Nature Has Agency
One afternoon back in August 2017, the world went dark for two minutes and twenty seconds. At least, it did from where I stood, on a rocky outcrop in a valley of sage and ponderosa in Medicine Bow National Forest in eastern Wyoming. The sun slipped behind a black disk of a moon, the horizon flashed brilliantly with 360-degree sunset colors. And then darkness. I could hear the wind, the birds, and a few hollers from unseen campers in neighboring valleys. I let out a holler too.
Many of us in the 70-mile-wide path of totality, from Oregon to Georgia, remember the day — those few minutes in darkness — of the 2017 solar eclipse. It was an event many of us had had marked on our calendars. My wife and I drove two days from our then home in Austin, Texas, to find a campsite deep enough into public land to most fully experience the wildness of the moment. We found it in Medicine Bow.
It was a moment worthy of disconnect. I had just spent a summer covering the Texas legislature during an increasingly divided political season. The Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, a turning point for White supremacy’s move toward the mainstream, had happened days before. These were early days of a particular brand of Trump-era anxiety. And so we went out to the woods. The solar eclipse was an excuse, really.
I’m not sure why this memory came to mind this week. Perhaps I’m thinking of what’s changed since then. Four years ago, it felt like we were facing down a long road, or into a dark valley. Today, the road is still long, but fringed with a ring of silver just light enough to illuminate the damage — oil slicks on the San Francisco Bay, a trail of devastation left behind by a racist symbol on our southern border — and a path to repair it.
Or perhaps the solar eclipse, and my memory from it, evades clear meaning. Just a “small ring of light… like a ridiculous lichen up in the sky, like a perfectly still explosion,” as Annie Dillard wrote of a total eclipse 25 years earlier. “It was interesting, and lovely, and in witless motion, and it had nothing to do with anything” — just a reminder that nature has its own agency, despite how we choose to see it.
Austin Price
Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo of 2017 Solar eclipse: Don McCrady
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