The Total Solar Eclipse Comes to “Eclipseville,” Kentucky

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I stared through my glasses at the last sliver of the sun, a neon-yellow comma, a pause before the big show. Then totality began.Photograph by Jessica Rinaldi / Boston Globe via Getty

Around ten o’clock yesterday morning, not long before the total solar eclipse began, a friend and I were driving down the empty two-lane roads of Christian County, Kentucky, past fields of forest-green soybean, dark tobacco, and gangly maize, past one-room Baptist churches and little tents under which bored National Guardsmen sat sipping red Gatorade. More than a hundred thousand people had descended on the city of Hopkinsville for the event, and we’d expected more traffic. By the time we got to Orchardale Shepherd Farms, our viewing destination, it was already nearly ninety degrees. Everyone seemed to be here: Governor Matt Bevin (his nine children were watching elsewhere); Lieutenant Governor Jenean Hampton; two young journalists from London; a Japanese television crew; a trailer full of NASA scientists; the Voodoo Bone Lady, of New Orleans, and her two Mandarin rat snakes, Damballah and Allegua; an Australian radio host, who ended up speaking live for sixty-eight minutes straight; Carter Hendricks, the mayor of Hopkinsville; Steven Tribble, a county judge; the Kentucky State Police; and even the Christian County jailer. He had eight hundred and twenty prisoners back in downtown Hopkinsville. He said he wasn’t able to let them watch the eclipse—“Not enough room.”

As the appointed hour drew nearer, Bevin held a press conference. “It will be very fun in terms of just the fun factor,” he said. “Everyone likes the idea of the sun going dark in the middle of the day. I don’t care what your perspective.” The Voodoo Bone Lady (she doesn’t go by any other name) waited in her S.U.V. and fussed over her snakes. “They’re not feeling well,” she said, shaking her head, causing the tiger teeth on her dress to rattle. She planned to conduct a ceremony during totality that would harness the eclipse’s energy and use it to promote peace. Outside NASA’s R.V., a piece of moon rock, embedded in Plexiglas, was on display, and a straw-hatted engineer named Rick Burt was giving away protective eyewear. “We have seen counterfeit glasses,” he said. “I’m also trying to increase awareness by reminding people to live in the moment and watch totality.” Over by a hay barn, Officer Sean Wint surveyed the scene. “We actually probably overprepared,” he told me. “We have thirty extra state troopers in the area. There’s probably never been anything this size in rural Kentucky. Social media has brought an awful lot of people all together today.” He suddenly excused himself—Bevin was being whisked away by some large men in black eclipse T-shirts.

People began putting on their eclipse glasses, waiting for the curved black edge of the moon to nibble into the orange disc of the sun. “Is it coming from the top or the bottom?” Elizabeth Marshall, a Kentucky native, shouted out, looking skyward. Someone else yelled, “From the top-right corner!” There were hoots and cheers. “Did you see what’s happening in the barn?” a thirty-one-year-old hot-sauce purveyor from Brooklyn asked anyone who would listen. “It’s making a pinhole-camera effect.” Sure enough, there were little Pac-Man shadows on the dirt next to the hay bales, where the sun was shining through tiny holes in the barn’s rusted corrugated roof. Kids hanging off the backs of A.T.V.s went whizzing by. A horse pulling a wagon galloped down the road. The wind picked up.

The Almasri family, from Memphis, was standing in the middle of the field, excited. It had gotten a little darker out, a slant light like one before a summer-afternoon thunderstorm. Five boys were jumping and running around. Their school had begun early, on August 7th, and they had been allowed to take the day off. Faris Almasri stared upward at what now, through his glasses, was a yellow crescent against a pitch-black background. “It looks, um, probably like a banana,” he said, then added, “That is golden.”

Just a few minutes more until totality began. My friend and I lay down on the grass. It was quiet except for the rumbling generator of a broadcast van. The temperature dropped significantly, and a breeze rushed over our faces. Finally, I was staring through my glasses at the last sliver of the sun, an inverted neon-yellow comma—a pause before the big show. Then totality. Yells and gasps and buzzing insects. We took off our glasses. Sudden twilight. The sun, replaced by the moon, was a perfect black sphere. Pure white light streamed out around it, and it was easy to imagine the sun’s rays shooting through lunar valleys on their way to us, turning them a glowing white-gold.

I felt calm, light, and slightly unnerved, like I was dreaming. I thought I wouldn’t mind if someone started singing. No one did, but the collective murmur of the observers, and their occasional hollers, were the sounds of humans at their sweetest. As I was warned would happen, I already knew that I wanted to see another total solar eclipse in another obscure corner of Earth. A red-tailed hawk flapped languorously by, perhaps confused by the early call to roost, but complying nonetheless. Venus was visible as a point of light in the sky. Around me, people had their hands to their heads or their arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders, like silhouetted statuary.