How did I become an eclipse chaser?

Like any good story, it begins with a girl.

I met Amy in the spring of 1991. I was a wide-eyed and wild 28 year-old and she was beautiful, sophisticated and as moonstruck as I was. It was love at first sight. We would go for walks - chase Moonrise to the outskirts of the city - and exchange life stories about our connection to the Moon. We had ‘kindred Moon souls,’ she once wrote. And how true that was.

Then in June she won a contract to move to Baja, Mexico, for two months to assist the peninsula’s tiny tourism businesses manage the throngs of scientists and eclipse chasers bearing down on them prior to the Total Solar Eclipse (TSE) of July 11. At this point I didn’t know much more about TSEs than any one else. I just didn’t want her to leave! But it was meant to be.

She called me at the beginning of July. This was going to be the event of a lifetime, she said. Would I come to Baja, stay with her for a week and enjoy the eclipse with her?

Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away.

My flight from Los Angeles landed in Cabo San Lucas on 6 July 1991. The minute I walked out on to the tarmack I loved the Baja. I hadn’t done much world travel at this point and a visceral sense of the exotic and the remote struck me instantly. I was excited to be finally in the path of the eclipse. But I wasn’t here to chase the eclipse. I was chasing a girl.

I took the bus up to La Paz and moved in with Amy. In the days prior to the eclipse, La Paz was the place to be. This sleepy Mexican town had been transformed into Astronomy Central. And the Mexicans were ready for us. As hosts, they took full advantage of the eclipse to celebrate the richness of their culture and to seduce travelers with public star parties, parades in the streets and social events that ran around the clock. There were tens of thousands of cool people filling the bars and I couldn’t escape the buzz in the air. It was the perfect setting for a young man desperate for adventure and romance.

When the day finally came, I could not have been more hyped about the eclipse. I had met and talked to so many rabid eclipse chasers in the past few days that my expectations were off the scale. These people were pumped! But when the eclipse began with the Moon taking a small bite out of the Sun, I got a chill that ran through my spine that I have never been able to describe in words.

As the partial phase of the eclipse progressed - with the Moon hiding more and more of the Sun - Amy and I drove up to the top of a hill overlooking the town.

Through my piece of green welder’s glass I could watch the Moon moving across the Sun - reducing it to an ever-shrinking crescent shape. When I finally noticed that it was starting to get dark - and the remaining light had taken on a soft, silvery quality - I had a thought that maybe my expectations were about to be exceeded. I couldn’t shake the realization that something cosmic was happening that couldn’t be stopped. Something that has its origins in the beginning of time. And that I am here - now - somehow part of it all. At the time I was clueless as to the significance of this. The Total Eclipse was only seconds away.

From my diary:

I watched from a hilltop as the monstrous Moon shadow cut through the sky - racing off the Pacific Ocean and heading straight for me at 3500 kilometers per hour. The wind picked up and the temperature dropped. The sky was being cut in half! Through a piece of welder’s glass I watched the perfectly black disc of the Moon cross the final inch of the face of the Sun reducing it to a single sliver of brilliance. The town of La Paz faded into silhouettes before my eyes as the Moon’s “veil of darkness” swept up every living soul from west to east. Planets and stars appeared over my head in a sky that was now deeper and more magical than any twilight I had ever seen. I blinked and dropped my welder’s glass and looked up with my naked eye as the Moon finally hid the last burst of sunlight behind its jagged edge. This DIAMOND RING EFFECT is the final exhilarating moment of the transformation of daytime into night. With the Sun now totally hidden behind the dark side of the Moon, I took my first few breaths in the Moon’s umbra - the alien world known as TOTALITY.

I shook off the goose-bumps as best I could but the hair on the back of my neck was up to stay. With my naked eye I could see past the edge of the Moon to the surface of the Sun where brilliant pink and red explosions of gas were leaping up into space. These PROMINENCES looked as if a crimson jewel-box had tumbled open from behind the black limb of the Moon. And burning in every direction, the atmosphere of the sun - the long, thin, BRILLIANT WHITE STREAMERS of gas and magnetism that cut into space like pointy swords for 3 million kilometers in every direction!! The vision was sublime.

It lasted almost 7 minutes. It was as if our little spot on Earth had fallen out of time. It was as if we had been arrested in a red-rimmed dome of dark blue sky so the universe could peer in at us from overhead with its one giant eye just to see what we were doing. All of a sudden, I was in a relationship with the universe. I had never seen or felt anything like it before

I remembered to take some pictures and look through my binoculars, but that was all. Totality left me breathless. And I haven’t been quite the same since.

This is how eclipse chasers are made. All it takes is one eclipse.