A total solar eclipse is one of things I've always wanted to see in person. I grew up in southern Illinois, and being a relative homebody, I knew from the age of five that the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017 would be the one. As a kid, I'd occasionally pull out the Audobon astronomy book with a map of upcoming eclipses and wonder what it would be like. I dreamed of hearing the birds fall silent as the skies darkened; the breaking of the August heat as the solar heat rays faded to nothing. My parents occasionally talked of moving, and I gradually realized that my own career would take me away from Illinois by the time the eclipse happened. But deep in my heart, I knew my first eclipse experience would be close to my home. It's hard to step away from an idea that's internalized itself over 20 years.
I moved away to start grad school in the summer of 2016, but I immediately began planning to make it home to my parents' place for the eclipse. Fortunately, the Stony Brook geosciences department provides an extremely flexible work schedule for its graduates, and I was able to take two weeks off to go home for the eclipse. The timing was a little unfortunate - planned fieldwork in Utah before the start of the fall semester meant that I would have to leave for LI the day after the eclipse.
Although I could fly home in a few hours, I decided to drive so that I would have my car available around the house - if Long Island is bad about requiring a car to get anywhere, southern Illinois is even worse. The drive from LI to southern Illinois is 16 hours, which is very close to the limits of my endurance. It's a trip that's pretty long for a single day, but as someone who can drive 12-14 hour stretches, just short enough to make a hotel feel like an expensive stop before making the two or three hour drive down the home stretch.
My plans were almost derailed at the last second. About a week before I left for home, I hit a deer with my car, with the only visible damage being a very large dent on the driver's side of the hood (one which put some visible stress on the latch). I figured it would be cheaper to have it fixed at home than on LI, so I decided to wait to get it checked out until after I got back home. What I didn't realize was that the sheet metal had come into contact with the A/C compressor, creating a small leak that only lost coolant when the car was running. I was setting myself up for a miserable drive through the Midwest.
I left LI around 4 am on a Sunday, hoping that I would be past the NYC and Philly before any weekend traffic began to pick up. As I hit the faster stretches of the interstate just past NYC, I began to notice a worrying hood flutter. It wasn't a lot, but I was worried about whether the latch could stand up for the whole trip. Shortly after reaching Pennsylvania, I pulled into a gas station and bought some duck tape to secure the hood in place. As I pulled back into the interstate, I started feeling puffs of warm air coming out of the A/C. I quickly realized that the A/C was going to be out, so I turned it off and rolled down the windows.
The airflow helped keep the drive from being unbearable, but as the August heat slowly built over the day, the car started feeling soupier and soupier. At about 2pm, I considered stopping for a few hours just to let the worst of the heat pass. I instead decided to get a large cup of ice at a travel center and power through. Between 3 pm and 6 pm, I had to make four stops just to get more water and cool myself off. As cooler evening air started to move in, I managed to regain some sense of comfort behind the wheel, and finally made it to my parents place around 10:30 pm.
I was lucky to have somewhere to crash for the eclipse, since most rooms in the area had been booked for the eclipse years in advance. Campsites were so full that several of the state campsites had people making extra camping spaces in the surrounding woods. Lodging was at such a premium that some locals were turning their front yards into campsites. But one of the beautiful things about southern Illinois is that it somehow managed to swallow these 10s of thousands of people without feeling noticeably more crowded.
Continued in Part 2Written: May 28, 2020