SUNDAY AUGUST 20, 2017
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| Corvallis Coeds with eclipse head gear |
Things don’t start out
well. Max and Harry show up 15 minutes
late. Harry has already claimed the
shotgun seat. I put my sleeping bag into the trunk and carry my bag of munchies
into the car. I notice that Max and
Harry have identical bags of potato chips, peanuts, and cheezies. It’s going to be a healthy road trip
“Everyone got water?” I ask.
“I just bought a few bottles
for the trip,” Max replies. “We won’t need any once we get there. Tom bought a 40 bottle pack at Costco before
he left. He’s afraid they’ll be a run on
water.”
“Okay,” I reply. “Food –
check. Water – check. Everyone got their
passports?” I ask holding up mine as I
get into the back seat.
Max waves his at me.
“I packed mine last night,”
Harry says as he digs into his suitcase.
The casual digging becomes more frantic, much like a dog digging in the
garden for a bone, and ends with Harry dumping everything in his bag onto the
car seat. Still no passport. He roots
around his underwear and socks – no passport. I have visions of having to drive
back to Vancouver and search for his passport at his house. That would probably put us an hour or more
behind schedule.
“I know it’s here,” he says
to no one in particular.
Finally he locates it in his
cosmetic bag. I issue a sigh of relief as
I settle into Max’s fancy expensive BMW and immediately spill my coffee all
over the back seat.
We’re not off to a good start.
Despite the predictions of “the
mother of all traffic jams,” the trip precedes remarkably well for the first half
hour until Max announces:
“I gotta pee.”
And so it goes: Three old men – three old prostates. We’re like dogs that can’t pass a fire hydrant
without marking their territory. I thought travelling with small kids was bad,
but between the three of us we manage to hit every rest stop between Vancouver
and Florence, Oregon. (Did you know
there are 10 rest stops between the border and Salem? I can name them all.)
Even counting pee breaks we
make the trip in less than nine hours – a tribute to Max’s driving skills. Max believes he was a Road Warrior in a previous
life and is determined to get us there in record time. The problem is Max also likes to multi-task
while driving. He continually is
searching for the best radio station, adjusting the air conditioning, opening
the window, closing the window. The
problem is that every times he takes a hand off the wheel the car fishtails
briefly – not terribly noticeable to those in the front seat, but knocking me
back and forth like a bobble head every few minutes.
We arrive in Florence just
after 5pm. Florence is about ninety
minutes south of the zone of totality.
We’re lucky to find accommodations that close at the last minute. We find there is another couple along with Tom
and Fen sharing the house as well. The house has three bedrooms and we're allocated one
bedroom and two couches. Harry and I
decide that Max did all the driving so he deserves the bedroom. We’re relegated to the couches.
We drop our bags and head
into “downtown Florence – a seaside tourist town best known for its sand dunes
and dune buggies. We have a decent meal
and head back to the house and bed by nine o'clock.
We decide to hit the road by5:15am, still concerned everyone will be heading into the zone of totality
early.
Several weeks earlier Tom
offered to find the “perfect” spot in Corvallis to view the eclipse. He’d been pouring over Satellite pictures of
Corvallis for days and informs me he’s found the ideal “spot” to view the
eclipse. We program his coordinates into the car’s GPS and head out in a three
car convoy.
There’s absolutely no traffic on the road. We pull into Corvallis Oregon in a little
over an hour. The town is so quiet you
could go to sleep on the road and not worry about being run over.
We follow the GPS
instructions to Tom’s spot which end up being smack dab in the middle of a
forest.
“Tom, you can’t see the sky
from here – let alone the sun. We’d have
a better chance to see the eclipse from the inside of a fallout shelter.”
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| Alaska student NASA balloon |
We leave Tom and the other
couple in the forest while we try and find another spot – one where you can
actually SEE the sun. We find a park in Oregon State University. Not only
has it great site lines, but NASA is
sponsoring a student contest to launch balloons to film the eclipse from the
sight. If the spot is good enough For NASA it's good enough for us.
We retrieve
Tom and company and return to the site which has rapidly filled up in just the
few minutes we’ve been gone. There’s now
about an hour till the eclipse.
We go into the park to find
a place to put down our blanket.
“Fen and I would like to
find a restaurant and have some breakfast,” Tom announces as we’re unpacking.
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| The Four Amigos |
“Tom," I protest, "By the time you find a
restaurant, order breakfast, wait for your food, eat, pay the bill and get back
the eclipse will be over. We came all
this way, drove hours and hours for the eclipse – can’t you wait until it’s
over for breakfast?”
“Maybe just coffee, then,”
he counters. “There’s a student Union building just a block away. We can get coffee there.”
We’re half way to the Student Union Building when
Max can’t find his phone. He’s in a
panic – so we stop and wait while he runs back to the park to see if he left it
there. Ten minutes later he arrives
back smiling.
“You found it?” I ask.
“Not only that,” Max replies
holding up a loot bag. “I ran into a NASA lady who gave me a bunch of stuff.” He opens the bag to show us the loot. “Look.
Glasses, a USB stick a portable power supply for my phone. Neat, huh?”
“Did you think to get us
anything?” I ask.
“No. You weren’t there.”
It’s now less than 40
minutes till the eclipse begins. It’s now
getting too close to the eclipse time so Harry and I opt out of coffee and go
back to the park in hopes of snaring some NASA loot. When we arrive the NASA lady is gone. Everyone around us is playing with their NASA swag.
Ten minutes later Max
returns.
“The Student Union Building
was closed.” He announces.
Where’s Tom and Fen?”
Oh someone said there’s a
coffee shop about four blocks away so they headed there
.
I begin to organize myself
for the eclipse. I have two sets of
eclipse glasses, cameras, filters, extra batteries and a spare SD card. I’ve been practicing for this moment for
months, taking literally hundreds of practice shots of the sun and moon.
Max looks at all my stuff
and pulls out a simple point and shoot camera.
“I brought my little camera
with me. Can I take a picture of the
eclipse with it?”
“It’s not that easy, Max” I
patiently point out. “You need to put something in front of the lens to protect
the sensor in the camera otherwise you’ll burn a hole in it. I had a spare
viewer but I gave it to Tom because he forgot to buy glasses until the last
minute and then there were none left.”
A few minutes before the
eclipse begins Tom and Fen return waving several pairs of glasses.
“Guess what!” Tom says
excitedly. “We ran into the NASA lady in
the coffee shop and she gave us these. I
won’t need your viewer after all.”
He hands it back to me and I
give it to Max for his camera. Max then hands me back the glasses I bought
for him.
“I don’t need your 'fake
glasses' – I’d rather use the NASA glasses – I know they’re safer."
I look at the NASA glasses – they’re the same
as the one I bought.
The eclipse begins – just a
small bite out of the upper right hand side.
I get some decent pictures. Max
isn’t having as much luck.
“How come yours turn out
better than mine?” he asks.
“Because I’ve been planning
for this for months, Max. I’ve actually
taken hundreds of practice shots of the sun and moon. Like anything – the more you practice the
better you get. Don’t worry. If you don’t get anything I’ll email you one
of mine.”
Over the next hour the
cookie bite out of the sun gets bigger and bigger. Finally about 10:15 almost all the sun is
obscured. It’s still so bright you can’t
look at it with the naked eye and it’s still bright outside.
A minute later an excited
murmur rises from the crowd: it’s getting
darker… and cooler… a wind picks up.
I grab my camera. I put into record to get a few moments of the
crowd “oohing and awing” before I take shots of the total eclipse. I’ve practiced this a hundred times.”
Suddenly it’s arrived! The moment of totality! I press the button to end the recording and
go back to picture mode…
Suddenly the moment I’ve
waited so long for arrives! The moment
of totality. I press the button to take
the perfect picture and my camera jams!!!!
I frantically press buttons. The
camera gets totally confused and shuts itself off. I have to wait for it to reboot. As it finally reboots the crowd emits a disappointed
“awwww!” The eclipse is over. I was so
busy trying to fix my camera I missed it!
I am totally
crestfallen. But it get’s worse.
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| Max's eclipse picture |
“Look at this great shot I
got, Max crows waving his camera around.
It is a totally amazing
shot. Even the professional NASA
photographers are amazed. People are actually
taking pictures of Max’s picture. Perfect
strangers are asking him to email the picture to them.
“How did you manage to take
that incredible picture?” a NASA guy
asks him.
“Practice,” Max announces.
I pack up my gear and trail
behind the guys out to the parking lot.
There’s a University student selling eclipse t-shirts.
“How much are they?” I ask.
“Twenty dollars,” he
replies.
“I’ll take a large,” says
Max handing here a twenty.
“Large for me too,” says
Harry handing her another twenty.
“I’ll take a large too,” I
say holding out a twenty.
“Sorry, sir. We’re all sold out.”
So didn’t see the eclipse,
didn’t get a picture– didn’t even get the t-shirt! At
least things can’t get worse.
Wrong! It ain’t over till it’s
over.
We decide to leave before
the eclipse is totally over to get a jump on the traffic. The jump lasts exactly ten minutes. Everyone has the same idea. It takes us four and a half hours to go just
50 km. We’ve arrived in the predicted “mother
of all traffic jams.”
Max valiantly tries to get
ahead of the rush switching lanes every twenty seconds or so. I doze for about 15 minutes; when I awake the
same car is in front of us and beside us that was there before I nodded off.
Max’s irritation is
compounded by the fact that we are miles and miles from the next rest
area. Max’s road rage isn’t helping his
bladder. He finally can’t hold it any longer. He pulls onto the median, pulls down his fly
and….
“Ahhhhhh!” he sighs.
Cars creep buy honking and
giving him the thumbs up! Max now has a
new nickname – not the Road Warrior, but now the Road Urinator.
Now this was an amazing feat
on many different levels. On previous
trips Max has been somewhat shy about his body functions. When we went on fishing trips where there
were outhouses….
“I can hold it for three
days if I have to,” he announced once.
Even when we had to share a
motel room, he was the same.
But give him a highway and
an audience of about a thousand drivers……
Harry and I hang on – just barely
- until we finally make the next rest stop. The re the parking lot is full of people
leaving their cars anywhere and bolting
for the washrooms. Max just stands
beside the car smiling and pronounces, “Better to bear the shame than bare the
pain.”
The traffic is stop and go
for the next eight hours. Around six o’clock
Harry and I begin to make noises about stopping for something to eat.
The word “Stop” (except for
bathroom breaks) is not in Max’s vocabulary.
“Maybe we’ll stop in
Olympia,” he concedes.
Olympia comes and goes.
“Maybe Northgate Mall,” just
outside of Seattle. “I just want to get in
a few more miles.”
Northgate comes and go.
Finally around 11:00 pm
after we’ve been on the road for 13 hours he agrees he too might be a bit peckish. However by this time most of the roadside
restaurants are closed.
“There’s always Denny’s or
McDonalds or Berger King,” I
suggest. “They’re open 24 hours.”
“I don’t want junk food,”
Max states firmly.
The car is littered with
cookie packages, empty chip, peanut, and cheezie bags.
“What do you think we’ve been
subsisting on for the past two days,” I ask.
“When did you become such a health food nut?”
“Never mind,” he replies. “We’re
almost home. Suck it up,” he replies and
speeds up.
Finally around midnight we
reach the Canadian border. Twenty
minutes later we pull into my driveway.
In one and two-thirds days
we have driven for over 25 hours to see an event that lasts less than two
minutes while subsisting on a diet of potato ships, peanuts and cheezies and
bottled water..
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| The great eclipse of 2024 |
As I step out of the car I
turn to Max and Harry.
“Hey guys, there’s another
eclipse in seven years. Are you guys up
to it.”
Max lays rubber half way up
the block leaving a cacophony of barking dogs in his wake. I’m not worried. He’ll come around in year or
two.
He hands it back to me and I
give it to Max for his camera. Max then hands me back the glasses I bought
for him. 
“Because I’ve been planning
for this for months, Max. I’ve actually
taken hundreds of practice shots of the sun and moon. Like anything – the more you practice the
better you get. Don’t worry. If you don’t get anything I’ll email you one
of mine.”
Suddenly it’s arrived! The moment of totality! I press the button to end the recording and
go back to picture mode…
