Things About Light

I learned something today about gratitude. I try, for the most part, to operate out of a spirit of love and gratefulness and humility. Sometimes I suck at this, because, like all y’all, I am human and I am not always all of those things. Sometimes I am not even any of those things. Earlier this week I was really fighting ungratefulness and a mean spirit. I am not sure why. It would be easy to blame hormones or lack of good sleep or being homesick or whatnot, but whatever the cause, I had a hard time being nice.

I didn’t really feel like writing, but all the Writing People are adamant that writing is a discipline, not a whimsical option. So I made myself write. The writing that came out of me, being in a bad place was, in a word, bad. I mean it was funny, don’t get me wrong. But maybe it was funny at the expense of people I didn’t really know… based on outside observation. Maybe it was prejudiced. Maybe it was unkind.

If my words don’t come out of a place of gratitude and love, they have no business being. It doesn’t matter if they are true. It doesn’t matter if they are funny as hell. I get this. Part of me bucks against censorship and feels like I have some inalienable right to say whatever the heck I want. Nothing that I said was SO HORRIBLE or illegal or even totally wrong, but I KNOW BETTER. I know better than to let loose words of mine that come from a place of darkness. They do nobody any good.

When the sun disappeared behind the shadow of the moon for a few brief minutes yesterday morning, it brought into startling clarity, just how much I take for granted. The world was cold. Much colder than it had been only minutes before in the light of the sun. It was dark and colorless, like the light of the sun took out every hue of green and yellow and blue and red when it left. It was the dusky colorless of the last light in the evening, when the road and the trees and the herds of whitetail deer roving dangerously among it all are the same color. This is the difference between words that come out of darkness and words that come out of light. Color and warmth are in the light. It’s just how it is.

It’s not that I shouldn’t ever be able to laugh and make light of where I am and the TRULY ridiculous things going on around me, but I know when my voice is kind and when it is not. In reality, I work with a lot of great people, in amazing places, and I feel very blessed for the years that I have done this crazy cool job.

Here is what I learned: When I am where I am supposed to be (which I try to be, most of the time), I need to be grateful and kind and humble, and if I cannot be those things, then I need to be still and quiet. I learned that I don’t like a sunless, lightless world. I want to live in the sun, in the color and the warmth. I want others to live there with me.

If the moon were a little closer to the earth, we would lose the sunlight more often. It really is an amazing thing, this astronomical system we live in. It overwhelms me to think about the infinite minutia that dictate our survival. The tiny changes in temperature, atmosphere, angles and rotations that determine how we live or die on this planet are, in a word, epic. It’s like the little changes in mood, in motivation, in voice that determine the effect of a word on the world that it lands on.

All change is facilitated either through love or through hate. Real love is born from gratitude, accepting your worth and giving it back to those around you. Hate creeps in to fill up the absence of gratitude, the ugly insecurity of the lie that you are worthless. A lie I know like the back of my hand. We are such small, insignificant parts of this giant miracle of a world. I want the change that I bring to my tiny space to be rooted in the warmth and color of love and light. I want to speak love without flattery, truth without unkindness and hope without dishonesty. I want to make people smile, and laugh, and love more.

Photo Credit: Collin Andrew

Things About Security

So I am on this fire. The fire happens to be lying directly in the Path of Totality for the upcoming Great American Solar Eclipse on Monday. In anticipation of the large numbers of ridiculous tourists thronging into the area for the event, fire managers decided to contract out road security to an outside agency. The agency that got the contract, either by lowest bid or by Knowing Someone, is a rag-tag bunch of 19 year old kids that I suspect are all members of the same LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) group, probably out of Portland. Based on the information gleaned from several conversations, along with my own powers of observation, these kids were apparently recruited by the company owner for $11 an hour to take a two hour “unarmed security” course and sent out into the forest in knock-off black 5-11 pants to guard roads into the fire area.

Additionally, the Powers That Be thought it would a good idea to give these guys radios. Radios that are cloned to all of the fire frequencies. Ones they can talk on. In addition to 27 guys in fake BDUs calling in “SITUATION NORMAL” every hour, on the hour, they also have radio conversations that go something like this:

“NONAMEFIRE ROAD GUARD SECURITY HOTSPRINGS ROAD GUARD SECURITY ROGER HOW COPY?!?!!” (in all caps to denote drill-sergeantesque yelling - also please note lack of punctuation, emphasis or any way to determine whom is yelling out from whomelse, but somehow, they all know [I should probably take that radio class])

“NONAMEFIRE ROAD GUARD SECURITY! YOU ARE A GO!” (I guess this means he can talk?)

“HOT SPRINGS ROAD GUARD SECURITY REQUESTS A CONVERSATION ABOUT CLARIFICATION FOR HOT SPRINGS EMPLOYEES WORKERS AND CAMPERS AND HOT SPRINGS EMPLOYEES WORKERS AND GUESTS! ROGER HOW COPY?!?!?!” (huh?)

“NONAMEFIRE ROAD GUARD SECURITY HOTSPRINGS ROADGUARD SECURITY YOU ARE A GOOD COPY 10-4 BUDDY AND I WILL BE IN YOUR 20 IN APPROXIMATELY 30 MINUS. OR PLUS. IN AWHILE. OVER. ROGER. HOW COPY?!?!?!?”

“HOTSPRINGS ROADGUARD SECURITY ROGER COPY DO YOU COPY THAT? OVER AND OUT. ROGER.”

“NONAMEFIRE ROADGUARD SECURITY ROGER THAT’S A GOOD COPY OVER AND OUT.”

“HOTSPRINGS ROADGUARD SECURITY COME AGAIN THAT WASN’T A GOOD COPY!”

“NONAMEFIRE ROADGUARD SECURITY ROGER THAT’S A COPY. UH… COPY!?!?!?”

It goes on like this for hours. I don’t really mind since I have been stationed 10 minutes out of cell range for the last 5 days where there isn’t even FM radio reception and it’s the only entertainment or human interaction I get. It’s more fun when I am sitting close enough to watch them in action though, stopping carloads of nice hippies that are just trying to get to the nudist colony at the hotsprings for their eclipse orgy.

One of the guards has something that looks suspiciously like a ninja sword sticking out of his utility pants. One of them has a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag draped ceremoniously across the back trunk of his 1997 Honda Civic. One of them is wearing a bullet proof vest. One of them stands guard with a can of Deep Woods Off™ Bug Repellant in his hand like bear spray, ready for action, during every encounter.

They take their new, $11/hr job VERY seriously. We have absolutely no fear of any Pacific Crest Trail hikers accidentally penetrating our fire perimeter as the poor bastards follow the more than 100 mile detour along narrow, winding roads past at least 8 of these guys. I am sure the guards are also giving all of the Japanese tourists who are visiting the area for their Eclipse Fertility Rites an excellent taste of ‘MERICA.

Perhaps the funniest part about all of this is that none of the roads that they are guarding are technically closed, so the guards can’t actually stop anybody from driving down them. They’re mostly here for an “educate and orient” the public kind of role, which they are totally NAILING.

Me, on the other hand, I will be out here, riding out the Eclipocolypse near the boundary of the wilderness, isolated and cut off from civilization for 14 hours a day. We tried giving a ride to some of the PCT hikers the other day (way back when I had a partner for the day) who were totally over the whole 100 mile detour thing, but it took us out of our division and WAAAYYY up this road that may have doubled as a creek bed in the recent past. The hikers were nice though, and from Germany. Why someone would travel across the world to carry a backpack through the mountains is beyond me. Haven’t they heard of Disneyworld, air conditioning and NASCAR? I am sure our security guards could set them straight.

I am trying to alleviate my boredom by little fits of yoga and pretending to not have dozed off when the Division Supervisor drives by. I only have eight hours left to go today and I have already had second breakfast, a brunch and two lunches, so you could say that my life is on point, for a Hobbit.

I would just like to point out that every other EMT on this assignment is staged in full cellular coverage. I even went out and bought a second phone with a Verizon line to complement my AT&T coverage so I could avoid this. Instead, I get squirreled away at a remote camp to keep me “safe” from eclipse crazies (because the Dungeons & Dragons Security Forces and dirty firefighters are WAY better), with no shower for nine days and only one bar of cell service when I go down to the gravel pit for breakfast and dinner. How do I rate? What is the universe telling me? All I know is that it’s going to be one epic shower beer.

They're decorating trail signs to coordinate with the tinfoil hats the visitors are wearing.

Things That Fascinate me: Total Eclipse From the Start

1927 map of eclipse pathways

In 3340 BCE, a bunch of Neolithic Irish Priests documented a series of celestial events onto a pile of rocks. The Loughcrew Cairn stands as the oldest recorded total solar eclipse in human history. These petroglyphs mean that people have been chasing eclipses since about 160 years before the wheel was invented.

Ancient cultures saw the total eclipse as a religious experience, usually a bad omen, a premonition of destruction, or in the case of an ancient Chinese emperor who wanted to know what had caused the sudden darkness - the imminent beheading of some hapless astronomers who didn’t know. What ancient Chinese records DO say about the event in October of 2134 BCE is that “the Sun and Moon did not meet harmoniously.”

Rahu swallows the sun

Whether it was a Chinese dragon, a South American Jaguar or a Scandinavian sky wolf, most early people had some theory about the creature that consumed, and promptly regurgitated the sun in the middle of its daily course. In India, the floating head of the demon Rahu occasionally caught the sun and moon in his mouth, but, lacking a body, they slipped out shortly after, according to legend. Ancient documentation on clay tablets found in a Syrian cave reference an eclipse that experts say took place in March of 1223, BCE. The Holy Bible itself makes note in the book of Amos, chapter 8 verse 9, of an 8th century Assyrian (now Iraq) eclipse that took place: "And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day."

Fast forward a few hundred years and people started getting wise to the repeating pattern of the eclipse. It probably helped that they started traveling more too (now that they had wheels) and discovered that the once-in-a-lifetime event happened fairly routinely, just not often in the same place. By the time that humankind had graduated into the Anno Domini they were predicting when and where the next total eclipse would be and all making up all kinds of theories that had nothing to do with giant mythical creatures. Less dramatic? Hardly, considering the vastness of the cosmos that were just beginning to make sense to astronomers.

The first photograph of a total solar eclipse in 1860

But what is it about a total eclipse that is so captivating to human audiences? Rarity seems like an unlikely motivator when the event occurs every 18 months somewhere in the world, and yet more than seven million people are expected to make the trek to experience the totality in August of 2017.

Dubbed the Great American Eclipse for the sweeping course it cuts across the entire nation like a beauty pageant sash, the August 21 path of totality makes its first all-American appearance in Lincoln City, Oregon where local law enforcement have issued preparedness warnings that residents should stockpile and prepare to shelter in place before the hordes of eclipse chasers descend upon them.  The shadow will move east/southeast across the country, leaving a path of partiers that some brilliant website analyst describes as “ 20 Woodstock festivals occurring simultaneously across the nation”, before finishing the visit along the beaches of  South Carolina.

Unlike comet-tracking cults and celestial doomsday believers, eclipse chasers appear to be cut from a completely different cloth. You won’t find end-of-the-world gibberish on eclipsechaser.com - rather, the community is a scientifically driven, curious group hailing from every imaginable background who all agree on one thing: there’s nothing like it in the world.

“The feeling of the eclipse when it happens, you can't describe it, it's like magic.” 30 year old Latvian IT consultant Agnese Zalcmane told the Daily Mail in 2015, “One minute the sun is shining then it starts getting darker but it doesn't get dark like it does in the evening or at dusk - it goes dark very, very fast. Within half a minute it's completely black and it is something that is very strange to experience.”

Seasoned eclipse chaser Rhonda Coleman tells the Bend Bulletin, “We depend on our sun for everything. You can’t help but feel a little dread when it starts to lose strength, when it starts to lose power, when it starts to dim in the middle of the day — when it’s not supposed to...For just the short period of time, everybody’s just looking up at once. It’s this beautiful connection to the family of man.” The experience seems to draw strangers together into intimate throngs with one purpose. Author, eclipse chaser and psychologist Kate Russo describes the experience in one of her books on the subject.

“You can literally feel the ominous shadow before it arrives.  The temperature drops.  The wind picks up speed.  The Sunlight slowly dims, bathing the surroundings in an eerie twilight that produces colours with shades rarely seen in the natural world.  Then it is time. Moments before totality a wall of darkness comes creeping towards you at speeds of up to 5,000 miles per hour – this is the full shadow of the Moon.  You feel alive.  You feel in awe.  You feel a primitive fear.  Then – totality.” Something akin to the ghost story your older brother told you late at night in a shadowy tent, the total eclipse haunts the experienced viewer with tenacity.

Hotels, campgrounds and resorts that were booked more than a year in advance are facing scandal after they scratched all reservations and jacked the price up to meet demand. The Grand Ole Opry, in Nashville, Tennessee, falls directly in the path and is hosting an Eclipse Party on the day of the event, showcasing country stars (pun intended) and celestial-themed food and drinks. Google is rife with websites featuring eclipse chasing tips that range from where to get your eclipse glasses ahead of time (or better yet, make your own!), to the best weather pockets along the path of totality. Granted, it’s the first total eclipse in the United States since 1979, but the good news is if all of the eclipse glasses are already sold out and your favorite central Oregon resort is booked up, you’ll likely have another shot on April 8,  2024 when a total solar eclipse will climb the U.S. from Texas to Maine on a northerly route.

For more info, check out this article from Forbes magazine.