What it Was Like Experiencing the Total Eclipse in the Midwest

Photo of the 2024 total eclipse by Kevin Bowman via Flickr

by Mark Pritchard

My journey to see the eclipse this year was originally supposed to be a big road trip from the West Coast. But my beloved couldn’t come for various reasons, so I decided to fly out to St. Louis where my sister lives, borrow her car, and head into southern Illinois for Monday’s eclipse.

I wasn’t sure where I should go for the best view, but after some research, I found that there was a spot just southwest of Carbondale, Ill. where this year’s eclipse path crosses the path of the one in 2017. So after Monday’s event, the area — a trapezoid of about 100 square miles — actually will have experienced totality twice in seven years.

I found myself in a hamlet called Alto Pass, Illinois, located on bluffs overlooking wooded rolling hills that lead down to the tip of illinois. The village, pop. 324, has its own post office, a bank, a funeral parlor, a boutique selling used women’s clothes, and one little store with the size, and inventory, of one of the smaller and less fancy corner stores in San Francisco. The village also has a large park in the middle of things with a community center and a big picnic roof where several dozen people gathered for the eclipse. Just outside of town is a large white cross on top of a hill called Bald Knob, where the church that owns it was charging twenty dollars a car for people to park and view the eclipse.

Alto Pass, IL by David Wilson CC BY 2.0,

Instead, I ended up a mile to the southwest, in a city park with an overlook, where about 25 families and I parked for free. I anticipated waiting all morning and brought a variety of snacks, but some families brought chairs, fold out tables, and staged a whole cookout. By 9 a.m., almost four hours before the local start of the eclipse, several dozen people were sitting in the morning sun looking contentedly out over wooded hills with trees turning green in the early spring. Birds sang loudly, and beautiful pink red bud trees dotted the woods.

Some of the people that had gathered were families who first met each other when they viewed the 2017 eclipse seven years before at this same location, and they greeted each other happily. I had parked next to a family that included grown children; they and their parents had gathered from places as distant as Phoenix and New Orleans. One of the young women had a San Francisco connection — she had worked for several years as a nurse at Benioff Children’s Hospital in Mission Bay. All in the family professed to be Giants fans.

It was essentially a big tailgate party of people pulled over to the side of the road — a scene duplicated all along the path of the eclipse as it stretched from Texas to Maine. But it wasn’t just a barbecue. It had an air of anticipation, like the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where people are pulled over to the side of the road to await another visitation from the flying saucers.

Families all hanging out to watch the total eclipse. Photo by Mark Pritchard

As zero hour approached and the light began to dim, the gentle breeze that had been blowing from the south all morning suddenly swung around to the west and seemed to strengthen. We all increased our peering upward. As an eerie, deep twilight intensified, a large group a few cars over counted down to zero.

The next time I took a peek, nothing was visible through my eclipse glasses. Raising my bare eyes to the sky, I saw the brilliant white corona around a dark moon, and a surprise: near the sun, the planet Venus appeared, so much higher in the sky than usual.

A few people whooped at the site, a dog barked, but the reaction was mostly just sighs of appreciation. During the morning, I had noticed that few people were drinking alcohol, and the atmosphere was more awestruck than rowdy.

When it was all over, the dad of the family that I had been talking to broke into tears. “That’s another item on my bucket list,” he said. His daughters hugged him in turn as he said, “Thank you! It wouldn’t have been the same by myself!”

Mark Pritchard, a former writer and performer in San Francisco for many years, recently moved to Reno. He reviews movies at toobeautiful.substack.com.