A few of my friends, and at least one taxi driver in Swords, know that I have an interest in watching eclipses. As in total solar eclipses. There are other kinds, but I would leave that to people that have Sky at Night on series record and own their own telescope.
But it was the kind of thing that fascinated me as a kid, and I loved going to the planetarium in Armagh and I’d been to see Patrick Moore lecture a couple of times and there is a bit of regret that once when I was in Los Angeles in the early 90s I went to see a Doors tribute band and learned the day after that Carl Sagan had been giving a public lecture in the area.
When I was studying my orthodontic post graduate course, almost all of my annual leave was used up coming back to Ireland to see my family and friends, and one time in 1998 that I was back I visited a friend’s house and read the first few pages of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X which was lying on her table. In the opening chapter of the book, his character goes to watch an eclipse and it sounded like a fun thing to do I met Douglas Coupland when he did an in Newcastle Upon Tyne, close to the university where I studied orthodontics, and I bought the book and he was kind enough to sign it with the cryptic (to some) message “become the special man”. I read it, and decided I wanted to see an eclipse too.
As luck would have it, there would be one in the UK the following year, and one day I was in a book shop and they had a book on this eclipse by Fred Espinak and it included a free pair of eclipse glasses. I bought it and read about the eclipse path. It would pass over England, but it would be at the other end of England from where I was and the chance of a clear sky was pretty slim.
So in the four years I was there, I think the only annual leave that I took to go anywhere other than home was to set forth to see the eclipse somewhere where I was likely to actually see it. In the end I went to see it in Turkey. My plan was to get myself to Istanbul and work it out from there. At the critical moment, I was on the roof of a hotel in Kastamonu, directly lined up with the sun and the moon in a celestial alignment that had been determined billions of years ago and would last for about 3 minutes above me. I was hooked.
Now I wouldn’t be off to some remote place like the Kamchatka Peninsula with a 10% chance of a clear sky, but when I learned that there would be one in Spain, I figured “easy enough to get to, country known to be sunny…..could be a runner.”
I used to have foreign students stay in my house, often doing some sort of work experience related to their university courses, who had come to Ireland to improve their English language skills. Occasionally they were actually studying at the university here itself and one such person was a Spanish translator and she turned out to be one of the least mad people I hosted over the years. We have stayed in touch and she invited me over to watch the eclipse with her and her family.
That afternoon I was with a dozen Spaniards for an epic lunch and then we headed to a high vantage point to watch it and the cloud descended upon us and got thicker and thicker. In the end there was no sign of the sun, but both it and the moon were oblivious to the cloud and the humans (and a greyhound) below and right on schedule everything went dark.
Then as unstoppably as it darkened, it brightened up again. I didn’t see the eclipse but I did experience it.
I got a text from a friend of mine, a consultant dentist in the NHS, that does own a telescope:
Steve, you can’t have been happy
I replied
Well, I got to visit a place I’d never been before, met up with my old lodger after many years, was welcomed into their home, shared in a fabulous meal and experienced the darkness with them. The eclipse is about being part of something bigger than myself and I had that in human terms if not celestial.
And in a way that’s a bit like orthodontics and the dental vocation in general: you’re part of something bigger than yourself.
