Wednesday, February 16, 2022 — 11
Michigan in Color
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
All life experiences are bina-
ry; they are either expected or
unexpected. You are familiar
with most of your daily rou-
tine, starting with waking up.
What you do for the rest of
your day is up to you. Maybe
you decide to get out of bed.
Maybe you choose to shower
and get ready for the rest of
your day. Maybe you visit your
favorite coffee shop for break-
fast, or maybe you don’t. But
no matter what you choose,
you expect the outcome of
your choice and at the end of
the day, you close your eyes,
you fall asleep and you repeat
it all over again.
Now look, I’m not saying
this to be morbid. I think it
is important to create consis-
tent habits, and repetition is
comforting. I love my morning
routines. I love the comfort of
walking over the same bridge
to get to class each morning.
I love my daily calls home to
my family, and I love order-
ing from my favorite restau-
rant once a week. I love all
these things because I know
what to expect. But what hap-
pens when you experience the
unexpected?
You are probably thinking,
I experience new things all
the time, it’s not that special.
I don’t mean new. With new
things, we can often anticipate
what the experience feels like
or recall past memories to help
our mind fill in the holes of
what just occurred. I’m talk-
ing about the rare “hold my
breath, what just happened”
unexpected — the type of feel-
ing that leaves your brain per-
plexed and mouth speechless.
I can only remember a few
moments in my life when I’ve
felt like this, one of them being
when I witnessed my first
total solar eclipse in 2017.
When my dad first told me
we were going to drive over
eight hours from the south of
San Francisco all the way to
northern Oregon just to look
at the sky for a few minutes,
I thought he was crazy. Why
would someone drive for eight
hours just to look at the moon?
I told him that we could wit-
ness the moon cover roughly
85% of the sun from home and
that it would be 85% as fasci-
nating — I would quickly learn
to eat my words.
The thing about total solar
eclipses is that you can see
totality, which is when the
moon completely covers the
sun. Only if you are within the
path of totality, which is the
small strip of area where the
moon’s shadow blankets the
Earth’s surface. The further
from the center of the path,
the less the moon covers the
sun and the shorter the time
that you experience totality.
So we could have stayed home,
but we would have only wit-
nessed a partial solar eclipse,
not a total solar eclipse — two
completely different phenom-
enons.
After the lengthy drive, my
dad, brother and I arrived in
Madras, a small town in Ore-
gon with a population of over
seven thousand people. By the
time we arrived, tens of thou-
sands of people, who’d trav-
eled from all corners of the
world, had already flooded
the ill-prepared town. Since
Madras has the lowest chance
of cloud coverage, people from
over 39 different countries and
all 50 states flocked to Solar-
town,
Madras’s
makeshift
campsite, for the weekend.
Even Oregon’s National Guard
was called in to mitigate traf-
fic. I was stunned. People had
been living out of their cars for
days, setting up tents and tele-
scopes. It gave off an almost
cult-like atmosphere: as if it
were Judgment Day and this
was the final hurrah. As time
passed, the anticipation grew.
“Two
hours,”
yelled
the
crowd. “One hour! Ten min-
utes!! It’s starting!!!” Finally.
First contact: the invisible
moon kisses the tip of the sun.
If you are not wearing the spe-
cial shades that block all visi-
ble light, you can hardly notice
the gradual bites the moon has
taken out of the star. Now, it’s
just a waiting game. Roughly
ten minutes before full cover-
age, the world is enveloped in
gray twilight. As time slowly
progresses
toward
totality,
you notice the diamond ring
effect, where only a portion of
the sun resembling a diamond
ring remains. Five seconds
before totality, you notice Bai-
ly’s beads, in which tiny balls
of light surround the rim of
the moon. It is almost time. A
shadow washes over our world
as if God has thrown a blanket
over us.
And then it hits. Second con-
tact: totality. The moon has
completely covered the sun,
and all that is left is its corona,
the outermost part of the sun’s
atmosphere which is typically
masked by the sun’s rays. You
throw off your glasses, and
at this moment, life is trans-
formed. The world changes
from light to dark, from hot
to cold and from anxious to
calm. The deadness of your
surroundings flows through
your body. You hear nothing
but animals shouting in confu-
sion, as your senses overload.
You are entranced and noth-
ing matters, not even time:
minutes pass but they feel like
seconds. And then it’s finished
and you want more.
Third Contact: the sun slow-
ly reappears. Your soul comes
back to life and you become
aware of your surroundings.
Putting the shades back on,
you see the diamond ring
effect and Baily’s beads again.
You wave goodbye to the expe-
rience and pray that you will
see another once more.
Fourth Contact: the sun
is now free and cheers ring
out from the crowd. You look
around and people are still
looking up at the sky to pro-
cess what they have just wit-
nessed. Some people are still
in awe, others have looks of
confusion and a few are wiping
away tears they didn’t know
they had.
I fall into the first cate-
gory. The experience was so
enthralling that we traveled to
Chile a few years later just to
get a glimpse of totality again.
While I could expect what it
would feel like then, no one
could have prepared me for
my first eclipse. As the next
total solar eclipse visible from
North America will occur on
April 8, 2024, you already
know that I have plans to see
it. But until then, I’ll have to
wait.
Experiencing the unexpected: my first total solar eclipse
Design by Melia Kenny
DEVEN PARIKH
MiC Columnist
“I can only remember a few
moments in my life when I’ve felt
like this, one of them being when
eclipse in 2017.”
“Some people are still in awe,
others have looks of confusion
and a few are wiping away tears
they didn’t know they had.”