Before the Eclipse

It all started in February, with a morning email from our friend Gayle:

There's going to be a total eclipse crossing the U.S. in August. Wanna go?

By the end of the day, everyone she'd notified had come on board, and Gayle had reserved the "family" room at the Rocket Motel in Custer, South Dakota. This would be our springboard to the typically open skies of western Nebraska, across which the zone of eclipse totality lay.

The small group of friends who made up the ensemble have travelled together in various permutations since the 1970s. We'd been to the bottom of the Grand Canyon together, and we'd been to the bottom of Dark Canyon, Utah, together. On our first trip to the Boundary Waters, Tim and Carol had been expecting their first child, and that child is now expecting her fourth child. We'd been to summer cabins on the North Shore, where we once spotted a Hudsonian curlew (now widely referred to as a wimbrel) wandering along the roadside, and established the Curlew Club in honor of the occasion. More recently we've been to winter cabins north of Grand Rapids together, though the allure of cross-country skiing seems to be fading for some of us.

One or two things had changed over the years, but here we were again, heading out together on a big adventure.

Thirty years ago, we would all have clambered into a single car. This time, we took two.

Thirty years ago, we might have planned a few meals  and bought groceries. This time, we decided to wing it.

A few days after the initial proposal was bruited, I suggested that we take an extra day going out to make the nine-hour drive less onerous and give us time to explore the Badlands and the Black Hills a little. The notion met with approval and I booked two of the four remaining campsites in the Cedar Pass Campground.

At some point it dawned on me that we might need somewhere to stay after the eclipse and I booked a campsite at Chadron State Park, forty miles north of Alliance, Nebraska, the locale where we'd decided to view the big event.

As the big day approached, the hype surrounding the event intensified. A half a million people would be coming to Nebraska, we were told. The governor would be flying in to Alliance from Lincoln to give a speech at Carhenge, a few miles outside of town. We began to imagine roads clogged with tourists, state highway patrol officers combing the back roads to ticket or incarcerate tourists who had simply pulled off the road to view the eclipse. (In fact, most of the roads out that way have no shoulders.)

The town of Alliance had been planning for the event for two years, and they'd developed a website to describe all the activities associated with it: food trucks, rock'n'roll bands, games, educational events. We didn't care about any of that stuff. But when you're six-hundred miles away, it's hard to imagine how big the town really is or how many people will show up. In short, we didn't know quite what kind of a mess we were getting ourselves into, and imagination runs rampant.

The Alliance website identified no less than 46 camping or viewing sites in the vicinity. I called up one near town, but he wanted $50 for a parking spot. I called another one who wanted only $10, but he didn't have porta-potties and would only take people with trailers. Then I called Sugar Farms, three miles north and east of town. The woman who answered the phone, Lexi, wanted $20 for the privilege of parking in her pasture. She took my name and said, "Just pay me when you get here." 

Fair enough.

Badlands

We got to the Badlands after a full day of driving. Having crossed the Missouri River, we were now  in "the West": harsh, largely empty terrain, the land of coyotes and golden eagles, buffalo and pronghorn, sage brush and wide open spaces. There are badlands scattered here and there throughout the west, of course—heavily eroded but graceful landforms with colorful strata and (smetimes) sharp peaks—but the Badlands of South Dakota deserve their capital B. Dry and forbidding in the noonday sun, they're often gorgeous when clothed in the glancing light and deep shadows of sunrise or sunset.

The campground had nary a shrub or tree for privacy, but it did have picnic tables and slabwood ramadas for shade; with the flanks of the Badlands rising a few hundred yards to the north of us, it struck me as great, somehow.

Our only near neighbor was a family of four from Seattle who were situated across the road. I met them by chance as I was wandering around, oblivious to my surroundings, trying to determine if the bird on a nearby post was a mountain bluebird or a western bluebird. Lowering my binoculars, I noticed I was standing in their campsite.

The neighbors

"Oh, pardon me," I apologized."Do you know birds? I think that's a mountain bluebird. We don't have them in Minnesota."

"We don't have them in Washington, either," the man replied, with a bemused grin on his face. (So he did know a little something about birds.)

In time I learned he was a research biologist. He and his family had come out to see the countryside and also the eclipse. They were planning to intercept the historic event near Casper, Wyoming, on their way home. I promised him we would be quiet. "I hate noise in the campground," I said, as if to convince him of our benign intentions.

And we didn't make much noise that night. The wind was coming in so strong from the west, it often rose above the voices and the banging pots and pans. It was too warm to have a fire, but we ended up singing a few cowboy songs—"I Ride an Old Paint" and "Singin' His Cattle Call" among others—as the box wine continued to flow. We heard coyotes twice, high-pitched but distant, over the fluffle of the wind on the tents.

As night descended, the landscape had the feel of a gypsy camp, with individual couples and families minding their own business as they cooked, ate, chatted, headed off to the toilet building or the evening lecture at the amphitheater a quarter-mile away, or got ready for bed. One after another, the light from lanterns and hi-tech flashlights punctuated the darkness.

The wind blew for most of the night. The rainfly, just outside our tent but roughly a foot from my ear, went wuff-wuff-wuff incessantly, but at irregular intervals, seemingly forever. I might have woken up twenty times during the night, but they all seemed like the same time, so the damage was minimal.

The next morning Tim told me their tent, quite tall but lacking the support of rainfly guywires, sometimes bent over so much that it was flat to the ground with the three of them inside it. Yet the poles never snapped, and a few seconds later, the tent would bound up again, like one of those stove-pipe man-balloons you see on the roadside in front of a car dealership.

We ate breakfast at the restaurant of the nearby Cedar Pass Lodge. Hilary had spotted a sign on the door on our way in, advertising a buffalo butchering that we could attend at ten that morning. I asked our waitress if she was Oglala. "Yes, I'm from Kyle," she replied.

"Are you going to go to the buffalo butchering this morning?" I said. (Stupid question. But it gets the conversation going.)

"No, I'll be working," she replied, "but a few weeks ago my parents were given the honor of butchering the buffalo for our tribal powwow."

"Really. What kind of knives do you use?" I said.

"Different knives. We often use fillet knives. It's a ceremony."

"I suppose it's just for the tribe," I said.

"No, it's open to the public. You should come."

"We're the kind of people who  just might," I said. "Where did you say you were from again?"

(to be continued)