Iceland Eclipse

I smiled.

“Hopefully it clears up.”

Across the counter, a strong broad-shouldered Icelandic woman smiled back.

“Well, you know… we actually have a machine for this.”

I raised an eyebrow.

She continued. “When the time comes, when the eclipse is about to happen, they will turn on the machine and it will clear the clouds for us.”

I gave her an incredulous look.

“What? A cloud machine? You’ve got to be kidding me…”

My disbelief annoyed her.

“It is too early for me to be kidding,” she said flatly, handing me a small paper cup half-filled with black coffee.

I laughed awkwardly.

“How much?” I asked.

“Eight hundred and fifty Krona.” she answered.

Eight hundred and fifty Icelandic krona was about seven U.S. dollars, and that hurt me on an emotional level.

I sighed, tapped my card, thanked the Viking woman, and carried my overpriced caffeine to the volunteer waiting area.

It was the third day of the Iceland Eclipse Festival. More than 3,000 people had traveled from around the world to experience the mesmerizing landscapes, choice music, talks from astronauts, and the first total solar eclipse to grace Icelandic soil in 72 years.

Today was the day everyone had been waiting for.

Today was the day of the eclipse.

And today was completely cloudy.

A volunteer coordinator introduced himself to us and assigned us our daily work. For the third day in a row we were to help repair luxury tents.

Just before the festival, a major storm had swept through, leaving many tents in varying levels of totally destroyed. Heavy winds had caused tent stakes and rain covers to come loose and rainwater seeped inside, ruining comforters, mattresses, and everything else that made these tents oh so luxurious.

We spent the morning fixing tent after tent while the clouds above us grew thicker and thicker.

After my shift ended, my friend and I went to the festival’s Ceremonial Gardens, where a special eclipse ceremony was taking place.

Totality was scheduled to begin in less than one hour.

It started to rain.

During the ceremony, four performers approached a fountain at the center of the garden and poured water into it from ornate vessels.

“Oh, good,” I murmured. “More water.”

My friend and I were huddled under a makeshift umbrella that we created out of a poncho and we were sitting with everyone else on the wet grass.

The rain continued to pour.

One of the ceremony leaders raised a microphone.

“Let us all take a few moments to pray together. Let us pray for the rain to cease and the clouds to disperse.”

I couldn’t help but feel an air of entitlement in the act, but I went along with it anyway.

After the prayer, the performers brought out hot stones out and arranged them around the fountain.

“From the fire our prayers will rise into the sky and be heard.” the ceremony leader continued.

The performers poured water over the hot stones and huge plumes of steam erupted upward, rising into the sky until they disappeared seamlessly into the grey, gloomy backdrop.

I let out a laugh at the irony. I couldn’t believe we were collectively pleading with the heavens for less clouds while conducting a ceremony that seemed specifically designed to manufacture more of them.

The rain refused to let up and despite our makeshift shelter, my friend and I were wet, cold, and completely over it.

We stood up and made our way toward the Dome, one of the festival’s enclosed stages, where we spent half an hour listening to live music and trying to warm up.

Then, shortly before totality, the rain stopped.

We stepped outside and looked toward the sky.

The sun was nowhere to be found.

The clouds were so dense that it was impossible to see anything behind them. At this point the moon should have been obscuring more than half of the sun, but there was no sign of either one.

We were less than a minute from totality and there was nothing to see but a dark grey sky.

Then, as if by miracle.

The sun appeared.

I still don’t know how.

The clouds suddenly thinned in exactly the right place, and through a narrow opening, the sun revealed itself, reduced to a brilliant crescent behind the moon.

The entire festival erupted.

People cheered as the crescent continued to shrink.

Then came totality.

The sun vanished and daylight collapsed into darkness.

The landscape was dark and ominous, suspended beneath a blackened sky. Thousands of people who had been cheering seconds earlier looked around silently in awe.

A few moments later, light returned.

And it was over.

Soon after, I was warming up at a nearby convenience store enjoying a foam cup of hot ramen noodles while chatting with a stranger about what we had experienced.

“Yes!” the stranger exclaimed. “It was at the last instant. The very last moment that the sun appeared! As if God himself separated the clouds for us.”

I laughed, nodding.

Then I thought about the woman at the coffee counter that morning.

And I found myself wondering whether that cloud machine was real.