Viewing: The lunar eclipse

Moving: 170 miles roundtrip drive, a quick scamper, several pounding racings of my heart

Learning: how much I miss adventures like this.

20 January 2000: Eclipse

At work someone told me there was a gathering at Rocky Mountain National Park with a ranger explaining lunar eclipses. Hm. I had up to then planned only to go somewhere out of the city, but I wasn't sure where.

If I went east, I could get out of the city quickly but the flat plains don't have the foothills' altitude. If I went west into the foothills, I'd have the greater altitude but I'd be driving west and not see the moon until I got to wherever I was going. If I went north, I wanted to meet Jenn somewhere. And should I go to "Toy Story 2," since it would end at 8:30, well before totality, and not leave the city but see the movie since I understood Thursday to be its last day? Jenn declined my offer but was glad I am such a decisive individual.

Then I checked Denver Sidewalk again and found that "Toy Story 2" is still playing next week, just somewhere or other other than I have ever been, and my coworker told me about the ranger lecture at Bear Lake, so I decided to go to RMNP. Wheee! It's only a 170-mile round trip, more driving alone than I have done in almost four years, at night, etc.

I would leave just before 6:30, get coffee and cash, and head out of town. Digital camera, not that it would do me much good; a cell phone, because there is at least scratchy spotty coverage through the perimeter of the park; binoculars, because not everything useful is high-tech; and the Cowboy Junkies and the Waterboys. RDC called at 6:20 and I braced myself for his trying to talk me out of it. He didn't at all. He was concerned, which I can accept; but he'd rather I go wander in RMNP at night than in the park near our house. So I was off a little later than I expected, obtained caffeine and funds, and then, as I should have expected, getting out of Denver and north on I-25 was the longest part of the trip. Even as late as 7:00, people are still commuting, plus there was the stock show. Traffic didn't clear until north of Thornton.

Which reminds me. I recently skimmed the beginning of a report from the Heritage Foundation titled "Issues 2000." It lambasts the federal government for spending on anything more than a judicial system--which is specifically the only governmental force named in Atlas Shrugged as existing in Colorado, the one state that all the industrialists flee to . One example of the money federal government wastes, according to this report, is the interstate system. I paraphrase closely: "the interstate highway system has been complete for twenty years yet the federal government still spends millions a year on it." Perhaps because roads deteriorate, because the population increasing results in greater demand on the roads, and because not enough money was spent to begin with on durable materials? Maybe because conservatives like you think public transportation smacks of socialism?

So anyway. First I listened to Lay It Down, which was already in the CD player. Then I exited I-25 onto Route 66 west and saw, glimmering in the moonlight above the ever-present bulge of foothills on the horizon, the snow-covered bulk of Long's Peak. In daylight, you can see Long's Peak from Denver, but I've never seen it by night, not at that distance, not without the light of a full moon. And there was moonlight on it, so the eclipse hadn't progressed too much yet (driving west, I couldn't see it at all). Listening to Caution Horses, speeding along like Milo in my little electric automobile, I drove straight for the peak.

West of Lyons I got the first idea of what a visual treat this expedition would be. When we first arrived in Colorado, when we drove to Aspen and I first saw all the Wile E. Coyote landscape in the flesh, the simple fact that all this strange geology was more than photographs, more than cartoons, gave me pause. There is such a cliff, one side of a butte, on the way to RMNP. (There are lots, but this first one announces "You have left the flats behind" suddenly, hugely, as you turn a corner and it blocks out the sky, and it introduces all that follow.) This night, instead of orange-red baking under a blue sky, I saw black blotting out the skyful of stars.

That cliff marks the beginning of the ascent. Lyons is only 5300 feet and change, barely more than Denver; Estes Park is at about 8000, and Bear Lake in RMNP 9485. So Cassidy and I began to climb. RDC does most of our driving, so it's rare enough I've driven to the park at all, and now I was driving at night. "Elk," I told myself. "Mule deer. Lots of 'em." But I encountered none, which was good because I was driving pretty fast. Because that's how I like to drive.

There's a vista just before Estes Park that gives a lovely view of Estes Park and some of RMNP's peaks, a vista that RDC and I usually stop at simply because we stopped there the first time we drove here. I did want to check how far the moon had passed into the penumbra, but I didn't pull over. Too public, and plus I was almost there. I took a Junkies break to listen to Fisherman's Blues as I passed through Estes Park, and then and only then did I wonder if the park would be open. Legally. And what I would do if it weren't. Almost at the Visitor's Center, I saw a car pulled off to the side with a few guys around it with bottles of beer in their hands, and I worried that they were there because no one was permitted into the park after sunset. But of course it's not a state park or state forest ("Closes at sunset / No camping, no keg beer" reads the sign at the top of Forest Road at home in Lyme). The entry posts, as I neared them, were illuminated but vacant and no traffic cones or gates suggested I turn around. Instead, a sign propped in the guard shack welcomed me in: "Post not staffed, please proceed." Okay!

My first stop was Moraine Park. If the road to Bear Lake was icy, Moraine Park would be a nice open spot to watch from, especially if I got there late. But it had no snow, and I wanted moonlight reflected on snow, and the scattering of structures in Moraine Park had electric lights on, inside and out. Just a few lights, with a lot of distance in between, but enough to spook me. The moon was about halfway covered, and from the glimpses I'd had of it on the drive, I thought I had enough time to get up to Bear Lake. With no snow in Moraine, perhaps there wouldn't be so much on the way to Bear.

I was off. Ahead of me, I saw more lights, but these blinked in and out of the headlights. These would turn out to be roadside reflectors and bits of cars. Because there were cars, but only two. I passed two cars (that I saw) pulled into two different picnic areas. Which are roofed by trees. Whatever. I left them behind. By this time I was strongly doubtful there was any ranger activity: no other cars were driving, it was winter, and my coworker had stumbled over the name of the spot he'd read the event was happening. Had he read about something at Barr Lake? Barr Lake, a state park out on the plains near DIA? Well, I'd find out soon enough.

Almost always before, driving to Bear Lake or Bierstadt has meant parking. Often we have parked well below and ridden a shuttle bus to the trailhead. Now I had slowed considerably--something I should've done as soon as I entered elk country--because of hairpins in the climb. I'd never passed Glacier Gorge trailhead at night before, but what I noticed was that its parking lot was empty. Glacier Gorge is only a mile by road from Bear Lake, and I grinned anew. I was almost there. The road was even okay: it bore its patches of black ice and sheets of corrugated ice, but Cassidy has four-wheel drive and I was confident. The snow to either side now looked respectable; there was snow at all, thanks to the altitude, and ploughing had created a tunnel effect so that I drove between steeply carved, four-foot banks. Withies marked the edge of the road.

Stalks of bamboo or what have you that mark a channel through low water are called withies when you're messing about with boats. Ratty didn't teach me that, though; Secret Water did. I don't know what they should be called when they mark a roadway under snow but withies seems reasonable.

I was in the Bear Lake parking lot for a moment or two before I realized it. No sodium lamps suspended on poles, as I am used to in parking lots, no cars with other cars vulturing nearby, as I have come to expect at Bear Lake. Of course, it's a lot more open than the road, and so it was, indeed, the parking lot. With a car ahead of me slowing down to park.

Shit.

The parking lot was otherwise empty. They--there were three heads--had no right to be here in my personal space. They might be dangerous. They might be no fun. Wasn't there another national park they could go to somewhere? Pissers.

I breathed deeply. If they were three women I would stay. If they were two women and a man I could stay. If they were one woman and two men I would leave, and if they were three men I would leave faster. They hooked around the top of the lot and pulled into a space. I hooked around and pulled into the next space, checking them out in my headlights as I swung the car round.

Three women.

I grinned. I nipped out of the car, zipped the keys carefully in the pocket of my fleece pants, and reached back in the car for layers. All I wore on the drive was a white cotton turtleneck, now ridiculously inadequate. The other car's doors opened. I had to ask: "You're three women?" and one said, "Yes," and I said "Good!" and they laughed. I pulled on a thick Icelandic wool sweater, fleece jacket, and Gore-Tex shell and shivered comfortably. Then I looked up and saw the moon without the frame of a car window across it.

It was so gorgeous. And it was mine, all mine; I got a feeling I have not had in a long time of possession of time and place. Not material ownership but the more layered meanings of "possession" A.S. Byatt explores in Possession. Like Randy felt when she looked at the painting that turned out to be of Mrs. Oliphant.

Excuse me, I just started rereading The Saturdays for a minute.

There are spots all over Connecticut that are mine--mostly in Old Lyme, Lyme, and Storrs and its hinterlands, of course, but also in Norwalk and Salisbury and New Milford and Goshen and Cornwall and Mystic--but few in Colorado, and I have been lonely for them. When Percy died I didn't retrieve his body from the vet because we had no place to bury him. Like Katie Nolan no longer keeping the star bank at the back of her closet because now she owned a piece of earth.

No, I'm not going to start rereading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

I was there, I was as alone as I wanted to be and no more crowded than I had to be, it was piercingly cold but not inside my layers, and the moon was about to go into eclipse. It was beautiful and solitary and I was a part of it all.

So of course I had to share it. I nipped back into the car for the phone and binoculars and strode up toward the lake, dialing RDC. He was having supper at the bar of the restaurant in his hotel in overcast Vancouver. He was glad I was there, and safe, and that if there were other people there, they were women. As soon as I reached the trees the scratchy signal completely broke up, which was fine. KMJ calls RDC and me "cell-phone naturalists" and I didn't want to prove her too right.

The lake waited for me just on the other side of a stand of trees, and everything was blue in the decreasing moonlight, in the reflected snowlight. I stood and listened to the wind in the trees, to the silence, to the moon, and watched the moon slip into the earth's shadow, the stars and planets brighten, the earth around me darken.

Enough. I was spooked. I had seen moonlight on the large snowfield of the frozen lake and on the surrounding rockfaces. I didn't need to see totality from there, I could see it better in the openness of the parking lot. Plus I couldn't stop ugly scenarios from invading my head and knew they would recede if I felt safer. So I scurried back to the parking lot where Kathleen, Sandy, and the other one whose name I forget lingered, I thought wimpily, surrounded by civilization.

They stood in a cluster at the top of the trailhead, looking up. I was mostly looking up too and so it was a moment before I realized they were wearing snowshoes. "Are you all going snowshoeing?" I exclaimed. "That's fantastic!" Wimpy, ha. These women had been suiting up.

The first time RDC and I went to RMNP, in May of 1996, we didn't hike the mile to Nymph Lake because it was all still snowy and we didn't want to lose the path. And here were these people, snowshoeing, in the dark--because now it was dark, despite the full moon, and would be for an hour and a half, in an eclipse, at 9:00 at night. And they didn't know where yet. Emerald Lake (3.6 miles roundtrip), Flat Top (more, to the top), Bierstadt (4 miles roundtrip), they'd decide when they got to the lake. For now they were watching the moon.

We stood there, we four, and watched the moon. One told of talking to a friend of her in Sydney when it was 6:30 a.m. for her and 12:30 a.m. the next day for him. She was watching the moon set over Ypsilon Mountain and he was seeing it at its brightest apex. It's a big planet. I said "There's a bit in a Jane Austen novel where someone wants to have an impromptu party but can round no one up, because it was moonlight and everyone had engagements." (Sense and Sensibility, Sir John's enthusiasm when the Miss Steeles arrive, specifically, but I left those bits out as not germane, and snooty to boot.) Another's parents in Pennsylvania were watching it right now as well, except it was happening later for them.

Then I heard other voices from farther away and looked to the parking lot to see a third car had arrived while I was at the lake, with its own people, and the voices I heard were male. "Look," I stated briefly, "I'm going to stay only another few minutes but I would so appreciate it if you would just stay until you see me safely in my car."
"Of course," they said. I admired them for going snowshoeing in the dark (they wore headlamps, which were a sensible addition but would have ruined the effect, for me) but they admired me for making this jaunt alone. And they didn't scold me for it, either.
The other party by their car and we at the trailhead gazed and craned our necks and breathed the night wind, ["make love to the darkness, and laugh at man's sin," Cowboy Junkies, "Witches," Caution Horses] and all the while I was thinking of the long road ahead ["and the strength they will need just to read the end," Cowboy Junkies, "Ring on the Sill," Pale Sun Crescent Moon]. Actually, the next line sums up the night perfectly for me: "And there in the silence they search for the balance between this fear that they feel and a love that has graced their lives." Not the whole night, really, just then in the parking lot. The fulfillment of the beauty and the grandeur and the peace of the night, the snow, the moon, the eclipse, balanced with the reality of the threat, however minimal but fully realized in my mind.

I did have a long road ahead of me and a cockatiel and an alarm set for 6:00 a.m. waiting at home for me, so I bade them a good excursion and good night and left. When I opened the car door, I was anxious to get in and close the door to get rid of the invasive dome light and lock the door (though I should think anyone bent on violence could have found a victim nearer than fifteen miles into a deserted park) but I did glance into the back seat and hatch space first. The headlights more than replaced the violence the domelight had done to my eyeballs, but so it must be, and I drove off.

Most of the way back to Moraine Park, the cell phone rang from the tangle of parka, fleece, and sweater. I extracted it in time and said hi to HAO. She didn't know where I was and had called the cell when the land line gave her voicemail; she assumed I was online. I hadn't asked her along because she had had to assist at the Write Place, but it had been a slow night there and she'd been reading my journal and anxious for me to correct my grievous errors about Big Brutus. All that was said later. I don't like to talk while driving and in fact I have not yet done so, so how I answered the phone was "Hey hold on a sec lemme pull over." And I did, and it was a pity to waste darkness with headlights, so I turned them off, and it was a pity to try to look up at the sky through the windshield so I turned off the car and got out, and while she was telling me what Big Brutus really is, I heard a noise in the woods off the side of the road. I interrupted her mid-steamshovel.
"Wait, I hear a noise, I'm getting back in the car--and locking the door--but I can't find the switch--there it is--I'm starting the car--I'm driving away--I didn't even put my seatbelt on--no no, I'm safe. It was probably a deer anyway. They have them here you know." I put the phone down while I pulled the belt on and promised to remove my libelous remarks about Oklahoma and we hung up so I could fully focus on my new paranoid fantasy that someone had come in through the hatchback in the moments I was out of the car, when I didn't hear a thing that would support such a delusion. The chances there was a human right there at the very spot I pulled over, a human bent on criminal mischief who could get into my car on one of the other two sides with doors, without my hearing or seeing him, were infinitesimal; the chances that I had disturbed a fox or deer or snowshoe hare were much greater and I have never heard of any such animal carjacking a human. I resent that I am so well socialized that I leap to assumptions of violence instead of reacting to what is the most, nay, the only, likely situation. It sounded big, like a human or an elk, but even a hare would have sounded big in the sudden silence left in the wake of the Waterboys and the car engine.

So anyway. I drove around Moraine Park and paused by the guard post. Succumbing to my OCD paranoia, I got out of the car under the post's sodium lights and checked the whole cabin. If someone were going to garrote me, he'd've had his chance in the five or more miles before this point, but as there was no such person, garroted I was not. I'm glad I stopped though. If I hadn't I might have missed the elk.

As often as I see them, they never fail to amaze me. As often as I saw white-tailed deer in Connecticut, they never failed to mesmerize me. And here were elk by the bushel, browsing in the meadows on the roadside. Don't they sleep? I wondered. With so many stars, it was a bright night even without much snow to reflect the starlight, even with the shadowed moon. Good grazing light. Their little eyes glowed green at me in the headlights.

I watched them for a bit, feeling safe here near unstaffed guard posts. Several cars passed me coming from Trail Ridge Road. Depending on snow, there are at least three different gated points on the way over the Divide. The first of those gates is just past a vista over Moraine Park, an easier drive than up to Bear Lake with probably excellent views of the moonlight on Long's Peak. The eclipse must have been lovely from there, but I was glad to have had the solitude and small company I did have.

The Cowboy Junkies' Black-Eyed Man and Pale Sun, Crescent Moon accompanied me home. I haven't been in a mountain town at night for four years, since Aspen. Following the St. Vrain River (I think) out of Estes Park, by habit I took the downtown cut off (hardly necessary at 9:30 on a weeknight in the off season). I turned a corner and there, like the butte near Lyons, another cliff faced me. This one, unlike the one in Lyons, glowed bright with snow in my headlights. Amazing. Much taller than in daylight.

I miss Aspen. I wonder when WinterFest is this year. I loved seeing the fireworks rise to their usual height and explode still below the peaks, so that all the colors and fire reflected off the snow-covered mountains.

Driving home from a party in Boston in 1992, I got into an accident a half-mile from my house at the very end of the two-hour drive. Of course. I'm probably typical in that I'm less vigilant on my own turf. Since then, I try not to drive home when I'm tired. Ask me how RDC and I started going out. (You wouldn't have to ask but he asked that I remove it from my friends page about him.) But it was only 9:30, only 85 miles to home. I'd be fine. And I was fine. I pulled up, gathered up all my stuff, and went inside, waking up my little sleeping buddy. He was glad to see me and glad to have a little head-petting, but there was something I still needed to do. Barefoot, in my bathrobe, I went outside again and checked the moon through binoculars. The very last sliver to be eclipsed was now the very last bit still dark. I grinned up at her, "Good job."