We've returned, ominously, to the lands of the Great War dead, following the Marne to Verdun for a picnic lunch in Argonne (roasted half chicken bought with sign language, tomato salad, baguette); onto our green-line road which turns out to be the Voie Sacree, memorials and graveyards of various nations along the track into farmland hills.

Here too are our first signs of others like us, eclipse hopefuls pulled over to the side of the road, staring to the sun en masse with their funny paper glasses on, holding their cars for support. And I glance back through our car window, holding my piece of Kodak exposed film (from Malignant Cove, Antigonish, Nova Scotia 1973) and get a flash of the sun through trees: our first look at the perfectly round bite out of the perfectly round sun, which is there, just as calculated, just as predicted.  Twenty minutes before twelve and for the first time today the sky is opening to patches of blue and it has begun.

We are inside the path of totality now and people are stopped, groups in cornfields with scopes, along nice hills, but we go on--can't settle for the first one--looking for our perfect spot closer to the line I sketched on the map in black ballpoint in NYC.  We have to be somewhere with a half hour to go I've decided--and totality comes between 12:25 and 12:30.    next

Totality is the thing--a partial eclipse is like a partial orgasm or a partial birth. The sunlight at 97 percent is hardly special, only afterwards does it start to get strange.