Memories of the Eclipse

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My name is Victor Lewis. On March 7, 1970, a total solar eclipse was visible from Savannah, Georgia. This is the story of how Robert and I drove there to see it.
    We were students at the University of Georgia then, and we looked the part of what many respectable people in that time would have called a problem. We both dressed with the sort of careless confidence that suggested we had rejected conventional life, though the truth was simpler. We were young and did not have much money. Poverty often gets mistaken for philosophy at that age.
    I remember driving down to Savannah in my dark red 1964 Corvair Monza Spyder, a two-door with a manual transmission and floor-mounted shifter. I loved that car because it gave me a feeling of personal freedom. It was not roomy, and according to some, it was not especially safe. It was, however, mine, and when the sunlight hit that dark red paint just right, I thought it looked like something faster and finer than it truly was. Youth can lend glamour to almost anything, including bad decisions.
    My friend Robert was always eager for an adventure and said we ought to go to Savannah to see the eclipse. He said he would be the navigator. I thought it sounded like a fun idea, so we set off on our quest to see the sun go out.
    As we drove, he kept a map he had picked up at a local gas station in his lap. He would look at it from time to time, then give me directions that were not useful but delivered with confidence.
    We both had hair long enough to offend barbers and encourage comments from uncles. In Athens, this made us average. In rural gas stations between Athens and Savannah, this made us suspects. At one filling station, a woman behind the register looked at Robert, looked at me, then looked at the Corvair as if it too had made a poor decision.
    “You boys in a band?” she asked.
    “No, ma’am,” I said.
    “Running from the law?”
    “Not today.”
    Robert grinned at her and bought a Moon Pie. He told her it was his last honest quarter.
    We made it to Savannah the day before the eclipse. I remember the late daylight that made the whole riverfront seem older than it was. The air near the river smelled of old brick, salt, fish, and diesel. Everything there seemed to have survived several eras, none of them entirely satisfactory. We left the Corvair in a parallel parking spot on the street and wandered down near the river, where old buildings leaned into one another like men keeping secrets.
    We walked past a shop near the river. The sign over the door said Savannah Lowcountry Antiques. We stopped to look through the window. Beyond the large pane of glass that looked like it had not been cleaned in a decade was a jumble of tarnished silver, yellowed prints, and enough cracked porcelain faces to haunt a courthouse. We decided to go inside.
    The shop smelled of dust, cedar, mildew, and old paper. It was the smell of things that had outlived their original purpose and felt superior because of it. To be truthful, there were a lot more oddities in that shop than there were antiques. There was also enough dust to suggest the place had not so much been cleaned over the years as layered.
    An “antique” dealer standing behind a counter. He was narrow and dry and so still that at first I could not tell whether he was breathing or not. He looked as if he had been there longer than some of the merchandise.
    What I noticed most about him was his glasses. They sat on his face like two thick-bottomed tumblers. Behind them, his pale, magnified eyes seemed to float at a distance, as though I was not looking at the man himself but at a version of him being projected through deep water.
    I moved closer to him just to make sure he was really one of the living and not just another exhibit. I walked up to the counter and said, “We came down from Athens for the eclipse.” I could not tell whether he had heard me, so I repeated, “Me and Robert here are in town to see the eclipse.”
    He turned slightly, nodded in a slow, grave way, and said, “Seen one once when I was a boy.”
    Hoping for more, I said, “You have seen one before?”
    He tapped the counter with one finger. “Yep. Looked right at it.”
    I glanced at his glasses, then back at him.
    He went on in the same tone. “While it was happening. Looked straight at the sun. I was just a boy at the time.”
    Robert drifted toward a shelf of Civil War junk and looked at a stuffed gull with one eye missing.
    The old man tapped the counter with a yellow fingernail. “I looked straight at it. Right at the sun.”
    I looked at the glasses again. Those were the thickest glasses I had ever seen on a human being.
    “Didn’t hurt a bit at the time,” the man said. He seemed pleased by the memory. He lifted one shoulder in what might have been a shrug or a confession. “Sun looked like God had bit a piece out of it.”
    There was a silence.
    The old man looked over at Robert and started talking again. “People’ll tell you not to do it. They always tell you not to do a thing after somebody’s already done it.”
    I nodded slowly. “Well. That is useful timing advice.”
    Robert, who was examining some brass objects sitting on the counter, said, “That sounds like how a curse starts.”
    The old man ignored him. “People talk now like they know everything. Back then, if you wanted to see a thing, you looked at it.”
    I said, “And did that work out for you?”
    He looked at me through those thick lenses and smiled. “Well enough.”
    It was difficult to argue with that, though the evidence before me suggested that “well enough” had required some pretty severe sacrifices.
    I thanked him, and Robert and I stepped back outside.
    On the sidewalk Robert said, “That man has spent his entire life refusing to let experience interfere with conviction.”
    I looked back through the window at the glint of those monumental glasses. “He may be the only man in Georgia to have stared directly at an eclipse and lived long enough to recommend it to strangers.”
    Robert said, “If that man told us that after looking directly at the sun, he swallowed mercury to cure a cough, I would believe him.”
    We walked on.
    That evening, we drove down to Savannah Beach. The beach lot was open and mostly empty. The sea made its long, dark breathing sound beyond the dunes. Wind moved across the sand with a chill that smelled of brine and wet shell. The sky above the water was moonless. The lot was dark except for a pale glow coming from a single flickering streetlight, which, in retrospect, should have felt like a warning.
    We did not have enough money for a hotel room, which at the time did not strike us as a serious obstacle. We were both over six feet tall and somehow I believed we were both more than capable of sleeping in a compact car. I suggested to Robert that we should just sleep in the car here in the parking lot.
    While he considered my suggestion, I saw a police officer patrolling the beach lot. Robert said we should ask if we could sleep in the car here.
    I said, “Why invite the law into our adventure?”
    He said, “Because if we ask, we are harmless college boys with a scientific interest. If we do not, we are suspicious hippie vagrants.” He had a point.
    I asked Robert. “You think the hair hurts or helps the scientific appearance?”
    Robert pushed his hair back and grinned. “It suggests advanced thinking.”
    We approached the officer, who regarded us with the expression of a man who had already seen several unnecessary things that day and expected a few more before supper.
    I said, “Evening, sir. We came down from the University in Athens to see the eclipse, and we were wondering if it would be all right to sleep in our car here tonight.”
    He looked us over. Long hair. Tall. Army surplus jacket on Robert. Driving a Corvair. None of this, I suspect, improved his opinion.
    “No,” he said.
    I nodded and said, “All right.”
    Then he pointed outside the lot toward a sandy area nearby.
    “But y’all can park over yonder,” he said. “Be all right for you there.”
    Robert and I looked where he was pointing. It seemed reasonable enough in the dark. An area just beyond the edge of the lot. Flat sand. Near enough. Officially blessed.
    I said, “Thank you, sir.”
    “Much obliged,” Robert said.
    “We’re going to get something to eat,” I said. “We will come back later and sleep where you said we could.”
    The policeman nodded as if this completed a transaction of civic usefulness. “Suit yourselves.”
    We drove off feeling oddly reassured, as though we had achieved some kind of lawful legitimacy and that we had navigated official authority with unusual grace.
    The hamburger stand was the sort of place where the smell hit before the door did. The smell of grease, onions, coffee, pickle brine, and old fryer oil permeated everything in the area.
    We ordered burgers and fries because they were cheap, then carried them to a wooden table beneath an old oak draped in Spanish moss.
    Robert unwrapped his burger, examined it, and said, “This looks like the cow died surprised.”
    I said, “Mine appears to have passed through several forms of government inspection and escaped all of them.”
    Still, we ate. Hunger is forgiving.
    The neon sign over the hamburger stand came on and buzzed as if it were arguing with itself. At some point, while sitting at the table and staring at an empty store with a vacant parking lot just down the street, we began discussing the sleeping arrangement again. The thought of parking out on sand in the dark had begun to lose some of its romance.
    It was one of those conversations that young men have late in the day when fatigue begins to soften judgment and turn laziness into strategy.
    “You still want to go back and sleep on sand?” Robert asked.
    “Not especially.”
    Robert looked out toward the empty store, its black windows turned blind to the road. The parking lot there was vacant and flat and, more importantly, not composed of sand. He pointed and said, “What if instead of sleeping where we were told, we sleep where no one has specifically forbidden it?”
    I looked at the lot where Robert was pointing.
    The idea had the immediate appeal of all bad decisions that save effort.
    I said, “I am not looking forward to trying to sleep anywhere in that Corvair, but our choices appear to be narrowing.”
    He nodded toward the empty store. “So, what about that lot?”
    I looked. It was flat, paved, quiet, and free of tides as far as I could tell.
    There are moments in youth when laziness dresses itself as prudence. This was one of them.
    I said, “It does seem less ocean-adjacent.”
    Robert said, “That is exactly the phrase I was looking for.”
    So instead of returning to the place recommended by law enforcement, we parked in the lot of the empty store near the restaurant and prepared to spend the night in the Corvair.
    Memory can soften certain hardships, but it has never softened my memory of the night we spent in that car.
    The Corvair was a fine automobile for getting around in traffic, but it was not a lodging. Robert and I were both over six feet, and too tall for the available space inside it. The bucket seats did not recline in any meaningful sense. The stick shift rose from the floor like a metal crowbar. We had one blanket. We had denim jackets, but they were not warm enough to protect us from the chilly night air. Every position we tried in the car was wrong. Every adjustment created a new grievance.
    At one point, Robert twisted himself sideways and said, “I believe I am beginning to understand medieval penance.” He shifted, struck his elbow on the window crank, and cussed through his teeth.
    I was trying to lean back without losing circulation below the waist. I lay with one knee against the steering column and my neck bent at a very uncomfortable angle. I could not sleep, yet some small, proud part of me refused to admit this was a failure.
    A little later, Robert shifted again. He struck his elbow and hissed. “That dang gearshift is in the way.”
    Outside, I could hear distant traffic, the rattle of a loose sign, and now and then the long hush of wind moving across somewhere open. The air carried a stale mixture of salt, asphalt, and fried food.
    After a while, Robert said into the dark, “Do you think that old man in the antique shop can still see anything at all, or does he just remember what sight used to be?”
    I laughed, which was painful because even laughing required space we did not have. “I think he sees the whole world through the memory of one bad idea.”
    “Do you suppose,” Robert said, “that every terrible idea survives because there is always one old man willing to endorse it?”
    “Yes,” I said. “That may be the entire mechanism of civilization.”
    Robert said, “Well, if tomorrow goes poorly, perhaps we too will someday become local examples.”
    Neither of us slept much that night. We dozed in brief fragments. At one point, I dreamed that I had been folded into a mailbox and was trapped there, waiting to be picked up and sent to an address on the other side of the country. I woke with my left leg numb and my right shoulder in active protest.
    When morning finally came, gray and unpleasant, we unfolded ourselves from the car in stages. I felt as if I had been assembled incorrectly. Robert’s hair had gone in all directions at once. We were both stiff, hungry, and cold.
    After a brief stretch to get our blood flowing and work out the cramps in our legs, we got in the Corvair, and I drove back to the beach. The water shone under the morning light with a broad, innocent glitter, as if the ocean itself had risen during the night to correct a municipal misunderstanding.
    I stopped the car and stared.
    The sea lay over that whole stretch of sand with a bright innocence that felt insulting. If we had followed the officer’s instructions exactly, my dark red Corvair might have spent the night becoming an artificial reef.
    Robert looked at the water for several seconds and then said, very calmly, “I do not wish to speak ill of the authorities.”
    I kept staring.
    “But I do believe that man directed us according to tidal information gathered from another planet.”
    I laughed so hard it hurt. Robert started laughing too. It was the kind of laughter that comes when disaster misses you closely enough to become absurd.
    I can still see the picture that came into my mind. In it, the Corvair is obediently parked where directed. The tide rolls in by degrees. Two overgrown hippies sleep in the cramped darkness while the Atlantic creeps toward them with bureaucratic patience. First come the wet tires. Then the cold ankles. Then the sudden marine revelation.
    “We would have drowned from what we thought was politeness,” I said. “We would have drowned from depending on the kindness of strangers.”
    Robert, still laughing, wiped his eyes. “That is the most Southern possible way to die.” He bent forward with his hands on his knees. “Imagine explaining that to your parents. Yes, ma’am, that officer was very helpful. Sent us directly into the Atlantic.”
    “We would have floated out after midnight,” I said.
    Robert looked at the submerged area. “At least the car is red. Would have made it easier for search and rescue to find us, provided we floated long enough.”
    We stood there in the wind, sore from spending the night cramped in that small car, looking at the place where we would have been if we had followed the official recommendation.
    Later that day, we saw the eclipse, and it was worth the trip. The moon moved across the sun, and the world dimmed. The light changed in a way that did not seem natural, though of course it was. For a little while, everything familiar looked borrowed from somewhere else.
    Looking back on it now, I realize that youth could carry a man on enthusiasm well past the point where judgment should have taken over. It could persuade him to drive across the state in a small car, sleep folded like laundry, trust a stranger with monumental eyeglasses, and nearly take marine lodging advice from a policeman who did not appear to believe in the ideals of youthful culture.
    And yet, without that youthful enthusiasm, I would never have had these experiences to remember.
    But when I think about Savannah now, the shadow crossing the sun is not the first thing I remember.
    I remember the old man in the antique shop who had looked straight at an eclipse as a boy and seemed content to let us believe he was not concerned about any consequences his actions might have had. And I remember the policeman who nearly arranged for the Atlantic to claim a 1964 Chevrolet Corvair Monza Spyder, along with two long-haired students from Athens who were just entering manhood and looking for adventure.
    The eclipse was exciting, but it lasted only a few minutes.
    But the magnificent memories of that day have remained with me for a lifetime.

 

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