Stephen Montoya
There it is. We won't see it again until 2317.
Thousands across the city and region stared up in wonder toward the heavens on Monday afternoon to witness a celestial phenomenon that won’t be seen here again for roughly 300 years.
We stood there in Sundance Square, Trinity Park, at the Will Rogers Memorial Center, at bars, and most of us in office parking lots not in the hunt for any inter-Mercurial planets (whatever that might be) or a better understanding of the solar corona, but rather just to see something cool.
Solar totality, a phrase that had become as tired as 105-degree summer days, lived up to the hype, with an accommodating Mother Nature, whose clouds toyed with us, as the moon cast her shadow over the sun. For about 3 minutes darkness descended at midday, and we all stood in awe, coming away with a better understanding of our minuscule place in the universe.
Stephen Montoya
The enthusiasts find an uncommon wonder at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.
It was the damnedest thing we’d ever seen. Well, I had ever seen. And that’s saying something, considering we watched the Texas Rangers win the World Series in November. The first recorded predicted total eclipse occurred on May 28, 585 B.C., forecast by Thales of Miletus, a pre-Socratic philosopher obviously before his time.
History says that when the daylight suddenly terminated — just like it did on Monday — the Medes and the Lydians were engaged in bloody hand-to-hand combat. Every soldier was said to have immediately laid down his arms as something far bigger than themselves and their differences commenced. The long, drawn out war ended on the spot, so fearful were the combatants that the world was coming to an end.
That’s very much the way we felt when the Rangers won the World Series.
Totality on Monday marked the first time such as thing had happened here since 1878. We (those of us currently walking about the Earth) will never see it again here, unless medicine man Mr. Gates, et al, have a very magic formula up their sleeves. The next total solar eclipse in North Texas is slated for 2317. Only Abraham and his Old Testament peers would seem to have a chance at seeing that.
“This has always been on my bucket list,” says Jonathan Wells, who spoke while sitting in the comfort of Sundance Square with his wife Andrea. The couple was enjoying a very spirited scene in Sundance Square, which was being entertained by Linny Nance & Network. The Wellses arrived on Saturday from Scottsdale, Arizona. (At about 12 years old, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, by the way, had not yet crossed paths with us the last time totality appeared here.)
“We're retired and we travel about six months of the year. It's here in the continental U.S. And it's not too far for us to travel from where we are in Arizona.”
The Wellses — he’s originally from the UK and she from Argentina — arrived here on Saturday. It was a trip he booked about a year ago and one they almost canceled when weather threatened the show. But they pressed on despite mercurial Mother Nature.
“We've never been to Fort Worth before,” Wells says. “We’ve been to Texas quite a few times but never Fort Worth. So, we thought what a great place to explore and combine it with the totality.
“Everything's bigger in Texas. Your churches are bigger, your barbeque is bigger, your eclipse is bigger.”
Fort Worth Inc.
Garrett Minnie takes a look upward just as the eclipse begins about 12:30 p.m.
On the outskirts of the crowds that stretched from the Cultural District all the way to the Fort Worth Botanic Garden, several onlookers who’d brought their very own high-powered equipment fidgeted to refine their lens angles. One of those was Jack Beyer, a NASA Space Flight photographer, who traveled from Los Angeles.
“I've been working a lot in Brownsville because that's where SpaceX is building Starship, which is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built,” he says while periodically refining his giant lenses to face the sun directly. “I figured I would hang out in Texas after the last test flight for the eclipse. So now I'm here in Fort Worth.”
This wasn’t his first eclipse rodeo. He says he shot the 2017 total eclipse, the first seen in U.S. skies in four decades. Its path of totality spanned from Salem, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina, making it the first eclipse in 99 years visible across the country. That experience shaped his preparations for this one. For example, Beyer bought an $800 tracking mount to place under his camera, so he didn’t have to continually track the sun’s whereabouts the rest of the watch, which NASA livestreams to more than a million viewers on YouTube.
“We have 42 separate camera feeds across the path of totality all the way up to Rochester, New York” he says. “So, hopefully the clouds cooperate in a majority of those places.”
Unlike Beyer, Donna Lucado and Don Carter traveled a mere 15 minutes to get a good seat. They were sitting in a row of camping chairs set up on the median between Will Rogers Memorial Center and the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.
“We’ve been offered a few bucks for a couple of our chairs,” Lucado says while looking up periodically to see the progress of the eclipse. “If I’d thought more about it, I should’ve sold a couple of the chairs for what people were offering.”
The Wellses from Arizona were sitting not far from Jim and Linda Paul in Sundance Square. The Pauls traveled here from Perryton, Texas, with their grandson Garrett Minnie, who is here by way of San Francisco.
Perryton, I said to him. Hometown of Mike Hargrove, former Texas Rangers first baseman.
“That’s right,” Jim replies.
Garrett was set up to take pictures with a 50-year-old Pamex camera and a lens he recently purchased from a vendor in Japan. A 55-year-old lens, Garrett says. The Pamex had been purchased by Jim in Nuremburg, Germany, while he was serving his country during the Vietnam era.
Jim and Linda were in Virginia visiting a daughter when Garrett called from California. Garrett and a friend — Ashley, I believe her name (rookie reporter) — wanted to come to Texas to see the eclipse.
“He called and said, ‘You going to be home by April 5 or something like that?’ And I said, ‘We can be.’ And he spent the last couple days with us.”
Jim and Linda Paul didn’t give a whit about the weather. Or the eclipse, if we’re being completely honest.
“I'll tell you what, with our situation, I don't care what the weather is. And I don't need to go up there to see the eclipse,” Jim says. “They came out to see us.”
You’ve just been mic dropped, total solar eclipse.