Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

Over the years, planning my trips to Europe has always involved plenty of logistics; this year, a couple more layers were added. First of all, traveling with my partner, something I haven’t done in fifteen years, and then making a detour to see the eclipse on the East Coast before continuing on to London.

Once I had seen the eclipse in New Mexico last year, I was pretty determined to get to the next one. I scoped out a number of possibilities: getting to Texas seemed expensive and logistically challenging, and I wasn’t that excited about spending two nights in Dallas or San Antonio. Eventually I opted for Cleveland: it’s easy to fly from San Francisco to New York; spending two nights at the TWA hotel would be a lot of fun; and there were convenient flights to get to Cleveland and back to New York on the same day.

So that’s what we did. With four flights in three days, it was challenging to be checking in for the flight after the one we were about to board, but we flew east on Sunday afternoon, and took the short flight on Monday morning from JFK to the lake shore.

I hadn’t planned the Cleveland part much beyond checking there was a train from the airport to downtown. Since it was also the opening day of the baseball season, our train quickly filled up with fans – we had nice chats with several people. After lunch we found a good spot on the green, which was not as crowded as I had imagined, and settled down to watch the sun being eaten.

I have experienced a total eclipse before, which I wrote about last year on Patreon. While the forecast had been a little pessimistic about cloud cover for this occasion, and the clear skies when we took off from New York had been replaced by grey skies halfway along, it had been sunny when we landed, and all we had was a bit of haze.

I confess that, after watching the sliver of sun getting smaller and smaller, the moment of totality was still completely overwhelming; I felt it viscerally, and was quite emotional. We didn’t get the experience of birds going quiet, but we had street lights coming on, the buildings lighting up, and amazing sunset colours from the wispy clouds.

I was torn between just savouring the moment and taking some pictures. We had four minutes of darkness, and then the first sudden flash of bright light came. The happy crowd started clapping and cheering.

We made our way back to the station; this train was not especially crowded, so we felt pretty relaxed when we got back to the airport an hour ahead of our flight. Everything had worked out well, and we had been lucky with the weather.

Then came a couple of what I have been calling hair-raising moments. I had taken my phone out of my day bag just before we got off the train to see if it would still be light when we landed back in New York. As we walked up the platform someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I think you have dropped this.” It was my phone pouch, with my driver’s licence tucked in the back. Without that, I would have had no ID to get on the plane; if I ran that scenario onwards, it looked very messy…

Then the line for security looked quite long, and after waiting for fifteen minutes and realising that we would miss our flight if we stayed where we were, we skipped ahead almost to the front of the line (mostly with understanding from other passengers whose flights were later).

We made it in time, and once we were on the flight, we could somewhat relax. We had time to eat and explore the TWA hotel, before a rather short night of sleep – it took me a while to drop off after all that had happened. I was trying to move back past the frazzled part of the day and recollect, to imprint more, the more spectacular part, though I suspect that I will remember the day for the rest of my life.

We managed to get up early (2:30am west coast time), take the air train from the hotel to the next terminal, and catch our flight to London. Once again I was glad to arrive on the same day rather than enduring an overnight flight, but I still slept poorly again that night as we continued to adjust from west coast time.