Greeting the Eclipse the Ohio Way

The one thing all that darkness might be good for is providing cover for the enjoyment of an afternoon beer.

(Photo by MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images)

WHEN I FIRST READ T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in a high school English class eons ago, I found myself thrown by the opening line, “April is the cruelest month.” “I guess it sort of is, but it kinda isn’t?” was the substance of my objection. The simple problems of youth.

I’m from Cleveland, Ohio, and in that city and others built on the shores of the Great Lakes, April is a happening month—meaning, just about anything can happen. Two years ago, some hard-blowing mid-April snow postponed a Cleveland Guardians baseball game—although that was not as bad as the “Snow-pening Day” troubles of April 2007, when the season-opener was delayed more than once. This year is warmer: We had such a mild winter that the Great Lakes ice cover, which normally spreads across about 40 percent of the lakes’ total surface area in February and March, barely got above single digits. There can be cruelty, sure—sometimes the “gales of November” seem to hang around—but April around the Great Lakes is simply not the April of Eliot’s grimy midcentury London. We catch more surprises over here.

On Monday, April 8, the nation will look to the skies as a total solar eclipse darkens a 120-mile path across North America. The darkness of night will fall over areas in the path of totality for an average of about three to four minutes. Cleveland is getting a lot of attention for being one of the larger cities in this totality zone. Another April surprise.

I live in a western suburb of Cleveland, about fifteen miles from the center-line of totality. Meaning that on Monday afternoon a little after 3 o’clock, as long as the clouds aren’t too bad, I should be able to exit my home, look up, and see a thin ring of sunlight visible around the obstructing moon, as a shroud of darkness falls on the earth. One scientist told CNN the eclipse will be “one of the most beautiful things most people will ever experience,” although the stark beauty of the total obstruction of the sun will be prefaced by the sky “getting this really weird gloomy color” some fifteen to twenty minutes beforehand.

Beauty mixed with weirdness and gloom: It sounds like things I’ve heard local fans say about supporting the Cleveland Browns.

---

ANNIE DILLARD CAPTURED this strange blend of reactions in her account of a total eclipse in Washington in the early 1980s. Here, she describes the initial plunge into the night of day as she and other eclipse watchers were hit by the “monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon”:

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lit from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world.

But among my brethren in these parts, I’m finding a bit of perplexity over the way this rare, apocalyptic event is being treated by the media and local governmental organizations. Aren’t they playing this up a bit much? my neighbors ask. It feels to them as though the moon has obstructed the news cycle for months at this point.

Yes, another solar eclipse isn’t coming around again for a long time. And yes, people are traveling hundreds of miles and have booked up hotel rooms to get their shot at seeing four minutes of darkness on an April afternoon. And yes, historically, different tribes and religions have placed great meaning on eclipses—whether the gods were angry with humanity, or a demon was eating the sun, or the sun and moon were having more children.

Alas, most of the people I’ve talked with around here aren’t seeing any demons or celestial procreation. They’ve sighed and tapped their foot waiting out an obsessive local media, for whom the eclipse is an easy story to update day after day—and certainly all day Monday. No doubt there will be discussion of coronal mass ejections and kids wearing solar sunglasses and roadways clogged with vacated cars, their drivers staring open-mouthed at the skies for a few minutes.

Most people hereabouts seem to impute no meaning to the mechanics of the heavens at all. This is no tsunami or tornado or two-foot snowfall or flood or algae bloom caused by pollution in western Lake Erie near Toledo. All those require cleanup and aftercare—and have meaning connected to people’s lives and livelihoods. To climate change. To people’s relationship to nature.

This eclipse doesn’t. Maybe for some people it will be not just a beautiful sight to behold but also the start of some kind of cosmic, spiritual awakening. But it certainly doesn’t warrant the states of emergency being issued in some places. It doesn’t, for crying out loud, require setting up reunification zones around the city in case someone gets lost during a four-minute event, as Cleveland has done.

Cleveland City Council Member Kris Harsh shared some rare common sense: “I’m hearing a lot of unnecessary panic out there. . . . People don’t need to panic or worry about anything,” he said. To those worried about their pets, he soothed, “They don’t normally stare at the sun, so they won’t stare at the sun during the eclipse either. Animals are just fine. It’s the people we need to worry about.”

In Midwestern places like Cleveland, the people the government is worrying about, those who have worked in jobs where they make big metal things that make little metal things, are less likely to scream in existential terror like Annie Dillard describes than to use these four minutes as an excuse to drink more beer. That’s just how things work here—and the Ohio craft-beer makers have not disappointed on that end.

Two caught my eye from the Phoenix Brewing Co., a little craft-beer maker in Mansfield, Ohio. I haven’t tasted them yet, but I like their names: “Total Eclipse of the Tart” (apparently a blueberry tart fruit ale) and “And Then We Went Blind” (a chocolate porter).

Pale ale or lager, craft beer or domestic or imported—what matters is that you find one worth sitting with on your front stoop in the totality zone. Now that’s a good Midwestern way to do the weird and gloomy.