By Thacher Schmid
When the eerie silvered half-light hit Portland’s Tom McCall Waterfront Park, there was sporadic applause and more than a few exclamations from the thousands of eclipse watchers in special paper sunglasses.
“Yay, nature!” And: “This is unbelievable.” “Whoa — sick, man!”
It was a Monday morning like any other in Portland, except for … well, everything. Most businesses shut down, if only for a few minutes. Traffic ran smoothly, albeit with much heavier volume than normal.
Along the Willamette River, there was a festive atmosphere for a couple hours. Thousands of people including native Portlanders and many tourists sat on blankets or on the concrete, set up cameras with special lenses or just stood there, peering up at the sun through the shades a clown was selling for a dollar.
There was more marijuana smoke than usual. Doomsday preachers stalked the crowd with pamphlets, sandwich board and loudspeaker. A classical music station played the bombastic, classic theme “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” by Richard Strauss — better known as the “2001: A Space Odyssey” theme.
Tie-dyed T-shirt vendors hawked eclipse shirts, helicopters fluttered overhead and dozens of motorboats plied the river. Entrepreneurs in silk ties mixed with dreadlocked hippies. People could be seen trying to figure out how to take what could be termed #eclipseselfies maneuvering cell phone and paper sunglasses.
The lack of totality left something to be desired for purists who headed south to the full totality zone, including hundreds who boarded a special Solar Eclipse Train before dawn. For most, though, it was enough: the half-light was eerie, like putting a digital filter on life itself — but nothing like the near-death experience hauntingly described by Annie Dillard in “Total Eclipse”:
“There was no sound,” she wrote. “The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the Earth rolled down.”
In Portland, people were nonchalant.
“We were going to go down there [to the totality zone],” said Morgan Edwards, “but … we’re good.”
Edwards, 34, lives in Seattle, and traveled to Portland to meet her friend Monica Quinonez, 35, who lives in Orange County.
“Planning for it three or four months in advance is super nerdy, and everybody gave me a lot of shit for it until this weekend, when they realized they were going to be missing out,” Quinonez said.
Ben Murdock and four pals were high-fiving each other, both for deciding to come see the eclipse — and for not fighting expected traffic nightmares further south, which never occurred despite an estimated one million people arriving in the area.
“We already live in traffic, to be honest,” Murdock, 21, said, to laughter from his pals. “99 percent is fine,” agreed Alek Agopian, 23. All five work together at Disneyland, they said. “We left the happiest place for this,” said Megan Bratta, 22.
“And we’re glad,” finished Agopian.
“It’s exciting,” said Joshua Alex, 11. “The next time it might happen is in fifty or a million years.” His father, Derje Taffese, 43, an Ethiopian immigrant who took off from his medical transport job, smiled. “I’m very excited too.”
Helen and Charlotte Durocher, two French-speaking sisters from Quebec City and Vancouver, Canada, said they booked a trip to Portland before they knew about the eclipse. “Portland has a lot going on even without the eclipse,” said Helen, 23.
Nicole Davis came because her little sister is going to Reed College but was pleased by the “cool coincidence” of the celestial happenings. “Full, like my heart in this moment, for the majesty of this world,” the 23-year-old said melodramatically, waiting in line to use the “Portland Loo” park toilet.
The moment itself was ultimately a mashup of lovely, weird, and anticlimactic.
“All I hear in my head right now is ‘Total Eclipse of The Sun,’” a woman told her friend as they watched the moon shimmy until only the faintest crescent was visible.
“You mean ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’?” her friend responded.
“Yeah — it’s one of my favorite songs. Everybody should be playing that.”
“I feel a little bit of anxiety,” another said, as the near-totality occurred around 10:19 a.m. Applause broke out, and a child’s voice was heard: “I don’t know what we’re clapping about.” A man in an altered state pulled down his pants, paraded about making chicken and dog noises, took a bow, then laughed maniacally.
“Classic Portland, right?” commented an observer.
“It’s a great time to do yoga,” said another. “Nice tree pose, man!”
Then it was over. Long before the sunshine returned to its full flow, streams of people walked back to nearby office buildings.
“Well, we saw it,” a man said. “The traverse is traversed.”
