O o

We aren’t going to see it.

I see this same thought ripple across the other eclipse-watchers along the reed-crested Charleston waterfront. Black and white faces sheened with midday South Carolina sweat exchange worried looks. The crowd clutches flimsy cardboard glasses, waiting for confirmation on whether the cosmic screening will end up cancelled due to poor weather.

“We should go back to the car,” says Luke.

I look across the bay. In every direction I see clouds seeping into the sky. To the east, the rusting hulk of the USS Yorktown turns corpse-grey as the sun vanishes. Farther south, at the strategic entrance of the harbor, the flat tombstone of Fort Sumpter has gone black.

“The humidity from the bay is creating a front that might cover the whole thing up. If we move further inland we might be able to catch some clear sky.”

Luke knows as much about meteorology as I do.

He catches my eye and adjusts his bandana defensively. “It could be a thing.”

I nod and we start to navigate our way through the forest of tripod-mounted cameras tilted at the sky.

— -

“We should do it”, Luke says, as we nurse our beers in a Toronto dive bar. “Meet up in the states. See a whole other side of the country. See what’s going on. Start in Atlanta, finish in D.C.”

It feels a little like disaster tourism to me, but I have a couple of weeks off coming up and Luke’s only in the country for a short while before he has to fly back to Australia and, anyway, the path of the eclipse will go right through South Carolina.

Behind us, the television is repeating the same images of burning tiki-torches, clean-cut boys, the photo of the car impacting the protestors. The sound has been turned off. All the journalists look like plastic puppets.

— -

-2

We’re operating on fumes of sleep, with only a few hours to spare before we’re due in Savannah. Luke’s bus from New York ended up being delayed by twelve hours and became a Greyhound Death March. He arrived in the city at 3:45AM. I was relatively lucky, my flight was only delayed by two hours.

Martin Luther King Jr’s tomb is the only thing we manage to see in Atlanta before we have to leave. Luke is particularly taken by the gentle ribbon of trees, grass and fountains that curve from the parking lot, past the statue of Ghandi, into the MLK Center. His latest obsession is urban design, which he says has a huge impact on the psychology of social environments.

Jimmy Carter has fused his Freedom Center with the Martin Luther King Junior National Monument. It’s a strange brew, the perfectly preserved cart that carried a man’s coffin from Ebenezer Baptist Church to Morehouse College right down the way from a room with a Georgia peanut farmer grinning behind an American flag.

If you want to see the tomb itself, you have to cross a busy street that divides the museum and park from Dr King’s final resting place. It’s a beautiful arrangement of white marble and blue tile, diminished somewhat by the fact the reflection pool has been drained due to toxic algae.

A security guard has been placed by the Eternal Flame; a recent precaution.

O o

When we get back to the car, parked out front of an arc of multi-colored 18th century row-houses, there’s a crack in the windshield. It looks like someone shot a BB-Gun at the glass.

I feel the pit of my stomach turn to ice. Neither of us have insurance, one of those stupid split-second decisions you make in order to save yourself twenty bucks when you’re teetering on the edge of poverty. I instantly swear to myself I will tick “yes” for insurance for the rest of my life.

“Forget it,” says Luke as he throws open the passenger-side door. “We’ll deal with it later.”

We both know that’s just something he has to say in order to keep us moving.

— -

On the flight down I read about how you can’t look directly at it at anything less than totality. The edge of the sunlight is intensified along the edges of the moon. A man who was partially blinded last time offers his warning; “I can see your face, but not your nose.”

You don’t see blackness. You don’t see anything. Your brain just skips over it.

— -

+2

“I love it. It’s like being a history teacher but I don’t have to grade papers.”

The voice of the tour guide is piped in via airline-quality fuzzed headphones.

Before we’re allowed into the Capitol we are corralled into a theatre and screened a seventeen-minute documentary film about the history of the House and the Senate, narrated by a dark rich female voice. Over the swellings of a John Williams-esque string section, we learn about the 1812 burning down of the city by the British, (in retaliation for the destruction of Toronto), the expansion westward (the native Americans are barely mentioned), the gold torn out of the guts of the Californian wilderness, the mounds of corpses that choked the creeks of Vicksburg.

Then the 20th Century lumbers into view and all the old faces are there, both Roosevelts, Kennedy, Johnson, (they skip Nixon) Reagan, Clinton (a tiny flash of Bushes) and Obama. A corporate promo for America.

At the very end of the film there is a shot of a flower framed by a sunset and the video becomes an unintentional eulogy. I imagine these images flickering on the side of a crumbling wall sometime in the early twenty-second century; entertainment for some Potomac-based scavenger tribe as mutated bioweapons howl in the night.

After the screening we’re taken through the building. The dome looms above, a Sistine-Chapel-style fresco spattered across it apex of the original thirteen colonies represented as virginal woman clad in gossamer-thin robes, clasping hands and dancing around the maypole of freedom.

Closer to the ground, a vast mural depicts Christopher Columbus stumbling out of a rowboat and condemning tens of millions of people to death.

Each state in the union has submitted two statues that they feel best represent their contribution to their country.

The tour guide, resembling a retired anime character with his thick moon-shaped glasses, gestures to a statue on the far right of a balding man with an elegant Grecian appearance.

“Charles Brantley Aycock,” the tour guide explains. “50th Governor of the state of North Carolina. In 1898 he led the only successful coup-de-tat in the history of the United States.”

Aside from the coup, Charles Aycock was also involved in a mob of nearly two thousand white men who attacked a prosperous black neighborhood in the city of Wilmington, burning down homes and businesses that had been built up since the end of the Civil War and killing sixty men, women and children.

“We can’t remove it,” replies the tour guide with bored impatience. “Only the state that sent the statue can recall it.”

O o

Charleston vanishes behind a cloudburst as we leave the outskirts. Machine-gun rain drums against the glass.

“Motherfucker!” Luke exclaims. I put the wipers on full-blast and they’re barely enough to keep the road visible. Up ahead all I can see is a sky that’s been punched in the face.

There’s nobody on the road besides the highway patrol manning giant signs every couple of miles that read: DO NOT STOP ON THE HIGHWAY FOR THE ECLIPSE.

— -

“For me, it’s like they’re a kind of clock,” the woman explains on the online video I’m watching on my iPad as I’m waiting for the flight out of D.C.

She’s seen twelve in her lifetime. She chases them.

“I can remember each moment that I saw them so clearly. Last time it was with my husband. He died last year.”

The woman is looking at the camera

“Other things, I forget,” she says.

— -

-1

Savannah feels like a gorgeous rotting corpse in the subtropical heat, although that may just be my hangover. I lie on the grass wishing I was dead in one of the many public parks that splay across the city in a perfect grid. The fountain at the centre of this park must has a kink in its pipe and the water sprays out at infrequent intervals. I find it soothing.

Luke makes fun of me. He’s relatively unscathed. A professional.

The city is draped with large trees dripping with Spanish Moss, lined with houses right out of an antebellum novel. A horse and carriage passes us by carrying a young Israeli couple who fan themselves as the coachwoman explains the history of the street they are on, how the free labor of the south generated enormous wealth, allowing the residents of this city to indulge in their wildest architectural fantasies.

We come to a statue of a civil war general. Tiny plastic American flags have been sticky-taped onto the wrought iron fence around it. The pavement is covered in chalk writing.

Oo

The rains give way and all of a sudden the sky up ahead is breaking up. Patches of blue peek through the bruised purple. We’re about halfway between Charleston and Columbia.

“We need to find somewhere to pull off,” I say. “We don’t know how long this will last.”

The next exit branches left. We take it and find a run-down gas station filled with the acrid stench of cigarette smoke and shelves lined with candy and crisp packets. An elderly black man is seated in front of a poker machine at the back of the store, pulling a lever.

On the other side of the road lies a huge dilapidated parking lot. Weeds push through the cracks, eating the concrete, dragging it screaming into the forest.

People are already gathered around their cars, each one a strange outpost in the ocean of flat grey. They stare at the sky, whispering.

By the time I put on my glasses and look up I see that the perfect black ink dot of the moon has already begun to occlude the sun.

— -

I watch the television in our motel at the edge of Atlanta, waiting for Luke to finish his shower. A man is talking to the camera and the chyron underneath has the words “sociologist” on it.

“One rather unique and largely unknown response to an eclipse is found in an 1886 account of Australian aborigines,” the man says. They “reportedly believed that the eclipse was caused by another tribe up on the moon itself, a people who were sick and angry, and were taking their ‘bad frame of mind’ out on the people below by blocking out the sun.”

— -

+1

The view from Monticello is incredible. Virginia rolls out in a patchwork of trees and fields to the horizon, peppered by little hamlets, brushfires and streams. Charlottesville is behind us and cannot be seen from this angle.

Our guide is an elderly man who has lived his entire life in the shadow of Monticello. He loves this town.

“Thomas Jefferson was one of the foremost intellectuals of his time,” he explains.

The guide points out the stargazing apparatus on Jefferson’s study desk, noting that the third president of the nation himself observed an eclipse on the 17th of September, 1811.

As we are shown around the property, we are informed that Jefferson designed every inch of Monticello’s gardens; planting honeysuckle, elm, corn, tobacco and hundreds of flowering plants. Inside his home there is a huge room completely stuffed with ephemera from all over the planet; artwork, fossils, stuffed animals. He was the very definition of a renaissance man.

They have begun to rebuild the slave huts along the edge of Mulberry Way, simple log-cabins, nestled around the geometry of the great house like a peasant village around a lord’s keep. You can listen to a slave tour on an app, which mentions that Jefferson owned over six hundred human beings on the property.

Near the end of the human-based tour, the guide mentions Sally Hemmings, the slave girl that Jefferson had multiple children with following his wife’s death (he never freed her, even in his will). Historians believe that Sally was fourteen and Jefferson was forty-four when this started.

“Those people that came here to Charlottesville last week,” the guide says, tears suddenly coming to his eyes, “They are not gonna win. That’s not who we are.”

(O)

Light has taken on an abstracted quality as the moon has continued to occlude the sun. The world around us has been processed through a chemical filter. I give up trying to take a photo of it and lie back on a sleeping bag that I’ve unfurled.

All around us, the cicadas are going insane.

The light changes.

Birds stop.

People stop.

Totality.

All along the horizon the sky goes red-gold as we are surrounded by sunsets from a thousand lifetimes. The stars have become visible in the sudden inky gloom above.

A hole has appeared in the heart of the sun. A perfect blend of black and white. Gravity, light, mass and time, all in synchronicity. A few million years either way and this event would not be possible, and we all get to witness it, our lives coming to a point of balance, sloping away in either direction.

A cheer erupts. I see people turn on torches, flick on their headlights. They embrace. They kiss. They say “I love you.”

In the distance, the storm we passed through rumbles with great arcs of lightning.

I lie rooted to the earth, my heart pounding in my chest, staring up at the corona of pale white ringing the edges of the dark sphere of the moon.

It is the strangest and most beautiful thing I have ever seen.