The Great American Eclipse
If you ask the desk clerk at the Hampton Inn why people move to and live in Casper, Wyoming, she’ll say, “Oil.” Perhaps it was fitting, then, that the Sun, which had nourished the organisms that had created that oil over billions of years, should draw the multitudes to Casper on August 21, 2017, the day of what was dubbed (and not necessarily in a jingoistic way) the Great American Eclipse. According to estimates, one million people visited Wyoming, a state where the population is less than 600,000, for the celestial spectacle. My cousin Susan Hawkins and I were two of them. The previous day we had arrived within an hour of each other at Denver International Airport, rented a car and glided off into the stream of traffic, talking as we slid under an electronic sign warning of eclipse traffic. (When was the last time you saw one of those?) Even though we were hours away from the event, I furtively checked the cloud cover every 10 miles or so, hoping for an unobstructed view of the