Watching the solar eclipse

Locals gathered around valley to witness event

By MARY CLOUD TAYLOR

Daily Inter Lake

At 9 a.m. Monday morning, more than an hour before the solar eclipse was to start, 7-year-old Jamie Newton sat in the parking lot of the North Lake Library in Polson with her sisters drawing with chalk while their mother stood in line to get solar eclipse safety glasses.

Newton marked the pavement with large circles of yellow, blue and black, her interpretation of what her first eclipse would look like.

“It’s going to get very dark and green,” she said. According to Newton, the mixture of yellow and blue in the sky, combined with the sun’s shadow, would produce a dark green color during the eclipse.

“I’ve experienced this with paint,” she added.

Over the course of the next hour, more than 800 people queued up behind Newton’s mother as Newton finished her masterpiece.

The library’s staff handed out free solar-viewing glasses to the public as part of its eclipse viewing block party. By 10 a.m., the line of people extended all the way down the block in front of the library and around the corner.

According to the North Lake Library Assistant Director Abbi Dooley, the library started out with nearly 1,300 pairs of glasses. She and the library’s staff gave out 400 pairs in the weeks before the eclipse but saved about 885 for the block party.

Dooley and her staff began distributing the remaining glasses to the crowd at 10 a.m. on the dot, and ran out 15 minutes later.

Several of those who stood in line left after getting their glasses, but more than 300, including Newton and her family, stayed for the party.

“We did not expect this many,” Dooley said.

About half an hour after she began selling 150 lunch tickets for $5 each, Dooley sold out and had to ask volunteers to get more food so she could sell more.

She then sold out a second time.

Rows of chairs lined the parking lot as children and adults alike stared upward through the glasses in anticipation.

AT 10:18 A.M., the moon’s shadow began to slip in front of the sun, and gasps and “wows” echoed across the parking lot.

As the seats filled up, Ava Wells, 5, sat in her aunt’s lap on the ground as they both pressed their glasses to their eyes and watched the sun begin to disappear.

Wells’ aunt, Amanda Wharton, 35, told the 5-year-old what to expect.

“You’ll be able to see stars in the middle of the day,” she said.

Those with glasses began passing them around to share with those who had come too late to get their own. A table was set up where kids could create their own old-fashioned pinhole viewers.

Made from cereal boxes and tin foil, the viewers filtered the sun through a pinhole in the foil and projected the image of the waning eclipse on the bottom of the box.

Chip Halverson remembered conducting the same experiment when the last total eclipse crossed the northwest.

Halverson said he was in fifth grade at an elementary school in Glasgow, the epicenter for the last eclipse. He remembered thousands of people flocking to the town to view the eclipse in totality.

Nearly 40 years later, he brought his two teenage daughters, Hania and Amara, and his wife, Dayle, to see the eclipse again.

Also at the library to watch his second total eclipse was Allen Bone, sporting a T-shirt depicting a picture of Einstein laughing and saying, “They bought it.”

Bone was a 28-year-old school teacher when the last total eclipse crossed the state. He recalled what he was doing when it occurred in February 1979.

“I was also an athletic director,” he said. “I was shoveling snow off the [running] tracks.”

He remembered birds chirping wildly and streetlights coming on as the eclipse plunged the area into a twilight state.

“It was a really eerie feeling,” he said. “I’d be interested to see it again.”

By about 10:45 a.m., the sun was missing a large, curved chunk, and a child yelled from the crowd, “Cookie Monster took a bite out of the sun!”

As the eclipse reached its climax of nearly 90 percent coverage at 11:30 a.m., the sunlight slowly began to dim and birds began to chirp in a chorus.

Ser Anderson, one of the North Lake Library’s librarians, stood at an educational booth, teaching 8-year-old Annalyse Lozar what was causing the eclipse.

In an event that occurs only once every 30-40 years, the moon aligns perfectly with the sun during the day to cast its shadow on the earth below, blocking out the sun’s light.

This year’s solar eclipse was even more rare because the moon’s shadow passed all the way across the U.S., throwing a path of totality in a curved line from Oregon down to Georgia.

In northwest Montana, viewers were able to see up to 90 percent of the sun disappear behind the moon’s shadow, but the entire country was able to view at least a partial eclipse.

Reporter Mary Cloud Taylor can be reached at 758-4459 or mtaylor@dailyinterlake.com.