Sky Pilgrims

“Turn right here! It’s still with us!” Kerstin pulled onto Farm Road 548, leaving the state highway and cutting across green pastures. I craned my neck back and eyed the hole in the sky we were chasing across Texas. 

We had flown out into America, borrowed a car from Kerstin’s aunt, driven two hours east of Dallas, and made camp on a ranch just off the Interstate. It was Kerstin’s 35th birthday, and the moon was passing in front of the sun for four minutes. The total eclipse would cut a swath from Mazatlan to Newfoundland. 

“It’s my birthday eclipse!” She had urged, back in January. “Flights to Texas are kinda pricey, though…” I grumbled a bit about humans knowing the date of this eclipse for hundreds of years, but my fiancée wanted to stand underneath the mighty heavens with me, so we packed our camping gear. 

A dozen packs of DEET wipes, two decks of cards, a folding table and two camp chairs Kerstin’s uncle had brought out as we were loading up, his beer cooler, my solar lantern, the tent, and the eclipse glasses Kerstin had ordered. 

We didn’t need the DEET wipes, mercifully. We camped between a film-covered pond and a mucky drainage ditch, but there were no bugs. It turned out to be a favorite spot of the ranch’s ponies, though. We had to watch our step when building the fire, their patties scattered all around.

We returned from a lip-smacking dinner of gas station tacos — al pastor and quesabirria — only to find a herd of ponies had retaken our campsite. We crept the car onto the field, watching speechlessly as a bored-looking donkey stuck his nose into our tent. 

“I’ll get them,” a towheaded girl offered cheerily. “What’s this one’s name?”

“I wouldn’t know...” Kerstin said out the window, kibitzing to me about how, wherever there are ponies, there’s always a very helpful seven-year-old girl. 

“Oh, his name is Brownie,” the girl suddenly remembered, then moseyed them off, taking the whole herd back toward the paddock. So we played cards under the lantern, and went to bed hopeful. 

But when we woke to a gray world soaked with dew, no shadows and no sunlight, Kerstin frowned. The forecast was looking better back at her aunt and uncle’s house. Just then, a truck drove onto our plot, and a salty-whiskered man piled out with a heavy mechanical contraption. 

He wore an oversized, blue dragon-print shirt and a cowboy hat. He set his machine down in the grass. “Which is way is north?”

I pointed to the Interstate. “You don’t mind us setting up by your campsite? We’ve been planning for months to watch the eclipse from Little Rock, but we got a late start.” 

The machine he was assembling was a telescope. Cut from pieces of wood, lead pipes for counterweights, Erector Set gears, a control pad that looked like a TI-83 calculator and a nest of a wires. “It has to be lined up with the rotation of the earth or it drifts, but it’ll track the sun.” The wires were plugged into a laptop on an apple box. 

The rig had clearly been designed by hand and built with love in his garage, over decades. It drew the interest of a mop-haired hipster, even more obviously not from Texas than Kerstin and I, who ambled into our campsite with his moccasins and hemp satchel. “Can I take a look?”

“Oh sure,” the salty-whiskered tinkerer said. “If I get it lined up right, you can see solar flares.” And I did, the clouds had parted briefly, and just enough, so that when I bent over and looked through his lens, I saw a bright red ball, with what looked like tiny hairs, or arcs of static electricity, crawling off it. The sun. Those were solar flares. 

“You built this all yourself? Do you have a science or engineering background?”

“Oh no,” he chuckled. “I taught myself, just checked out books from the library. It’s all fractions.” 

Then the winds changed, and we were plunged back into a shadowless haze. Kerstin called it. We packed everything up and headed toward Rockwall. 

Racing down the highway, we were both panicked. Kerstin, that we would not escape the heavy canopy of clouds stretching from horizon to horizon. Me, that even if we did, we would not a find any place to park, and would spend the eclipse circling in the car. I had downloaded a radar weather app, and as Kerstin drove, I saw all of Texas swallowed by angry green pixels. 

But just as we were approaching Terrell, we looked up and saw a handsome stretch of bright, shining blue sky. 

“Quick, turn here!” I took Kerstin down the backroads, navigating half by phone, half by keeping my eyes on that elusive patch of clear sky. Our best hope. With the whole storm, it was blowing north across Texas. And it was narrowing, the dark wisps slowly knitting back together. 

We raced through the fields, down one-lane byways and dirt tracks, turning this way and that. Kerstin hollered and steered. “Do you know anybody else who would do this with you?” she asked, deep celestial mischief flashing in her eyes. 

“No!” I exalted with her, and then we found it. A Buc-ees in Royse City. If the winds kept carrying that patch of sky north at this speed, I guessed, it would be right over that Buc-ees parking lot at 1:36. Totality.

We pulled off the ramp at 1:18. Probably 40 pumps and a palatial travel stop, with gifts, a fudge shop, famously clean bathrooms, and every kind of snack and soda. We got one of the last parking spots against a berm of green grass just below the offramp. 

Unloaded the camp chairs and special glasses. Got a Coke out of the cooler. Looked up, the sun was already a half crescent. Totality was now ten minutes away. It was still a bright, sunlit day under a glorious patch of open sky. 

“I can’t believe it’s about to get dark,” I said to Kerstin. 

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, it will. And you’ll see we’re just flying through the universe together.”

We tilted our heads back. The yellow crescent sun became a golden sliver. The shadows of the cars and trees weakened. The birds quieted.

And then… darkness. We yawped and hooted along with the crowds around us at the gas station. Very suddenly, the bright daylight had been replaced by deep dusk. The corona shone in a mystical ring above us. Red points of lights glowed out from behind it. Solar flares. Venus hung nearby. We took selfies, texted our families. And just watched.