Solar eclipse wows northern Vermont

On Monday, March 8, at 3:26 p.m., thousands of people in northern Vermont witnessed a total solar eclipse, a celestial phenomenon that occurs when the moon passes between Earth and the sun, completely blocking the sun, turning it black save for that bright corona, the sun’s gassy atmosphere, that forms a fiery ring around the otherwise dark circle.

Total solar eclipses are not technically rare — they happen somewhere in the world about twice a year — but, according to NASA, it would take about 1,000 years for every geographical location in the contiguous United State to be able to have seen a total solar eclipse. The last time in happened in Vermont was Aug. 31, 1932, and it won’t happen again in the Green Mountain State until 2106.

For Rita Ciambra, a science instructor at Peoples Academy high school in Morrisville who teaches an astronomy class, this was her second total eclipse. She caught her first totality in 2017 in Tennessee and said she had this day marked on her calendar ever since. She had been preparing her students for April 8 for at least a year and half, to the point where some students were beginning to wonder if her enthusiasm was misplaced.

It was not.

“I don’t know about your experience, but the sun gets completely covered and the corona comes out and everyone just starts yelling,” Ciambra said. “I have a student who lives in town, and they were saying, ‘I could just hear everybody all at the same time just yelling all over Morrisville.’”

The dark side

On the front lawn of a home on Earl Grey Road in Morristown, shortly after 3 p.m., a motorized paraglider occupied a gently crisscrossing spot in the sky, becoming lost in the darkness and becoming utterly forgotten by the dozen people who removed their special eclipse glasses for the three and a half minutes of totality.

As the moon gradually blocked the sun, the color seemed to drain out of a landscape that was already somewhat mud-season monochromatic. The world resembled archival footage.

One by one, the brightest stars and a planet or two revealed themselves and the robins, those worm-hunting harbingers of spring — already confused by two mammoth spring snowstorms — started singing their evening songs. Elsewhere, a friend noted in a group text message, the chickadees thought it was morning time. The geese started taking naps.

The temperature dropped markedly, and people reached for an extra layer or an extra blanket or drew a special someone closer.

On Earl Grey Road, on the lawn in front of the Statehouse, in Burlington’s Waterfront Park, all around Morrisville and presumably anywhere there were gatherings of people, rose a steady crescendo of cheers and cries, exclamations and expletives.

When the corona burst into view, and everyone removed their glasses for three and a half long minutes, hugs and high fives and tears of joy and wonder pierced the mid-afternoon darkness.

Visitors from afar

There was another heavenly rarity on Monday: mostly clear skies. Meteorologists had for months forewarned that April is typically a cloudy month, and there was an 80 percent chance the eclipse would not be visible.

This didn’t stop thousands of people from booking up nearly all the hotel rooms across the region, and most of the short-term rentals.

According to the Vermont Lodging Association, as reported by VTDigger on April 2, almost all the lodging properties in the path of totality — that roughly 115-mile-wide band that followed the moon in its arcing northeasterly trek across North America — reported between 98 and 99 percent occupancy for the eclipse.

The Vermont Short Term Rental Alliance estimated a roughly 80 percent occupancy rate in counties along the path, compared to 50 percent for that day in previous years.

At 2 p.m., as the moon began its transit across the face of the sun, the Bloomer family from Massachusetts sat in lawn chairs on the running track at Peoples Academy, donning the ubiquitous eclipse glasses. Dad Brady Loomer, a STEM teacher, brought his solar telescope, and he and his son took turns looking for sunspots.

Mom Katie Loomer said they usually vacation in Stowe once a year. They booked a short-term rental in Morrisville village last June after having a tough time finding reasonable hotel rooms. On Monday, they sought higher ground.

“We drove around, and we were looking for places that didn’t have trees or buildings, and we found this place,” Katie said.

As soon as it became clear that the skies were favorable for eclipse watching, thousands of day-trippers made their way into the state. State transportation officials had not yet calculated the migration data as of press deadline but had predicted ahead of the event that as many as 160,000 people would flock to northern Vermont.

While the arrival of the eclipse watchers was somewhat staggered, with plenty of people staying over Sunday night, the mass exodus was abrupt, with news outlets reporting drives back to Boston and southern New Hampshire exceeding 12 hours, more than four times the usual time.

Even the next day, a steady stream of cars inched their way south on Route 100, bound for Interstate 89.

Despite the revelry that surrounded the event, there wasn’t a remarkable number of driving done under the influence, at least not that police uncovered. A Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department detective said there were only two such arrests made on Monday.

One such arrest happened to be made as totality neared, but the arresting officer was kind enough to let the out-of-state inebriate borrow a pair of those darkened glasses to catch a glimpse before taking him in.

On a drive across Lamoille County in the hour before the eclipse began, anywhere you might find a pre-seeded cornfield or a grassy knoll, you might find a smattering of people. Away from the crowds, Vermonters sat in the pastures and looked at the skies, a beverage or snack within arm’s reach.

Nearly 500 teenagers and faculty from St. Paul’s boarding school in Concord, N.H., gathered in the fields at Foote Brook Farm in Johnson. According to Kathy Giles, the school’s rector, someone from the school is friends with the farm’s owners and reserved the spot.

A man with a megaphone, about 20 minutes before the moon’s transit began, announced it was almost time for the group’s scavenger hunt.

“We have kids from all over the world, and, as you can see, they are very excited to be here,” Giles said.

Cashing in

Some enterprising folks used the influx of visitors — during a typically sleepy tourism season — to make some money.

A group of Lamoille Union High School seniors stood alongside Route 15 in Hyde Park with bright orange vests, offering paid parking — $5 a car — at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post.

As Sebastian Krueger and Vance Faraci waved cars into their spots, Evelyn McAdoo and Jade Walker collected the money from the slow but increasing stream of drivers looking for high ground to watch the eclipse.

“All of us are seniors and we are just raising money for our future plans,” Walker said.

In Jeffersonville, Lori Hebert and Kerrie Gawrys set up tables on Main Street to sell some eclipse-themed merchandise. That included black T-shirts with fluorescent lettering that glowed in the dark — including for those three and a half minutes of totality.

“My daughter and my husband and I have been playing with different designs and we made some T-shirts for ourselves and some for our friends,” Hebert said. “We had some teachers from the school order some and we thought, let’s just set up here.”

The bright colors attracted Brian Gibson, a science teacher for the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Boston. While he was traveling to Vermont to see the eclipse, his students were busy back at school.

“Right now, they are creating eclipse PSAs, using all the videos we’ve already looked at,” he said.

Vermont’s most famous export was also available for sugar-hungry tourists.

Wrote Craftsbury resident Andrew Martin, “A friend of mine had their 8-year-old son post up on the side of Route 14 last night with a sign that said, ‘Maple Syrup for Sale.’ He sold $300 worth of syrup and made $50 in tips.”

It’s educational

The day after the eclipse, Ciambra, the Peoples Academy astronomy teacher, was still speaking in the elevated, excited tones that countless other eclipse witnesses were also still using.

She had been preparing the students for months — and she and other stargazers had penned regular eclipse-hyping columns in the News & Citizen since last summer — and she started wondering if the kids thought she was acting, as they say, a little extra.

She was pleased that her first class on Tuesday, her astronomy class, was also still bubbling with excitement.

“I’ve been hyping it up a lot, and I think the kids were starting to think, ‘You know, maybe she’s going a little overboard.’ But I’ve had multiple students say to me, ‘That was everything you said it was going to be.’”

As a self-avowed space geek who had already traveled to Tennessee to witness the 2017 totality, she knew what students were in for if the clouds didn’t get in the way. As a teacher, she was even more excited the next day that the students were using the vocabulary they’d been learning all along, incorporating it in the way that is only possible after witnessing in real time all the things they’d been taught.

“People spend all this money to travel, because it’s such an amazing experience, and I was telling them it’s amazing that you live here and can just walk outside and see it. Now I think some of them get it,” she said. “We use the word ‘awesome’ so much when it doesn’t really apply, but this is one of the scenarios where we can really say, yes this was an awesome experience.”

Aaron Calvin contributed to this report.