The Day the Shadows Bent

by Jeffrey Scott Baker

(April 8^th, 2024)

I decided not to deal with the traffic and go see the total eclipse, besides I’d seen the total one in 2017. And I had things to do here. So, I stayed in town, feeling that I liked watching the partial phase in the city I grew up in.

And I did more than that.

Back in February 1979 I was in my first year of College at Newman University (then called “Kansas Newman College”) when the last total solar eclipse for about forty years to cross the US. swept through Canada and a lot of the Pacific Northwest. Much of the rest of the country got to watch the partial phase and that day not a lot of us were paying attention to our classes. Fortunately I didn’t have any classes at the peak time for the local eclipse, so I grabbed a camera from the Journalism room and took some pictures, mainly of eclipse watchers and the crescent shadows on the ground.

So, April 8^th, 2024, I drove over to Newman University and watched the eclipse, not too far from where I had stood and photographed the one forty-five years earlier.

The sky was clear, except for some filmy clouds high in the sky and the sun blazed its usual blue-white. There was a crowd of students gathered outside the Bishop Gerber Science Center, most with those eclipse glasses that I frankly don’t trust. The kids and maybe some of the faculty probably hadn’t been around in 1979.

I found a spot on the sidewalk where trees cast leafy shadows and started taking pictures around 12:55pm, and took one a few minutes apart for a while. About fifteen minutes later I could notice a thick crescent shape in the mix of sunlight and shadow, but I later saw that it was visible in the earlier pics I took.

I pointed out the shadows to some kid who hadn’t known an Eclipse did that. And I hadn’t been able to watch that in 2017; it had been largely cloudy.

The eclipse went on, the sky got a little darker, around 1:30 it got noticeably cooler, although the evening news only listed a five-degree difference.

Around 1:40 the crowd cheered; we had reached maximum eclipse, about Eighty Per Cent of the Sun covered by the Moon.

Then it started to recede and the crowds slowly started to disperse.

The experience actually made me a little wistful; much has changed for me in forty-five years, mostly for the better. The campus had improved a lot. McNeill Hall, where I ran in to check the TV coverage in 1979, was now faculty offices. On that eclipse day I didn’t live on campus yet. Several of the buildings I knew were gone, and new ones had been put up. I smiled to see students watching the eclipse from the courtyard that was where the old Science Building had been.

There won’t be another country-crossing Total Eclipse until the ones in the 2040s. I will be in my Eighties by then, if I’m still around. I may have someone drive me where I can watch totality.

Or I just might go back to where I was standing in 2024 and 1979 and watch the shadows bend.

—end—