#1595 The Solar Eclipse of 2024

It's a sacred place, and it was designed more than a millennium ago to be a calendar, to be able to determine equinoxes, or observe them at least, and solstices, and to help the people, the Puebloan people, to know when to plant, and when to harvest, and when to migrate, and when to do their festivals. Here's something before the Arabic alphabet, an entirely different system, surely lunar in some sense of the term, and solar, without instruments of the kind that we take for granted, telescopes, and computers, and so on.

Observing the heavens over millennia, passing on this information from medicine man, to astronomer, to sky watcher, et cetera, preserving this oral knowledge of the world, and then applying it in stone at Chaco Canyon, which, even if it weren't a calendar, even if there hadn't been an eclipse, is one of the most extraordinary, and beautiful, and moving places that I have ever been. So I recorded while I was there, in real time. I've also had a chance to talk to our Enlightenment correspondent, Mr. David McCandery of the state of Washington. So you'll get a little sense here of what it is to see the eclipse in a sacred place, Chaco Canyon.

And now I'm just looking out at this.

Canyon de Chelly.

But of course, just think of that. I mean, oh, I've been to a better Anasazi site than you have. I mean, there's a hierarchy of these things, and people create their own hierarchies, and then they are very righteous about it when they talk to.

The human ego can attach to any subject, to any sport, to any activity, to any craft, to any speech, to any relationship.

John Adams was right that the rage for distinction is the fundamental human impulse. Everyone wants to be the strongest, the most beautiful, the most poetic, the sexiest, the richest, the best traveled, the most enlightened,

the best ballerina, the finest musketeer, or black powder expert, the finest archer, or flatelist.

This amazing human competitive urge, which I suppose is why we're still clawing around the earth after all these difficulties and more to come. At any rate, this is spectacular, and it wouldn't be as spectacular if it weren't cloudy. And it certainly wouldn't be this spectacular if there were hundreds and hundreds of people here.

But there aren't many people here, and the people here mostly are being quiet.

It just has a beautiful, beautiful look. Subtle. Lots of gray green.

Cliffs.

The clouds are kind of long and wispy, but there's a virtue that could be called cumulus. The sun is now completely occluded, so behind a cloud, and it's as gray as it has been here all day. The eclipse of 2024.. I'm Clay Jenkinson for Listening to America in the heart of the heart of the heart of this incredible country. Keep listening, everyone.

So, Dennis, here we are at Chaco. What have you experienced with the eclipse? I just think it's an amazing place to be. Just very, mostly serene. And there's a young hawk, red-tailed hawk, learning to fly here in the cliffs.

And he or she's been calling, and it's just carried through this canyon. It's just been amazing. Can you see it? Yeah. And so the eclipse is at about three-fifths, I would say, probably the most occlusion we're going to get.

Is it what you expected?

I went through a similar eclipse not too long ago. And so, yes, I think it is. It's what I expected. What a place to have this moment. It is an amazing place.

I mean, these stones, these old dwellings. It's just the graciousness of our hosts to answer silly questions and to be patient with us.

But it's almost complete solitude, even though we're in a small group. What better place can you imagine to see the eclipse of 2024 than Chaco Canyon? I don't think there could be one. I mean, obviously, you can get 100 percent somewhere else. But, you know, just the history, the human history here, you know, and its connection with the land, the moon, the sun.

It's amazing. Cosmological people in a way that we no longer.

I had the great good fortune to be able to observe the eclipse at Chaco Canyon. I'd never been there before. It's in northwestern New Mexico. I've been to other canyons, of course, including the Snake and Grand Canyon, and I've been to Canyon de Chelly, but for years, even decades, people have told me that Chaco Canyon is the place one must see, and now I see why. Because it's not just an extraordinary ruin, if we're allowed to call it that, but it was a calendar.

It was an edifice, a campus that was designed to verify and illuminate solstices, equinoxes, and eclipses, among other celestial phenomena. Think of it, this worked out a thousand years ago, before European science really even took off. How? How did they do it? The oral tradition must have been extremely tenacious.

We have the advantage of permanent written records of data, of sophisticated clocks, written history of eclipses and equinoxes, and so on. So here was a people entirely oral, although they had pictographs, and here was a people entirely oral, although they had pictographs and petroglyphs, who were able to accumulate this knowledge over time, and I'm talking deep time, decades, even centuries, perhaps longer, and to maintain that knowledge somehow, and to be able to bring it up at appropriate times, and to plan an edifice like Chaco Canyon so far in advance that they knew that it would accurately depict these important markers in celestial activity. Stunning, astonishing, flabbergasting, really. And I always say, if you gave me a million dollars, and I couldn't consult any books, or the internet, or history, and said, buy any telescope you want, and start observing the heavens, and tell us some of the patterns you see for planets, and comets, and transit of this, and that, I'd just throw up my hands.

It was an amazing experience. Now you may remember from the Thomas Jefferson Hour that I was able to be in Wyoming for the total solar eclipse of 2017, and there was totality there, not in Chaco. In Chaco we had about four-fifths totality, and there's a world of difference between the two. I remember being in Wyoming and experiencing the totality, and seeing the world go silent and dark, and thinking of what it must mean for a people that doesn't yet understand these phenomena to see the sun blink out briefly.

It's shocking enough for us who think we know the apparatus, the celestial mechanics behind all of this. And so this was a very different sort of experience. The last one was on a ranch road out in the middle of nowhere, probably 30 or 40 miles from Casper. I wasn't entirely alone, there were six or seven other cars parked down that gravel path, but I was essentially alone, and I recorded my impressions. Then you can go back and look in the archives of the Thomas Jefferson Hour and find that program.

It would be from 2017 with David Swenson, who also observed it independently of me, also in Wyoming that day. At this time, we were in a sacred place chosen by our scout, Frank Lister, who is scouting for my big Travel to Charlie tour. that begins, by the way, in two weeks, begins on the 27th of April. Oh my, I'm ready. I've been making lists, I've been packing, I've been working the itineraries, I've been making appointments with scholars and with historic sites all the way out and all the way back, trying to determine how many miles I can honestly make per day and still listen to America.

It's all extremely interesting. I can't tell you how thrilled I am, not nervous. I'm sure I will feel some nerves with having all that important and expensive rolling stock behind me, but mostly I'm just feeling deep, deep delight. So that's all coming up, but this was a Listening to America trip to Chaco Canyon, which I had never seen before. And I will be back, and I will be back with knowledge.

We had a wonderful Navajo and Zia guide by the name of Kylo Winters and his wife, Terry. They spread out a beautiful tablecloth on a picnic table, and the temperature was perfect. in the 50s, somewhere, late 50s. There were only a dozen people in the entire park property, so we essentially had one of the world's most sacred places to ourselves with a Navajo and Zia guide. You couldn't ask for better, you know, if we'd been in Niagara Falls, there would have been a hundred thousand other people, which would have been interesting too, but this was almost the perfect alternative.

We need to take another short break. When we come back, I will bring in our favorite Enlightenment correspondent, Mr. David McCandery. We'll see how he observed the eclipse, if he did. We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome to this special edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. I'm talking with our Enlightenment correspondent, David McCandery of the state of Washington, formerly the executive director of the Washington State Historical Society, now the author of several books, most recently a volume in the press about Captain James Cook, which is an appropriate way to start, Dave. Why are events like this, eclipses, transit of Venus, transit of Mercury, why are events like this of such importance to the Enlightenment?

It's the transit of the moon across the face of the sun. It's the magnitude of the covering up of the sun that is the defining feature. But the deeply mathematical and intricate understanding that humans have developed about the working of the cosmos, I think those are the two driving forces. Aesthetic, appreciation of nature's power, and an understanding and appreciation of humanity's ability to understand the cosmos at work.

scientists, natural philosophers, hundreds of years ago, in Newton's period, and actually going all the way back to perhaps the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians, and maybe other cultures and civilizations as well, that people could kind of figure this out just by observing the pattern of occurrences, doing all of that on kind of pencil and paper, figuring out, it's just stupendous, I think. And it speaks well of our species that we're able to figure this out.

And of course, in the ancient world people could not travel the way they did in the Enlightenment, and today Captain Cook could go to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. Today you could fly anywhere. People fly around to stay with the eclipse as it appears, to move around the circumference of the Earth. Back then, without any of the scientific instruments that we take for granted, without calculus, without ephemera, these are these sort of catalogs of where the stars are and the phases of the moon at any given time, and without the kind of calendars or mathematical systems that we now use and are almost universally used in our time, they could predict these things. I don't understand how they could do it.

I mean it was literally mind-boggling to me. I just thought to myself, oh my, look at this.

They would wait for an eclipse to come to them, so to speak. But now, with modern technology, yeah, you can fly around. In fact, Carly Simon famously wrote a lyric about this, I think in what, 1972, about some guy that got on a plane to watch the total eclipse of the sun. So yeah, there is a long, deep cultural and mathematical.

Even you, who are deeply committed to the work of the Enlightenment, would throw up your hands and say, I don't know where to begin.

Now, truly, someone was the first one. It might have been those Babylonian astronomers you alluded to. So there was a body of people. But it's the cumulative building of the knowledge base. And so it could be that even someone like Newton or Cook would say, well, thank God for those people who, several centuries ago, like Halley, laid the groundwork for us to work with.

So it's a cumulative process. And it truly must be said, as much as we've come to learn about the cosmos, it's such a small part of what's out there to discover. That itself is a mind-numbing prospect.

Now, of course, he was also the spearhead of empire and so on. But he was sent there as a scientist to get data. And when this happened, when he could actually look up and see the transit of Venus, this was not a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse. When he could see the transit of Venus, this was not a lunar or solar eclipse. He must have felt some sort of ecstasy that we cannot.

I can think of a few places that might be in the category of Niagara Falls. But I was instantly captivated by their production decision to host their coverage there. And so I was watching. And they came on the air just when the eclipse began down in Baja, California, or Mexico, Mazatlan. And I began to think, again, the phenomenon of which Cook was a part.

Cook wasn't the only one looking for the transit of Venus. There was this Jesuit Abbey, who was at Cabo San Lucas, got yellow fever, died two months later. Somebody who would sail with Cook on a second voyage, William Wales, an astronomer. He was up on the shores of Hudson Bay, Thomas Jefferson, King George III, people in India, South Africa, Siberia. So the notion of capturing this, going some exotic location.

But the pièce de résistance to bring it back to Cook is, perhaps inevitably I do with almost everything, it's become kind of a running joke between you and I. Cook, in some measure, Clay, got the assignment of taking some other astronomers, including his own portfolio, as an astronomer from the Royal Society. Because in his previous work doing the survey of Newfoundland, that island off the East Coast, the maritime Canadian province, which Great Britain had secured from France as a function of the Seven Years' War, Cook was doing the comprehensive mapping of its coastline, and knew there was a solar eclipse coming. He anticipated it, and he first came to the attention of major figures at the Royal Society who had commissioned the voyage to Tahiti in 1769.. In 1766, near the present town of Burgeaux, Newfoundland, Cook observed a solar eclipse.

It wasn't total there, but he named it Eclipse Island. It's still on the map.

And by his dipping his toes in the water of enlightenment. science, I'm kind of mixing my metaphors here, I think the people at the Admiralty came to understand this is an exceptional guy. This is a guy who can map with the best of them, but is active enough, interested enough, intellectually capable enough that he can not only anticipate an eclipse, record it, and report on it to the Royal Society. I think it was literally at that point, when that report was published, that the folks in the Admiralty realized they had a rare talent on their hands.

They use these moments, and that's why Cook was on Tahiti, so that they could cross-reference, triangulate Greenwich and other places with somewhere essentially off the face of the globe at the time, Tahiti.

trigonometry, it's well beyond me. As I say, I'm in awe of eclipses, although I didn't see the latter-day transit of Venus, which we reported on in the old Thomas Jefferson show, but all of this, I stand in awe not only of the natural power of the universe, but also our species just barely beginning to develop a capability of understanding it.

There was the sunrise and the sunset and high noon and a few other things, but clocks, as we understand them, being able to tell you the time to the exact hour or minute, is really a renaissance and following invention.

And the following Monday, the day of the eclipse, I was in the funeral cortege, as it were, going to his service. So I missed that one. I've seen glimmers of some other things. I did my best this past week, but it was just too cloudy. Surprise!

It was overcast in western.

Welcome back to Listening to America with Clay Jenkins. And today, the eclipse. And here's more of that remarkable experience.

So you mentioned Niagara or the Grand Canyon are really splendid places to see this eclipse. I can claim one of them for you. Chaco Canyon. And let me tell you why. Chaco Canyon is in northwestern New Mexico.

Think of what we used to call the Anasazi world of cliff dwellings and so on. That term, Anasazi, is no longer used. Ancestral Pueblo is the term of choice these days, or Chaco people. But I did not know before I went there, Dave, that it is itself a calendar, that it was designed so that when the equinoxes occur, the light shines on a certain place in the cliffside. And when the solstices occur, it also is set as a calendar.

complex to be able to record precisely. And that this knowledge, imagine what it took to come up with this knowledge. And, you know, you can't just say, let's build this here. You have to wait until the equinoxes and say, if it's going to be built, it's going to have to be in such and such a configuration. And you have to wait for the solstice.

And if you're predicting eclipses, it could take years before you can even begin to build. And here's this people that we would call primitive, who disappeared in the 9th or 10th century, or at least were morphed into modern Puebloan people. And they had this incredibly sophisticated understanding. I was told while we were there that they actually had an official person known as the Sky Watcher. That was your job.

You were Sky Watcher. And all you did for all your life was watch these events and gain greater and greater precision over time, and then be able to help interpret that knowledge with medicine, men or what sometimes are called shaman, so that the culture would be able to learn from this. But I also learned that this determined when they planted, it, determined when they harvested, it, determined when their festivals were. And so this is absolutely amazing. It was stunning to be there.

And I was one of about 12 people at this national monument in the middle of nowhere. It's one of the greatest things that I've ever seen. And to be there with my little glasses, my special protective eyewear, and to be able to look up, it was about four-fifths occluded, so not entirely. But it was amazing. Now, you will recall that I was able to see the last one in totality in Wyoming.

And that's a special kind of thing, because the light goes out in the world, everything goes dead silent. There's a little moment where you're stuck in your breath like, oh my goodness, the sun went out, even though you're aware of the science of it. Four-fifths is not the same. It got a little bit less bright, but it doesn't take much sun to maintain its capacity to lighten the earth. And so I think that I was in as good a place as you can ever be for this.

And I gained just unbelievable respect for the people who did that site, Chaco. And it gave me more respect for the thing that I was observing, to be in a place where people that I've never really thought about much in my life were on to the very same cosmic.

Your recounting of that, Clay, just goes to the point that I was trying to make earlier. You said it so much better. But we're talking about such deep time. I'm not talking about the deep time of the cosmos. I'm just talking about the deep time of humanity's sense of itself on this sphere.

Who knows how many generations you're having to talk about so that you can detect this pattern? I mean, we'll go from the sublime to the ridiculous. It did get dark here. I did sense there was a little loss of general ambient light. It's nonetheless true that our house, in fact, I can look due east and our house is oriented towards the east.

And at certain times of the year, the sun, as it's on its path through the sky, the light will shine right down the hallway. And every year, just like your Skywatcher down there in New Mexico, I'll get up in the middle of March. And then again, in late September, the rising sun will be shining down the hallway. I'll get up. I'll come out and exclaim to my wife, Stonehenge.

And then I think, OK. And then you forget, kind of forget about it. And sometime around April 1st, you realize, oh, my goodness, it's swept all the way north. It's almost off the window, sites from the other direction. And at that time, you become overwhelmed with a sense of how much more interesting everything is than you think on a day-to-day basis.

When you get up, you look at the clock, you put something in the microwave, you make a little coffee, or you look online, it says sunset at such and such a time, sunrise at such and such a time. When you actually, those moments when we come alive to the way the world works.

I mean, working people, young people. Yes, maybe some people with more sophisticated understanding of physics and astronomy. But there's something about this clock and the pattern that the moving cosmos creates around us that we, I think, in some deep, almost biological way, Clay, our species has a sense of this. It's a deep, almost ancestral memory. And that's why there is a Stonehenge.

That's why there is the canyon you were at. That's why my little channel here in Tumwater, these are all of a piece. It's a deep, ancient memory of humanity, trying to gain some sense of awareness and appreciation for where we find ourselves in the universe.

But what I know now, if I had had a choice, I would have gone to Niagara Falls for the reason I cited earlier. That's where I would have gone. And Chris and I were just there.

half a year ago, last August, for our anniversary. And we just couldn't get enough of that whole.

He missed it both times.

So Jefferson went into this in a big way. And for him, this was, it was partly cloudy the second time, but for Jefferson, this was almost the point of being alive as a figure of the Enlightenment. Yeah, well, yeah, it was as big.

And indeed, you couldn't see the transit of Venus all over the world either. In fact, that's another amazing thing. People, astronomers, had to figure out, Clay... Where to go. Where to go, in order to see.

And famously, the people at the Royal Society, they drew a trapezoid that roughly kind of bridged the equator in the South Pacific. And they said, get somewhere within this trapezoid, and you'll be able to find it. And at the very last minute, news of Tahiti's encounter, an earlier encounter in Tahiti, came to the Royal Society and the Admiralty, and Cook was sent specifically there. But up until about six months before he left, he was just heading to a zone on Earth where some set of astronomers had said, the transit will be visible here, find a place, get there in plenty of time, observe it and report back.

and they're just a remarkable documentation. This was probably the best recorded solar eclipse for the very, very reason you cite. I'm kind of sad that it's gone, but there'll be other things to look forward to, I'm sure, of some note.

We both believe the Enlightenment was the greatest thing that ever happened to Western civilization, that due process and separation of powers, checks and balances, the Bill of Rights, the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, the guarantees both within and outside the U.

S. Constitution, are the best thing that has happened to human beings. And if you doubt that, go get arrested in Bulgaria or Turkey or some African state that has failed to observe the basic principles of due process. We are very fortunate in all of that. And because we see the Enlightenment, because we see celestial phenomena through that lens, we think of Captain Cook going to Tahiti in 1769, or Jefferson writing to the mathematician David Rittenhouse and saying he would pay any price to get the instrumentation he needed to be able to observe the transit of Venus at Monticello.

Well, it turned out. it was cloudy. But that's the Enlightenment, wanting to measure things. They were obsessed with Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton was one of Thomas Jefferson's three heroes, Locke, Bacon, and Newton.

And many people in the Enlightenment, including Voltaire, believed that Isaac Newton was the greatest man who had ever lived. So that sort of mindset has pervaded my own outlook on the world for 40 years now. And I do believe that if we were a Jeffersonian nation, minus all of the race problems, we would be a dramatically better republic than the one that we're in. So I've always looked at things like eclipses and solstices through that Newtonian lens. And it was so interesting, and, I think, important, to be pushed out of that paradigm at Chaco Canyon, because there we saw the same phenomenon, a near-total solar eclipse.

But we saw it through the eyes of the ancient Puebloan people and their own interest in the sky. And they had an actual person who was designated a sky watcher. And it was his work to observe the sky and to see how the planets were moving, and to see any meteors that were coming through our comets, and to measure the solstices, and to know how to predict an eclipse, and to be able to give advice to the people about when to plant, and when to migrate,

We had an extraordinary day, one that I will never forget. I don't know if I'll be alive for the next total solar eclipse, but I know that I can't find a better place to observe it or a better person to be with there. And our guide, Kylo, made all the difference by taking us through it with patience, and generosity, and grace, and allowing us to be, for a moment, a part of a world that we're aware of in books, but not much more. So that's this week's program. Thanks to everybody.

We'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.