If you haven’t seen the total solar eclipse, it’s like you’ve never fallen in love in your life
In a state park in Columbia, S.C., on Aug. 21, yours truly got more than a prime view of the total solar eclipse. I learned how to camp for the first time while volunteering with a rad Girl Scouts troop from Charlotte and watched 30 perfectly good Ball Park hot dogs bite the dust when I looked away for one second, almost ruining lunch for 75 people including Girl Scouts and their parents.
This isn’t your average story about the total solar eclipse, so it’s safe to take off your now worthless solar glasses and continue reading. Nowhere in this story will you find:
Cell phone photos of the total or partial eclipse that look like a crumpled Moon Pie wrapper with Vaseline smeared over it.
People posting on their social media, “That partial eclipse was so disappointing I wish it’d burned my retinas out so I’d never have to know disappointment like this again.”
Tearful accounts of how seeing the moon over the sun has changed someone’s life: They’re finally getting that new mattress.
Oh, I’m going to tell you what the total eclipse really looked like from where I sat, getting bitten by ants with a pineapple towel wrapped around my face to avoid sunburn.
The total eclipse started around 2:30 p.m. Here’s what happened, hour by hour:
6:30 a.m. My girlfriend Lara Americo attempts to wake me up for the third time this morning. She wants to avoid the traffic that had been foretold (and turned out to be a hellish traffic jam situation). I didn’t even have time to make my survival peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the kitchen and instead make them while in the car passenger seat. It’s like trying to thread a needle in a bumper car.
7 a.m. About 15 miles away from Columbia, a scientist on NPR likens seeing the total solar eclipse to falling in love, and if you haven’t seen it, it’s like you’ve never fallen in love in your life.
8 a.m. Pass a shopping center that was invented by MadLibs: Drop me off at Fortune Square. I’m going to Hair Candy.
8:15 a.m. We arrive at Sesquicentennial State Park in Columbia, where the Girl Scouts have been camping since Sunday afternoon. We follow their homemade cardboard sign to the “primitive” campground, as a park ranger describes it to us, and boy is it ever.
8:30 a.m. On how we’re going to survive the primitive campground in the depths of South Carolina, thanks to Lara: “Sure, I’m a trans woman of color. Sure, you’re a squishy gay woman. But we have the Girl Scouts.”
9 a.m. I watch Lara pitch the tent we bought at Target last night while eating a gloppy yet delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
9:30 a.m. Lara and I are on lunch duty for 75 people, which includes the Girl Scouts. At the tent with the fire pit and food supplies, I do my one job of filling a stainless steel pot with water and Ball Park franks. I give this pot to Lara, who balances it on two pieces of wood over the briquettes. This doesn’t look sturdy, I say with my eyes, but since she pitched the tent, I tell myself Lara must know more about camping than me. This is a camping thing.
9:45 a.m. Lara, fairweather vegetarian, had one job: Cook hot dogs over a fire. I go to the car to get bottled water. Lara shouts to come back with an oven mitt I left in her car after delivering lasagna to pals last week. It’s an emergency. When I get there, 30 Ball Park franks have fallen into the dirt of the fire pit. Lara had one job.
10:15 p.m. No one knows about Hot-Dog-gate, but Lara decides to tell one of the Girl Scout’s moms and they get into the car to get more dogs at the food store even though I said I won’t have a hot dog. But luckily, I didn’t cook all of the dogs because I had a feeling cooking all of them would be bad. This is, as the Girl Scouts troop leader Ilona Silva would tell me later, “woman’s intuition.” I await my badge for “Saved Lunch Based on Gut Feeling.”
11 a.m. Lunch is in an hour. The total eclipse is in three and a half hours. I haven’t been this stressed making food since my laughably awful potato party of ‘14.
Noon. My party skills, on par with Mary Richards in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (meaning so bad it’s good) come in handy as I realize we have 60 dogs plus veggie dogs, and we’ll be able to feed everyone. The mom who went to get more hot dogs is stuck in traffic.
1 p.m. Lunch mercifully ends and we head out into the field. We never tell the mom her trip was completely unnecessary.
1:13 p.m. I look through my glasses a few times and then at the grass to be sure they work. Nope, not blind yet.
1:30 p.m. Clouds are like I’M GOING TO RUIN YOUR ECLIPSE AND YOU CAN’T SAVE THIS LIKE YOUR HOT DOG LUNCH.
1:45 p.m. A group of loud people are playing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and singing. The darkness is encroaching in slivers and I hope a spaceship takes them away. Bugs are starting to make nighttime sounds and I’ve finally stopped sweating my face into my boots.
2 p.m. It feels like dusk outside and I’m suddenly in the mood for a cheese plate and white wine and want to talk about my week in exasperating detail over a light jazz soundtrack.
2:30 p.m. There’s only Bailey’s Beads (the sliver of sun leftover before the moon overtakes it), and I scold myself for remembering that term by saying it in the same voice I use when pretending I’m a bear in the woods, but bear of the hairy gay man variety.
A post shared by Joanne Spataro (@lookitsjoanne) on Aug 21, 2017 at 11:58am PDT
2:32 p.m. I’m knocked back as if someone pushed me. The full total solar eclipse really is like falling in love. No picture I’ve seen can capture the texture of the moon, flecked in blue and light gray, like I’m seeing sans solar eclipse glasses (the only safe time to take them off). The unreal way the corona wafts around the moon in a thin flaming circle. It’s like the Death Star took a two-and-a-half-minute gas station break. I almost cry, but then I hear the tired refrain of “Back in Black” by AC/DC from those same jackwagons.
2:50 p.m. It starts getting hot again. I judge a drawing contest where the Girl Scouts created pictures of what the moon looks like during the eclipse. I pick the one with the blue and light gray flecks, with a sidebar conversation between the sun and the moon: See you in another 37 years! I thought it was 7 years, but hey, whether I’m 38 or 69 when the next one comes around, I’ll always remember this eclipse. And that Lara had one job.
Photo: Joanne Spataro
This story was originally published August 22, 2017 at 11:00 PM.