But the Sun is Eclipsed by the Moon

When I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in high school, I was delighted by Mark Twain’s use of a solar eclipse as a plot fulcrum. Hank Morgan, bonked on the head and woken up in sixth-century Camelot, leverages his 19th-century, American-bred knowhow to fend off superstitious Englishmen who would've had him burned at the stake. Not only that, his ability to magically blot out the sun convinces Arthur and his courtiers to make Morgan the king’s right-hand man.

Twain wrote the book as a satire of chivalric romance, and he shows Hank Morgan’s good side in his attempts to democratize Arthurian England and end slavery. But we also find in Morgan, who dubs himself “The Boss,” the mixed seeds of the flimflam man, carnival magician, and Gilded Age entrepreneur—much like the character played by Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz.

Four years before Twain’s book was published, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines came out, using a lunar eclipse as a plot twist to the benefit of adventuring Victorian Englishmen. Twain might have been one-upping the British author, but both may have taken their cue from Christopher Columbus, who not only stumbled upon America but also set the tone for a certain strain of flimflammery that continues to this day. Upset that the local inhabitants of Jamaica had stopped providing food to his men (after his men had plundered their villages), Columbus used a lunar eclipse to convince the locals that his god was angry. Now, some might argue that Columbus was only being shrewd in using his greater cosmic knowledge to gain provisions, that the local tribe members on this island were simply being outwitted and outplayed as if they were contestants in an episode of Survivor. But we should remind ourselves that, if knowledge is power, then with great power comes great responsibility. Or so saith Stan Lee.

Know-nothingism is not the alternative, of course. Few people could spot a good flimflam man like Mark Twain, and few people made more fun of gullible mobs than Twain did. To rise above the mob, Twain suggests, we could use more empirical evidence and less romanticized superstition. We need scientific inquiry. Consider, for instance, that it took the study of solar eclipses to discover helium and prove Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. 

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I recall two partial solar eclipses from my childhood in the Pacific Northwest. The first was probably the one that occurred on March 7, 1970, when I was in kindergarten. My class marched out of its portable at Sunny Hills Elementary to the playground and lined up to look into pinhole boxes so that we wouldn’t go blind. I felt a bit perturbed that I had to watch at a remove, that what I was witnessing was a representation of the actual thing—a shadow puppet on a wall. Seeing the moon partially fill in the dot of sunlight on the piece of paper was sort of like watching a hesitant student take a multiple-choice test. Of course, today I’m appreciative of the precautions our teachers took in preserving our five-year-old retinas. My middle-aged retinas thank them profusely.

The second partial solar eclipse likely was when I was sitting in 7th-grade math class at Pine Lake Junior High, just across the road from Sunny Hills. The teacher might have made a reference to the eclipse as he taught us how to calculate the area of a rhombus, but for the most part we just sat in our hard plastic chairs as day outside turned to not-really-night and the buzzing fluorescent lights became increasingly annoying. It’s possible that this moment marks the beginning of the end of my mathematical aptitude, but I’m not certain.

If I lost interest in math, however, I did not lose interest in the larger scientific questions that math could help solve—I just didn’t want to be the one performing the equations. What I liked most, and still like most, are the stories related to cosmic events and how people have tried to explain them, use them to their advantage, or simply give in and feel the awe of the moment. Herodotus writes of an eclipse that ended a six-year war between the Lydians and the Medes. Like the stadium lights going out at on a Friday-night football game, the lack of illumination put an end to hostilities. During the Peloponnesian War, Athenian general Nicias (with a little help from his priests) took a lunar eclipse as an omen to tarry around the harbor of Syracuse, only to be routed by the Syracusan fleet. So saith Thucydides.

Even in modern times, people get weird about eclipses. Annie Dillard, writing about a total eclipse in my home state of Washington (one that I have no recollection of but which occurred when I was still in junior high), notes the near hysteria: “From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching.” Dillard was in the Yakima Valley at the time, standing on a hill of wild barley, but where was I on that Monday morning in 1979? Learning to square dance in P.E.? Snoozing, open-lidded, through another math class? Why did this particular eclipse escape me?

Well, I had no choice but to be in school, learning, learning, learning. And maybe I didn’t even care at the time. It wasn’t the sun and the moon that concerned me most that year so much as sports, girls, and hobbits.

The following year I read about Hank Morgan and his exploits among the Knights of the Round Table (probably about the same time that I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Such spoofery helped loosen some of the cataracts of childhood gullibility from my eyes. I was probably also listening to Pink Floyd and The Who at the time and thinking: The Boss? Hmmm. Same as the old boss? . . . We don’t need no thought control. I was, at least internally, starting to question authority.

Fortunately, some authorities have the ability to inspire. My youngest daughter, who had a fantastic 8th-grade science teacher last year, is excited to see the upcoming eclipse, so much so that she’s incredibly disappointed that we can’t travel one state south to experience totality. Marching band camp at the high school has precluded that option. (“Trouble with a capital T!” I can hear a certain flimflam artist singing in The Music Man.) So we will instead head somewhere local on Monday morning, perhaps even our own yard, to see if the world as we know it will end.

Based on what I’ve learned so far, I don’t think it will—but there might be screaming.

And a Rock Feels No Pain

Some distance off the southern shoreline of Pine Lake, about five feet beneath the surface, there’s a rock. It’s a good-sized rock, you might even call it a boulder, but in the grand scheme of things it’s an inconsequential rock, likely one of many glacial erratics deposited here when the Cordilleran Ice Sheet extended down from British Columbia into Washington state during the Pleistocene epoch. When the ice retreated roughly 12,000 years ago, the Puget Sound region was left with a number of lakes, including Pine Lake and its neighbor, Beaver Lake, both now located in the city of Sammamish.

I say “now” because the area used to be rural, unincorporated King County, and back then the name “Sammamish” referred most specifically to the much larger lake down the hill and to the west of Pine Lake. The eponymous Sammamish High School, which is not one of the four high schools located within the city limits of Sammamish, is located many miles to the west in the city of Bellevue.

Well, the names may change, but the stone remains the same. From my family’s dock on Pine Lake, it would take half a minute to swim out to the rock and an area that my three brothers and I referred to as “The Island,” which was not an island so much as a shallow spot beneath the surface. It was amusing to swim out there and stand on the island, water at your armpits, and watch the boaters do double takes. It was even more fun to locate the rock, which by the end of a hot summer could elevate you until the water was at your waist.

One of my favorite times to search for the rock was at night, when the mysteries beneath the lake’s surface became even more pronounced. Who knew what lurked down there when the stars clicked on and the water turned as dark as ink? The lake bottom, coated by a soft, sedimentary muck, never quite prepared you for encountering the rock’s hardness. You’d swim out to the island and walk around, feeling tentatively with your toes. Sometimes you’d find it, sometimes not. Sometimes a fish would brush against your calf. I’m sure there were times when I came within inches of my goal before giving up and heading back to shore.

When I was younger, my dad swam out to the island with us, but he generally preferred to stay on the dock. An avid golfer, he brought home floating golf balls one year, along with a patch of Astroturf. Early in the evening, when most people had gone in for supper, our family took turns whacking balls toward the opposite shore while one of us puttered around in the boat with a fishing net as a scoop. My dad would give us tips on how to swing a club and then stand back to puff on his cigar. When he died in November of 2013, I walked out onto the dock and surveyed the calm, mist-laden water as the sun rose over the trees. Ice crystals had formed on the dock, and they crunched audibly underfoot. Not knowing what else to do, not knowing yet how to process the moment, I took out my phone and memorialized the crystals on the boards and the shroud of mist cloaking the neighboring docks. I needed something to mark the day, a picture of a natural occurrence that would freeze time like those crystals before it melted away. Back in the house, my dad’s cooling body lay waiting for the rest of the family to arrive, and after that, the stoic attendants from Flintoft’s Funeral Home.

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During this hot summer of 2017, when smoke comes down from Canada instead of sheets of ice, I find myself comforted by the rock’s presence. Just the other day, while visiting my mom, I located the solitary boulder—not once, not twice, but three times because, well, it’s easy to lose your coordinates underwater. Swim far enough away, and it can take a while to regain your bearings. Every summer day that I visit my mom, now, I wonder if it might be my last chance to find this personal monument to endurance (meaning both the rock’s permanence and the amount of time it can take to find the thing). And I think of all the friends and classmates who used to live on the lake or nearby and whose families may have long since departed, their houses sold, torn down, and replaced by swankier homes with pristine lawns and strong, fortress-like bulkheads along the waterfront.

The shoreline didn’t used to be this way. It used to harbor snakes and frogs. I have not seen tadpoles near the dock in decades. Before I could swim, I used to dig my fingers into the gray clay along the shore, beneath the roots of a fir tree that had been clinging there for generations.

It’s hard not to be sentimental about your childhood home, about summer days spent playing rag tag between docks or winter afternoons playing touch football on the ice when the lake froze over (a rare occurence). The lake was a commons, a byway, a runway, a theater. One of my brothers used to stuff his clothes into a plastic bag and swim to the park at the east end, where he’d meet up with his girlfriend. Somebody at the far corner of the lake owned a floatplane, which would come propelling toward us until it gained lift and cleared a flotilla of mallards. On the Fourth of July, most everyone who had a dock set off fireworks late into the evening, and the next day you’d see the torn, soggy carcasses of Roman candles and Whistling Petes bobbing in the water.

Memories can become nostalgia in a heartbeat, and nostalgia can become a playground for stubborn minds stuck in a halcyon glow. “You can’t go home again,” Thomas Wolfe reminds us. Times change. Municipalities enact laws to help make such changes sustainable, and as a result you’ll no longer see people speeding along Pine Lake in floatplanes or boats with gas-powered outboard motors. I miss those days for nostalgic reasons, but I know the lake’s speed limit was adopted out of ecological necessity. The waves ate at the shoreline, which is why a lot of those bulkheads were first built. Fireworks are no longer permitted on the Fourth for what seems to be an obvious reason.

If I’m being honest, I’m saddened by the changes around the lake less because the big homes and big lawns are an affront to some sense of aesthetic proportion than because these dwellings—most of them—are simply not the ones I remember from my youth. There used to be shacks and cabins, some with wild, unkempt growth along the shoreline. A few of the older homes remain, including my mom’s (once “my parent’s,” once “mine”), but I have to remind myself that today’s lake will be tomorrow’s nostalgia for somebody else.

At nearly 87, my mom is still healthy enough to spend much of her day tending her garden. But I don’t like to think about the day when I can no longer return to Pine Lake as a resident or as the son of a resident. Certainly, I could go to the park, put in a kayak, and paddle around, but it wouldn’t be the same. Somebody else will live in that house, or, more likely, somebody else will tear it down and build a new one.

I’m pretty certain, however, that unless a new ice age arrives the rock will still be in its place, unseen by those on the surface but available to anyone who wants to search long enough to find it.