It was 3:15 a.m. on August 21st when my phone alarm rang. I woke up in complete darkness with Caitlin next to me. When I got out of bed a surge of energy hit me because today we were going to see a solar eclipse. After getting ready I went upstairs and greeted Carley and Nick while making a quick breakfast.
We began our drive north at 4 a.m. from Ashland to Ashwood, Oregon to view the eclipse in totality. The partial eclipse began around 9 a.m. but the two magic minutes where a total solar eclipse would appear began at 10:12 a.m. I heard the traffic would be bad, so we woke up very early to ensure we would end up where we want to be in time for the eclipse. The drive there actually went by pretty fast as we sang along to music and shared stories.
After five hours of driving we were surrounded by mobs of people gathering on the side of the road, and that’s when we knew we were in the area of totality. We were able to find a quieter place where we parked our car on the side of the road and relaxed in the yellow grass while waiting for the sun to disappear behind the moon. I set up my Canon camera on a tripod with a Canon 70-300mm lens.
As 10 a.m. approached it slowly became darker and colder. Shadows were elongating, and I felt as if I was hallucinating during the rapid change of temperature so early in the morning. And then all of the sudden everything went dark except for the white ring that was shining in the sky. My friends and I were all screaming from this brand new sensation of darkness in the middle of the day. The mountains in the distance were outlined with small rainbows. I was shivering as I snapped a few photos of the moon and the sun meeting. And all of the sudden there was light again. The moon moved, the temperatures began to rise, and I could hear birds chirping in the distance. My friends and I looked at each other in shock. What did we just experience?
After we got our excitement out about the eclipse we piled back in the car for our five-hour drive back to Ashland, or at least we thought so. When I heard of traffic due to the eclipse, I was only concerned about the traffic before the eclipse, but what everyone was actually talking about was the traffic afterward. We were in a stand still on the road for hours as all the eclipse-watchers tried to make their way back home. Some people were so inpatient that they tried to speed pass the traffic on the side of the road. We tried taking back roads for a few hours, but after off-roading with our compact car we decided we probably weren’t saving much time. It ended up taking 10 hours to get back to where we were staying.
Traffic eventually died down the more south we got, and we were cruising by the time we reached Rogue River National Forest. Led Zeppelin blasted from the stereo as we drove among the towering evergreen trees. Smoke covered the sky from a forest fire, and eventually the sun turned from yellow to bright red and then completely disappeared in the smoke. This was the second time I saw the sun disappear today. We finally arrived back where we were staying around 8 p.m. The long day of endless driving was worth it for what we got to experience.
RILEY J ROAMS 
Leave a comment