All that I can hear is the last quiet pops of the embers of my dying fire, the rustling of the wind through the tall grass, the quiet movements of small animals in the underbrush, and my own breathing.
The sky overhead is dark, but not completely black, and I can make out the walls of the surrounding canyon, where the rocky cliff edges block the sky’s glow, forming a black silhouette horizon. The smell of grassland mixes with the smoke from the fire, and the rough surface of a rock presses against my back as I sit, waiting for totality.
Now, the moon is a thin crescent of light over a dark, ruddy circle. Looking up at it, it seems to be changing, but in truth, it and the Earth are simply dancing around each other as partners, with the Sun watching on jealously. I hold up an arm, blocking it out with tip of a single finger, and then let my arm drop.
Finally, the moment of totality is here. The strip vanishes into darkness. The moon is now a ruddy disk, still slightly light at the top. I know that the moon isn’t red; the Earth’s atmosphere reddens the sun’s light, as it passes through. And I know that the moon is only a ball of rock, fixed in the sky, not growing larger.
But I also know that the sky is a funny thing. If you spend a long enough time looking at the moon, or the stars, or anything else in the sky, it seems to grow for you, until it’s all you really see. That moon, which can be blocked out by the tip of a finger at arm’s length, feels like it’s a whole world, a thousand miles across, and you are floating over the surface as you sit on the ground on Earth.
The moon now feels like it’s growing. It doesn’t look like a rough sphere, with mountains and highlands and lowlands. The dark maria have disappeared in the dim ruddy light,
and the whole world looks like a polished ball of copper. Its edge is so smooth, and there is a distortion of color near the edges, that tells me that I am not looking at the moon. I am looking through a narrow hole in the sky, through to a copper sphere.
I hold up my arm again, and extend a single finger.
The moon is a bronze halo around its tip
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