Do not curse darkness. Look for light. [photos follow]

Moods here matched the weather Monday night and this morning. Forecasts for high cloud cover over all of Nebraska not only grew more ominous overnight, but added in warnings of rainstorms. Joy.

Over breakfast, we decided to stay the course rather than rush off on a five hour drivew in search of marginally better forecast weather to the west. A short amble up to the fairgrounds in Beatrice, then.

Good news! The roads were nearly empty, and though the fairgrounds parking area was already filling up and the queue for the shuttle bus stretched across a football field, everything was moving. I set aside concerns raised by reports of jammed highways in Oregon and Idaho, redirecting my thoughts to the thickening gray layer above our heads.

The school bus-turned-shuttle carried us out to Homestead National Monument.

There, we debarked into the crowd. Tents and trucks seĺling shirts, souvenirs, and carnival food made the overfilled park feel like a country fair. Some carnival game booths and a Ferris wheel were all they needed, I thought

A dance performance group tried to overcome a poorly tuned speaker system with children's songs, but eventually yielded to indifference and the usual series of unmemorable speeches by politicians, local community leaders, and proud organizers.

At the NWS tent, the meteorologist was putting her best spin on data predicting a thickening cloud cover and, yes, rain. 

Resigning ourselves to planning to see our first eclipse in 2024, Barbara and I spread out a tarp and lay back to wait until totality arrived. Might as well see what it looks like through the clouds, we decided, so we listened to keynote speaker Bill Nye, talked about going back to the inn and driving on in the morning.

Then the cloud layer pulled back.

Quick! Your glasses! Bill cried. We did ... yes, there, a smooth circular arc blocking part of the sun! The clouds closed in again, and anxious eyes scanned westward for the next break ... the clouds  cloaked and revealed the sun time and again as the dark shadow consumed it. The view lasted long enough for us to watch the last arc  of solar fire start to break up into sparks chasing around the thinning arc of sunlight, clockwise, counterclockwise ... and with the seconds before totality racing away, the clouds closed in again.

The washed-out shades of the sky and of the prairie around us spoke of another world than the one we had greeted at dawn.  Bill Nye and Dr, Amy Mainzer from NASA took turns in a frenzied effort to cheerlead the event, reminding everyone about safety glasses, the historical value of solar eclipses, and about the many strange sights we could see when -- if? -- the clouds pulled back again.

And then they did.
How to explain it? No words I know couldcdescribe that dark disk surrounded by a roiling ring of flame.  Seeing it in person is different; something deep and visceral cried out that this terrible black disk did not belong, that this was a threat somehow.

The sky? Blue, but the darkest twilight shade. There was a planet shining through the haze -- Venus, probably.

Animal sounds or behavior? Lost in the crowd's cheering. A sense of relief?

Two and a half minutes seemed forever, and was over too soon.

Okay, committed umbraphile here. Next US total eclipse cuts through some more meteorologically challenging regions in 2024. God willing, I plan to be there.