They say over a million people flooded Oregon that week, driving flying plugging up our roads and prompting all the “get off my lawn” sentiments from the beaver state. People actually spent their vacation time and money to come here for two minutes of darkness.
I hope the light offered them more than they bargained for—it’s a beautiful state and its glory deserves the full light of day.
We like our Oregon. We like our light traffic and sparse towns and rural American dreams. We live in a monopoly of beauty and I suppose we’re all love your neighbor and world peace until the world shows up on our doorstep, true colors bleeding out.
We heard predictions that I-5 would be backed up for a hundred miles, that gas would run out, grocery store shelves would be empty, and mass hysteria might break-out as darkness descended. Dire predictions probably increased sales that week and I know hotels and AirBnBs more than quadrupled their rates, but we all survived. I didn’t hear any apocalyptic prognostications coming true.
And I know—we’re all over the eclipse now. It’s finished and we’re done and all the build-up was exciting but nobody cares to read another thing about how cool it was, especially if you were among the majority of people who didn’t get to see it. I know.
This is what sticks with me, though: we stopped our normal Monday lives and set aside our typical slavery to the schedule and the world didn’t end. People left their offices and homes and regularly-scheduled-programs for an hour on a Monday morning and shared in something collective, something rare and phenomenal, and it didn’t kill us.
Total eclipses don’t happen every day and if they did, it wouldn’t be worth stopping our lives for. We couldn’t designate an hour every Monday morning to gaze at the sky with silly glasses on. But maybe there are routines already in place that show us how to make sudden stops?
