TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN!
In 1972, I drove a van with 12 teenagers and two staff members from Camp Hurley in Kingston, New York to Prince Edward Island, a round trip of about 1,600 miles, to witness a total eclipse of the sun. On Monday, July 10, on Prince Edward Island, the camp’s “Eclipse Committee” joined a scientific team from the Smithsonian Museum and about 50 other people. We spent a night each way sleeping on the floor of a church gyms. Totality was about four minutes. The most striking thing beside the darkness was the silence. The birds and insects all went quiet, something I did not expect. We become accustomed to the background noise. I couldn’t find any pictures from the trip but located these two images online.
On Sunday, I picked up my grandson Gideon at SUNY New Paltz and we headed to my son-in-law’s mother’s house near Syracuse where we met my son-in-law, Marty. Syracuse was on the edge of totality so it would last only about a minute so on Monday, after lunch, Marty, Gideon, and I drove an hour north of Syracuse to a town called Mexico where totality would be about three minutes. Despite some cloud cover, the eclipse was amazing. For three minutes in was night in the middle of the day.
My granddaughter Sadia and her friends attend the University of Vermont in Burlington. They gathered along the shore of Lake Champlain, and they had a perfect view of totality.
My friend Nick, a much more accomplished photographer than I am with sophisticated equipment took this picture in southern New Hampshire.
I was 22 in 1972 which makes me 74 now so I’ve got to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience twice. The next total eclipse visible in New York State will be in 2079, so I expect to miss that one. Hopefully Sadia and Gideon can take their grandchildren.
