a political billboard by which I was briefly very excited. It read something like:
No guns, no wall
Just crime and drugs
And I thought, “Well, here at last is a bold visionary! I am going to send this cat some money!” until someone suggested I was misunderstanding his point and that he probably did not intend to propose we get rid of the first two things in favor of endorsing the latter pairing.
We made it to Franklin without incident. We did see a number of signs in Franklin offering “Eclipse Parking” for $50 a vehicle, which we took as indicative of charming optimism about the number of people who might be coming to look at the eclipse, considering that there were thousands and thousands of available (and free) parking spaces within view of all of the signs offering to allow you to park in a driveway for only $50.
As the moon started to journey across the sun, we found one of those gratis parking spaces at a pizza place with a dog-friendly outdoor patio (tip of the hat to bringfido.com), ordered a couple of pizzas, and settled in with our eclipse glasses. It was kind of fun to watch the moon slowly make its way in front of the sun, like watching the real live version of a “phases of the moon” animation at high speed. We ate pizza and checked in on the totality’s progress until the light began to grow perceptibly dimmer. Then we just looked up.
It is easily one of the most astonishing things I have ever seen, and by far the least accessible. Meteor Crater, the Grand Canyon, Devil’s Tower, Shaquille O’Neal … but these are all things you can see up close fairly easily. The sun appearing to go out is a completely different story. We had to put some work into this one, and some luck was involved.
Wow.
I cannot imagine the terror that an eclipse would have inspired in humans possessed of consciousness and sense of self and all the things that come with a modern brain but yet to acquire any understanding of celestial mechanics at all. Imagine the panic, the confusion, the stories, the genetic memory. “The cold, angry sun” would be told around campfires for a thousand years.
After the event was over, we took the dogs in search of snow cones. (It was 80 in Franklin.) There was a little municipal eclipse festival going on; food trucks and funnel cake and craft merchants and souvenir “I GOT MOONED AT ECLIPSEFEST” T-shirts. Small-town adorable. I love stuff like this.
About the ride home … it might be a while before I’m really ready to talk about it. The slight traffic we encountered on the way down? We were misled. The trip back from Franklin was stop-and-go traffic of the sort one usually experiences leaving a stadium parking lot after a major concert all the way from Lebanon to Crown Point. Lebanon to Crown Point is one hundred and eleven miles. It took 10 hours. That’s a long time to be in a car with the people and two dogs.
Totally worth it.