Back in 1932 when I was only 15, astronomers predicted a total eclipse of the sun. The moon was to pass between the sun and the earth and for a moment cover completely the face of the sun.
My father decreed this to be an event of historic, cosmic significance that would not recur in New England in our lifetimes and must be duly observed. The Event was predicted to take place on an August day along a “path of totality” along the Kennebec valley and out by Seguin. My father, mother, two sisters and I were to go by sail in our 28-foot sloop Dorothy and watch the eclipse at sea, unobscured by houses or trees. My little brother, age 3, was sent to stay with a neighbor.
The marine expedition got under way early, and, with a good breeze and the help of our little 2-cylinder Kermath engine, reached the path of totality in good time.
It was a lovely fair day with a few clouds to the north, but they dried up over Bath. We were all equipped with dark glasses or pieces of exposed camera film to protect our eyes from looking directly into the sun. My father had a special pair of glasses for the eclipse. We hove to, ate sandwiches, drank ginger ale and waited, keeping a careful watch to see when the moon would take a bite out of the edge of the sun. At last it did. The bite increased. The day grew dimmer. It was not like sunset, bright in the west, but rather as if someone had turned down the house lights in a theater before the show. The light faded. The darkness deepened. The sun was half gone.
The gulls that usually roosted offshore at night flew overhead toward the islands. As it got darker, stars began to appear, not the usual summer constellations but the winter stars. It was not black dark. Without our dark glasses we could pick out Orion. My father told us to watch carefully for Bailey’s Beads, a string of lights around the moon, just as it exactly covered the sun. The Beads were the sun shining through the valleys in the mountains of the moon. That was really looking into the machinery of the universe.
In our enthusiasm over Bailey’s Beads, we missed the corona, a halo of variously colored light around the eclipse.
As the moon began to move off the face of the sun, daylight gradually returned. Stars faded. Gulls flew back and sea and sky turned blue again. It was an anticlimax. We did not stay for the end of the show but bore off to the eastward and headed for home with a fair wind.
On the way, we traded several bottles of beer for some mackerel, fresh and flipping, delivered in the dip net as they were lifted out of the seine.
About four o’clock as we were sailing gently up the east side of Pemaquid Point in the fading breeze, my father told me to be sure the side-lights were filled and cleaned and to hang them in their places in the rigging. I started to do it but observed that it was still bright day. He urged me on with a remark about being caught out. My mother then suggested that he take off his special dark glasses.
“Oh,” he said,” There’s lots of daylight left.”
And what of our little brother? The lady with whom he was staying decided to see the eclipse too. They drove west into the path of totality, and my brother remembers having seen the eclipse from a rail fence in Brunswick.
Roger F. Duncan was a columnist for The Working Waterfront for 20 years. He died on May 15, 2010.