It's 9AM
It won’t happen again for 45 more years.
Or so.
A total eclipse where I am.
Where I can walk into the front yard and watch the moon eat the sun.
If I were in King Arthur’s Court, I could be considered magic.
Or a warlock
Or just plain cool for stargazing.
Which is what you can call staring at the sun for a couple of hours.
Here I’m considered a nerd.
I talked to a lot of people at a baseball tournament this weekend.
They acted like it was a lot of bother.
Arkansas expected up to half a million people.
But I was on the road to and from Fayetteville on Friday and Sunday and it felt like I had the road to myself.
The absence of big rigs was…
Disconcerting.
I wondered if it was because the governor declared a state of emergency to deal with an influx of people…
Or if it had to do with other disruptions outside of the state.
Because if I were hauling freight on 18 wheels, Sunday night at 11 might be a perfect time to get in my 8 or 10 hours or whatever the Federal Government allows you to drive now.
Except there weren’t any.
Just a few.
A few more parked in the pull outs, resting after hitting their limit.
Waiting for morning and getting the heck out of Dodge or delivering.
But no traffic to speak of.
And in Fayetteville, the most folks we ran into were at the Hogs baseball game beating Ole Miss Friday night.
Not to mention hunting up parking at a beautiful park beside a mountain where there were fifty team at the ball fields and what looked like a hundred soccer teams doing Saturday morning games.
That’s where all the traffic was.
But we found parking and found Wins and found that NWA is really the most beautiful place.
Which I’ve said before and will think again.
Even if I love the Delta and love Pine Bluff and love parts of Central AR to play in, on and around.
There is something special about the Hill and all the up to Missouri.
It’s opposite the other side of AR which used to be part of the Show Me State where during the last solar eclipse to take this path, the Mississippi River ran backwards.
Not on the same day, but around that time, an earthquake shook the New Madrid Fault, and forced the big muddy river to reverse course.
It created hundreds of oxbow lakes, and changed the local topography.
But folks then did not have the same level of awareness we do now, so they were surprised by the ground shaking under their feet and nature doing unnatural things.
We’ve had years of warning and were still surprised when the Jersey Devil gave a shiver and shook NYC for the first time I can remember.
A lot of people didn’t want to watch the eclipse today because of mutterings of strange days..
To which I nodded and agreed.
Strange days indeed.
But…
Aren’t they all?
I mean, if you’re looking for weird, you don’t have to look too hard to find it.
Heck, you’re reading a guy who sees beauty in empty spaces and desolation of Delta farm fields and uniform pine forests.
And mountain sunrises like the one I shared in the picture above.
That’s weird.
Embrace it.
Your weirdness and sunrises and solar eclipses.
The quirks of this world are what make it great, I think.
Well, baseball makes it great, and so does no traffic travel, and adding a Chris Lowry book to your collection is great too, but quirks are right up there at the top of the list.
Top five, at least.
Maybe top ten if you’ve got a cold beer after a sunset on the other side of Kessler Mountain, but these great things are fluid.
And tomorrow, the path of totality might be number one.
Go outside and witness it for yourself and let’s compare notes.
Just don’t forget your glasses.
Staring at the sun with no protection is just weird.
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Enjoy the eclipse