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Totalityville, USA
“You really want to drive that far to see total eclipse? 98 percent isn’t enough?” My husband wanted to go, but I was dubious. I told him, if we went, he’d have to do the planning. I warned him where he wanted to go was already a zoo; that we could expect eclipse traffic; that, with a one-year-old kid, a hike to the kind of perch he had in mind could prove miserable or impossible. Then our kid’s fever came back, not go-straight-to-doctor-do-not-pass-go-do-not-collect-$200 high, but nearing it. Now we really weren’t going, I said. If he still wanted to go, he should plan to make tomorrow’s trip alone.
But I married a manly man, persuasive when he wants to be, and so we all went. I scrambled to pack kiddie fever supplies, and we hit the road with what looked like hours to spare – hours to spare, that is, when summer construction and astronomical portents don’t collide. By midmorning, the navigator (yours truly) had to bust out several maps to figure out where we could stop to view totality en route if traffic continued to gobble up time so greedily. Finally, time constraints narrowed my choice to Totalityville, USA (not its real name), a town about 20 miles from our initial destination. Totalityville is small, but it boasts a large city park and a friendly Park District website. Several blocks away from the park, the Methodist church would be hosting an eclipse fair, the Chamber of Commerce was pleased to announce. Compared to more widely-advertised eclipse destinations, Totalityville sounded like it would be refreshingly … normal. And so it was. It was good luck we didn’t get to where we first thought we were going, because then we would have missed out on Totalityville.
Like many Americans, accident, not choice, leaves me mostly unacquainted with small rural towns, as opposed to villages more or less clustered in conurbation. As @bridget sarcastically observed during the backlash against the Atlantic’s much-mocked “this eclipse totality is racist” article,
leaves forming natural pinhole cameras
The eclipse also forced science-loving liberals to choose between ignoring this historic scientific event and traveling to areas full of ignorant, backward, creationist rednecks who probably think that the eclipse is our punishment for gay marriage.
While we spent time among these “ignorant, backward, creationist rednecks” on Monday, we watched them fiddle with ingenious filter setups as they manned their numerous telescopes. We heard them explaining the optics and mechanics of eclipses to their kids. Parents pointed out how the dappled shade of leafy trees creates natural overlapping pinhole cameras. All the kids in town had the day off from school. It was as if Labor Day had come early, only geekier – and even hotter. All in all, not too different from what families do during eclipses in more liberal enclaves. Even holding a city fair at a church is not so very different, since churches host community events in liberal enclaves, too.
a carefully beautified view
Tending our feverish kid on a sultry August day meant we weren’t terribly sociable with our accidental hosts. Totalityville’s sprawling, pleasantly shabby park was lively but uncrowded, as I hoped it would be when I read that the town’s eclipse fair would be several blocks distant from it. A park doesn’t have to be completely manicured to be an object of civic pride. Here and there the park had splurged on beautification, especially by the park’s marshy, medium-sized pond. We staked our claim to a little patch of earth near the water’s edge, under a shade tree, right by where the pond’s dragonflies were loitering. The pond’s ducks and geese disgruntled themselves in the distance, in the way waterfowl do, neither fully content with the day’s affairs nor terribly discontent. The cicadas this August are never quiet, but an eclipse excites them – or at least confuses them, if bugs separate excitement and confusion.
view from under our shade tree
Time spent packing for our kid’s fever was time not spent packing the typical eclipse accessories. With a felicitous choice of mylar food wrapper, though, you can improvise eclipse glasses. A round hole punched in the middle of a card makes a nice, if large, pinhole camera. Our car’s user’s manual, always stashed in the glove compartment, comes in a little binder, so we made use of its leaflets’ nice, round holes. And anyhow, we were to witness unclouded totality, where for a brief span it’s safe to stare at the sun with unshielded eyes.
While the sky dimmed gradually, some people smoked. Some people vaped. Many still barbecued, either on the park’s grills or their own. Once deep golden-brown twilight swiftly descended, we all grew quiet and attentive. Someone had firecrackers ready to go the moment totality hit, items usually not allowed in parks, but today, who would mind? Some clapped and cheered. (The temperature drop alone was reason to cheer.) The ducks and geese grunted a bit more in the dimness. A few fish leapt. Then the cicada chorus went up to 11, drowning all other sound.
Totalityville boasts several fraternal orders – Moose, Oddfellows, and Masons, at the least – and a few trade unions I didn’t immediately recognize. The town’s oldest Baptist church looks more like a courthouse than the courthouse does, if courts came equipped with rather penal-looking Baptist prayer towers. The town’s Catholic church and parochial school lie side-by-side and share the same scrolling LED sign board. There are plenty of modest, well-kept houses and low-rise apartments. Some shabbiness, but mostly respectable shabbiness, not much despairing neglect. The town’s baseball diamond looks so downtrodden because it’s well-used and well-loved (it has new-looking lights and banners). Totalityville is no sort of tourist town, but it’s pleasant enough that it could be.
Many heartbreaking tales of misery and squalor have come out of small-town America lately. While it’s natural to hope that drawing plenty of attention to small-town despair might finally lead to political help, drawing outsiders’ attention to misery and squalor specifically makes it easier for them to think of small towns as Other, easier for them to miss what’s pleasant and what outsiders would find quite normal about America’s small towns. Small towns like Totalityville, whose greatest abnormality might be its exceptionally excitable cicadas.
For @titustechera, @bridget, and @trink.
Published in General
Beautifully written MFR, and I happen to live and love the small town I live in.
Thank you, Midge!
Boy I hope the ignorant, backward, creationist rednecks remembered to overcharge their betters for absolutely everything.
Quoted because I can only like it once. Also because I might have a followup on it later.
Eh, it’s not overcharging if your guests are paying for convenience amidst congested crowds ;-)
Totalityville did not anticipate outside visitors – except, I guess, relatively familiar outsiders from the nearby countryside. Their festivities were more about Totalitivilians celebrating amongst themselves, rather than leaving town to join the madding crowd miles down the highway where totality would last a half-minute longer. So it was a normal municipal event, rather than a tourist trap.
I have very little reason to suppose that we were the only total outsiders visiting – after all, what are the odds that we thought of it, but no-one else did? But not enough of us outsiders descended upon the town for Totalitivilians to have to change their usual habits for summertime municipal festivities.
Wonderful. Thank you.
Hey, I found it!
Wonderfully evocative, @midge! Wish I had been there (instead of in the back parking lot for an 80% partial eclipse)!
I like the tumbleweed for 12 gp.
After skimming that Atlantic article you referenced, I am so pissed I can’t see straight.
But your piece is wonderful. I’m from Appalachia, and the snobbery and bigotry of suburbanites toward rural America makes me—laugh!
I say suburbanites, not urbanites, because I’m struck by how much more cities and rural areas have in common with each other than either has in common with suburbia. The cream, the money, the snobbery rise to the suburbs. Up here in the mountains, we can wear our work clothes all day, go shopping in’em–and nobody looks twice. Same thing in a city like NY. If I were to wear my barn clothes on the street in Wayne Pa., let alone try to enter a store, someone would probably call security.
Racial bigotry? You see more mixed race couples, and babies, here than you do in an area like the Main Line (to name the wealthy suburban sprawl I know best). And no one looks twice.
Religious fundamentalism? ‘Fraid churches here are no better populated–no,actually, less populated–than the wealthy status-marker Presbyterian and Episcopal churches of the Main Line (but then, you’d expect people to show more interest down there, since they don’t let just anybody in..)
We bumpkins also seem to have a lot more tolerance for physical diversity. When I venture to the Main Line, I’m struck by how thin everybody is. You gotta look that way. Not up here; we’ve got plenty of people who require mechanized chairs to get around–and even if not that obese, virtually no adults are thin. Oh, and if you’ve outlasted your teeth, we can handle that too. If even one of the many jagged toothed, , very large, overall clad gents I number among my intelligent, charming friends were to stroll down a suburban street, well, the area would probably go on lockdown.
Suburbanites’ attitude toward rural America: Total eclipse of the heart.
Hypatia, that should be another OP in itself. Wonderful.
Even if you’re not rich or cozy with elite powerbrokers, you can spend your life living in suburbia, thinking of it as the normal. I’ve lived in suburbia nearly all my life, especially when I consider that even cities and “rural” areas have corridors of relative “suburbia”, which I somehow end up in. And there are things I like about suburbia: I am very much not a city girl. I don’t thrive on all the congestion, noise, and bustle. We’re stuck in a city for now, but during the brief time when we thought we could pull up stakes and move cross-country to some small town, our first instinct was to check that whether likely small towns were “suburban” enough to host a classical-music scene, a scene which requires not just musically literate people, but enough of them close enough together to form a critical mass – something that’s just easier in more densely-populated areas, irrespective of how refined the musical tastes of those in the hinterlands might be.
True. Fitness and teeth. Especially the teeth. The habit of appearing well-kept to others – with well-kept selves, children, and homes – has much good in it. Keeping up appearances often keeps up more than just appearances. But it cannot help its risk of self-parody. Dunno if you’ve ever seen the comedy “Keeping Up Appearances” (a British comedy, so they’re a bit more relaxed about weight and teeth) but it nails the absurdity you allude to.
A great family moment, Midge. Thanks for another piece of clear-eyed but sympathetic cultural coverage.
In my generation of kids, there was something of that sense of cosmic awe and wonder, if decidedly much more second hand, in shared viewing of live coverage of space launches.
(It seems funny or crazy now that every single launch attempt from 1961 to about 1964 led to regular classes being cancelled or postponed in elementary and secondary schools across America as big, heavy black and white TV sets were wheeled to many of the classrooms to see history in the making.)
Families made popcorn and stayed up, sometimes even up to daring hours like ten pm if needed!
I thought NBC’s Frank McGee and Roy Neal were the absolute best when it came to explaining what was happening, and going to happen with the launches.
It was always exciting to sit with two or three other classes and watch the TV the teacher had brought from home so we could watch the rockets. The picture was snowy because of the rabbit ear antenna but you could hear what was going on and that was pretty good.
Thanks for bringing this memory back.
Great post Midge. A friend of my sister was on her way from Chattanooga to Sweetwater, TN to see the eclipse there. She posted a picture on her Face Book page. Sitting in stopped traffic on I-75. Apparently, everyone from Atlanta was trying to do the same thing. :)
My sis lives in Walland, TN. She and a buddy relaxed in a pond near her house, drank Margaritas and watched the event. Had a wonderful time and no traffic.
One of the downchecks for Colorado when we decided to relocate from the big city was that everybody was so…healthy!
Bet you enjoy the movie October Sky almost as much as I do.
Such a lovely post, @midge ! So very glad that you and your family had fun, and it sounds like one of those days you’ll look back on fondly for many years.
Sarcasm aside, this hits home for me. I went to law school in a small town an hour away from the nearest airport. (Those airports had one runway, six gates, and a food court that was a vending machine.) The town itself was rather nice, and I got to know some people who lived there. The owner of the ice cream store and I became friends, and I tutored some of the high school kids. The university itself is also rather special: steeped in history, with a lot of strong traditions dating back over a hundred years, and a student body that passionately loves the school.
At any rate, when my dad came for graduation, he commented that he never would have had reason to see the plae – which he thought was really special – if I hadn’t gone to school there.
Back in 2015, I decided to do a destination half marathon in 2016. In lots of searching, I found one that was billed as “America’s prettiest half marathon,” and it also had events tied to it – bourbon tastings, Thoroughbred pettings, a swing dance party. The race also featured local products (Sword, which is a better version of Gatorade, local craft beer, etc.) to showcase what this small city had to offer.
I had never even been to the state, but the whole thing sounded like such fun, so the first non-family vacation I took in six years was to this random place in middle America. It was gorgeous, completely different from Boston, and the race was really an excuse for the people who put it on to show off Lex. Some of my friends thought I was out of my mind. “You’re going to Kentucky for vacation?” But… it was like what you described at the eclipse: a lovely part of America that I would otherwise not see.
Getting out of the city bubble is good for the soul.
Oh Midge . . .
I’m just recovering from the adventure two states away to experience ‘totality’ and am waaay behind on my Ricochet notices. You did it right! Your account was so similar to ours that I kept thinking we must have been in the same place, but our situation didn’t have a pond :) Oh. And no firecrackers.