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.”

