Four minutes and eleven seconds of night

The notch arrives before anyone believes it. A single tooth bitten from the west limb, no wider than a fingernail held at arm's length.

We had been watching the projected disc on white card for six minutes, arguing about whether the tremor at the edge was the Moon or the heat shimmer off the gravel. Then it was unambiguous — a clean bite, moving. Somebody at the far end of the ridge began a count aloud and stopped, embarrassed, at four.

Nothing about the light has changed. That is the strange part. The valley is exactly as bright as it was, and the Sun has already begun to disappear.

A quarter gone, and the cottonwoods start printing crescents on the road.

Every gap between leaves is now a pinhole camera. The dirt track below the station is scattered with hundreds of small identical crescents, all leaning the same way, sliding slowly as the canopy moves. Visitors who ignored every instruction about eye safety stand looking down instead of up, which is what we hoped for.

Air temperature has dropped 0.4 °C against the trend line. The swallows are unbothered.

This is where the day begins to lie about itself.

More than half the Sun is gone but the eye compensates so ruthlessly that the ridge merely looks like late afternoon under thin cloud. The giveaway is the quality of shadow: edges have gone knife-sharp, because the light source is no longer a disc but a thin arc. Fence posts throw shadows you could cut yourself on.

Colours desaturate first at the blue end. The sagebrush turns the grey-green of an old photograph.

Forty seconds that no one on the ridge described the same way afterwards.

The remaining sliver breaks into beads as sunlight threads the lunar valleys — Baily's beads, four of them, then two, then one. That last bead flares against the emerging corona and makes the ring, and the ring is genuinely, physically bright enough to hurt. Filters off only after it goes.

The shadow bands came at eighteen seconds: faint ripples of light racing across the white tarpaulin, like the bottom of a swimming pool laid over the desert. Two of us saw them. Two did not.

The Moon's umbra arrives from the west at roughly two thousand kilometres per hour, and you can see it coming across the valley floor like weather.

Then the sky is a colour that has no ordinary name — a deep bruised indigo with a full 360° sunset laid around the horizon, orange in every direction at once. Venus, then Regulus. The corona stands out a full solar radius, streamers combed east and west, its inner edge the pale colour of frost on glass.

Three pink prominences hang at the four o'clock limb, each of them comfortably larger than Earth. The temperature has fallen 9.6 °C from the pre-eclipse baseline. The crickets, entirely convinced, begin.

Nobody operates their camera correctly. The recording from the ridge microphone contains one instruction, four expletives, and then two minutes of no speech at all.

The ring returns on the opposite limb and the whole apparatus of daylight reassembles in about nine seconds.

It is violent, coming back. The corona is erased instantly — not faded, erased — and the sky snaps from indigo to a washed pale blue before anyone has lowered their hands. Filters back on. Somebody is crying and pretending it is the wind.

The umbra departs east across the flats, a dark stain moving off toward the Snake River plain, catching up with a line of thunderheads sixty kilometres out.

Symmetry, and almost no audience for it.

The second half of an eclipse is the first half played backwards, and by common consensus it is ignored. Half the ridge is already packing. The crescents on the road lean the other way now, which is worth the walk down to see, and the temperature climbs back at about a degree every eleven minutes.

A tooth again, on the east limb this time, and shrinking.

Shadows have gone soft and ordinary. The light is a normal late-day gold. If you arrived now you would find a slightly hazy evening and nine people sitting very quietly on folding chairs facing the same direction.

The disc closes. Total elapsed shadow: two hours, forty-six minutes, fifty-four seconds.

We logged C4 by consensus at 19:31:02, though the projection card had shown nothing measurable for perhaps twenty seconds before. The instrument bench came down in the dark. The station book records the entry in the usual single line, which seems both correct and completely inadequate.

Next path across this station: 26 January 2038, if the ridge road survives another eleven winters.