In the path of the eclipse

The world was so focused on “Don’t look up!” that, as a result, it was seeing nothing at all. That’s when this photographer grabbed the reliable AE-1 with whatever film was already loaded.

People sometimes make pinhole cameras. Those are touted as a way to “watch a solar eclipse” without frying one’s eyeballs or sautéeing one’s brain. Certain literal-minded schoolkids (we confess) found it anti-climactic compared to the excitement that precedes such primal events. And now, as an adult with lowered expectations? It’s pocket-sized shadow play, the real deal is outside our pinhole view.

Our weathered, old farmhouse stood in a small cluster of trees too humble to call an oasis. A few acres of alfalfa lay to the left, and a million square miles of unbroken desert stretched to the right.

The residents would fire up a massive old irrigation pump to fill the cistern and water the trees. When they pulled the power lever with a loud snap, cold water geysered out of a 12″ pipe. They would run alongside the flow, shovel in hand, to ensure the ditch didn’t fail and flood the house. It was fun to follow the water, barefoot, cool as goosebumps in the middle of the Mojave.

That weekly chore kept the trees alive. It also maintained the humans’ livability meter somewhere between “Mostly Bearable” and “Ask Again, After Sundown.” In the harshest environments, it is not possible to ignore the underpinnings to life as we know it.

The eclipsed sun conspired with every twig and leaf to make them a million pinhole cameras aimed at the house’s blighted and weather-bitten clapboards. The trunks and twigs are overlaid with light-crescents, images of the eclipsed sun at the moment the photo was taken.

It’s one of those areas people drive past on interstate road trips. “Who would live out there?” It’s hard to say succinctly. Recently, Google Earth showed us that new residents of the old farmstead had not kept that little oasis watered. From satellite views, it now looks as blasted as nearby abandoned ruins. A field that hosted nature-struck weekenders now seems to have have been used for parking semi-tractor trailer rigs.

In the longest view, the desert always wins, regardless of who squats there. Still, we are touched by the changes we see as loss. Surely the many owls, mice, cats, and more would agree, if they still had that habitat.