A Desert Harvest by Bruce Berger

Author:Bruce Berger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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LONG BRACED FOR, nearly dreaded, July 11 dawned free of the least blemish. At breakfast all were handed postcard-sized cardboard with insets of an aluminum-coated plastic called Mylar through which we could safely stare at the sun. Hesitantly, watching neighbors for signs of blindness, we put them to our eyes. The sun was a pale bulb. Many began pacing the dune, calculating the optimum viewing spot. Those with telescopes that ran on electricity triple-checked the cord from the dune to the generator, as well as the generator. A man who had set up in the cactus for an unobstructed view could be heard cursing his tripods, along with the country that made them. In the midst of scrambling and fussing there was a cheer like the stroke of New Year’s. The moon had bitten the sun, on time to the nanosecond.

What followed seemed like bits of a tribal dream. People laid the spread fingers of one hand over the other, creating a mesh through which light fell onto bedsheets in a lattice of crescents. Shadows crispened, cast by a shrinking sun. Three men in blue uniforms, with semiautomatic rifles over their shoulders, suddenly materialized on the dune and strode through the darkening sky watchers. Refusing at first to identify themselves, they admitted under pressure that they were from the Mexican navy. I asked one why they had come. “To protect you,” he said. “From what?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “From theft?” I persisted. “Yes, from theft during the eclipse.” Given that any serious thief would come in the night rather than during the six-minute dusk of the eclipse, and that all of us had been using expensive equipment to nail down cheap seats, the military guard added the traditional spice of the irrational—missing from the Centerline Camp if not from Rancho Leonero—and if I had thought of it in time, I would have asked one of the patrol to guard my folding chair. Invited to peer through lenses and to pose with the more glamorous staff members, they lightened up. All had been warned against taking flash photos that would disrupt night vision, but I neither realized how dark it had become nor remembered my cheap camera’s automatic flash, and my blast was answered by a volley of threats. The mountains to the north darkened swiftly, as if under thunderclouds, but without the blackness and screams I had read about in Annie Dillard.

Another cheer went up, followed by a hush: totality had begun. It was now safe to look directly at the sun, yet out of instinct I still hesitated. Soon every naked eye saw the whole moon, opaque as a manhole cover, blot the whole sun, which flowed in blond streamers. After the slow, relentless advance toward darkness, motion stopped. The horizon in all directions glowed melon-pale. However anticipated, it was suddenly stunning that the sun and moon, each a mere 360th of the visible sky, had achieved a cosmic bull’s-eye, giving a sense of the clock stopped at a high noon that was midnight.

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