“If not now, when?” Is a question that’s been guiding a lot of my actions lately, which isn’t that new for me, but feels especially acute these days. This election year, the intractable global crises, climate change, and more simply, advancing age. Where did the last six years go? I thought on my February birthday, thinking back to my last big milestone. Life moves fast.
Asking “If not now, when?” most recently led us to Texas to see the total eclipse. More than six months ago, our friends Janet and Jeff sent us a link to Kerrclipse, a four-day music festival at Quiet Valley Ranch, home to the venerable Kerrville Folk Festival. As Kerrville was smack in the middle of the path of totality, Folk festival organizers decided to host an eclipse-centric festival as well. Acoustic musicians and music camp veterans in general, Janet and Jeff had traveled to see the 2017 total eclipse in Oregon and knew not to miss the April 8 eclipse when it carved a shadow through North America. Kerrclipse was seemingly made for people like them…and us. When they put the word out to a bunch of their eclipse-curious musician pals to either caravan or meet them there, we quickly signed on.
Good thing. By the time it came for us to load the car for the 1600-mile trip to Kerrville, Texas, I second-guessed myself a little. The logistics had grown complicated — Kwame had to work in Phoenix en route, we had to be back home a little earlier than we’d originally planned, the calendar, in general, had become busy — but it was too late to back out. The car was packed, campgrounds and hotels were booked, festival tickets procured, the house-sitter lined up…after another few deep breaths, we set out.
Once we got going, the joy of the open road took over. We camped at another touchstone for us, Joshua Tree, en route, setting up our tent amid a brief snow flurry, squeezed in a visit to town while the clouds emptied, and a hike before dark after the skies cleared.
Following a couple of days in Phoenix, I hit the road again, solo-tripping through the high desert of Arizona and overnighting in Las Cruces, New Mexico and Marfa, Texas, before I would meet up with Kwame again at the San Antonio Airport. Those legs of the trip felt like a separate part of the vacation altogether, the time alone reacquainting me with my younger self who’d spent a fair amount of time in the Southwest decades earlier, after exiting a marriage and Colorado, where I’d been living. I was thirty years old then, trying to start over yet again, a little lost but hungrily eating up miles of desert landscape, asphalt and adobe, writing furiously in notebooks, wanting just to write and sing, full of angst and possibility. It was good to feel calm as I revisited both familiar and new-to-me roads.
As I left Phoenix in the rear view and the highway ascended into Tonto National Forest’s Sonoran desert-scape, my mouth dropped open. The cactus were in bloom, the sky brilliant blue, the clouds impossibly white and fluffy… and there were raptors everywhere: Swainson’s Hawk circled above the highway, a Golden Eagle perched on a pole, a Red-tail Hawk dove for some unseen prey. It was hard to keep my eyes on the road. This was clearly a destination in of itself and I was sorry to be only passing through. Another time, I hope.
Which is why I was taking a slight detour to Marfa. In 2016, when Kwame and I did a music tour across the U.S. we didn’t have time to veer off of Highway 10 on our way to Austin. I remember stopping for gas in Van Horn on that trip and seeing the turn-off sign for the fabled desert town. It was satisfying to make the turn this time, albeit I sped past the famous Prada store along the 90, where a small crowd was milling by the roadside, in part because I expected to see it on the way out of town, in part because… could I really take a better picture? Besides, I was more curious about the mysterious white thing that was hovering above the flat horizon. I wondered a while about space aliens and mirages… before the mysterious blob came into a focus as a small blimp tethered to a fence by a long cord (later I’d learn the blimp was part of a border surveillance program).
Other than a large kettle of Turkey Vultures rising up over town, I didn’t spy any mysterious apparitions or lights in Marfa, which reminded me of a cross between Los Alamos, CA and Joshua Tree, a place where ranchers, farmers and homesteaders, immigrants, and outsider artists rubbed shoulders with art-loving urbanites and tourists. I stayed in an old stucco across the street from a recently built mid-century modern split level. Downtown was a mix of galleries, chic hotels and historic buildings, the hotel bar hopping with well-groomed folks from other parts. I bought a T-shirt at the ground-level shop that sold sunglasses, silver-cast feathers and mushroom-enhanced chocolate. The woman working the desk was an artist from Philadelphia who moved here as a print-maker before morphing into a jeweler. I nodded, thinking of my 30-year-old-self again, and how something about an unblinking expanse of desert can inspire and foster new possibilities. Marfa had that energy. In the morning, I ate breakfast tacos at The Sentinel, the coffee shop adjacent to the Big Bend Sentinel office, which has become a bastion for independent journalism. I was reluctant to leave, but Kerrclipse awaited …and I needed to pick up Kwame at the San Antonio airport first.
Kerrville’s Quiet Valley Ranch was a big channel change…and its own special thing, consecrated by years of song and story. Janet and Jeff had just parked their Scamp when we arrived. After setting up our tent at the next site over, we got to connect with the extended network of fellow California songsters who had taken over half of the lower meadow. The next four days would be a blur of circling up to play music over coffee, before dinner and after the evening festival programming — highlights of which included BROFRESH and Big Richard, two very different but equally spirited bands. Sharing meals and conversation with the Singkerrnicity crew — longtime festival goers who really knew how to outfit a basecamp with both kitchen and living area — made everything all that much more idyllic. Someone brought T-shirts, paint and stencils and we spent an afternoon creating custom festival shirts. Janet brought supplies for eclipse-proofing our binoculars and spotting scopes.
And this was all before the eclipse! Amid the music programming, an afternoon was given over to a presentation about the eclipse by The Solar Wind Sherpas, a team of eclipse chasing scientists who were camped out in Quiet Valley Ranch’s big meadow. They hoped to gather as much solar data — temperature, density, solar flare information— as possible during the eclipse and got us all primed for the wonder we were in for on Monday.
And “wonder” is the term I keep coming back to as I reflect on the experience.
The eclipse was far more moving than I could have imagined, especially watching with a group as the moon shadow made first contact with the sun on its way to lining up completely, the sky going dark and then light again in a sped up version of dusk and dawn. It was cloudy in Kerrville, too cloudy, in the end, for the team of Solar Wind Sherpas to get the data they came for, but not too cloudy for us to see multiple stages of partial eclipse and several excellent views of totality. Every time the clouds parted, a cheer went up.
The day before eclipse day, several of us Bay Area residents had gotten to talking about recent fires and storms and earthquakes. Soon we were all recounting our experiences of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. We all had stories, images from that day still vivid in our memory banks, many of them centered on who we’d been with and how often we formed bonds in natural calamities. The eclipse experience felt equal and opposite and just as unifying, only instead of sharing a natural disaster, we were connecting via a natural wonder. Cheers to that!