Awe, romance and traffic mark Stowe eclipse

Those intrepid enough to brave the still-frozen heights got a prime seat to see the valley below, where different renditions of Pink Floyd songs played, and that Bonnie Tyler classic was pumped out of sound systems from one end of the Mountain Road to the other. The whole region broke on a workday to toast commemorative IPAs and light limited-edition, pre-rolled joints.

Every room in Stowe was full. Ninety-nine percent of the more than 1,400 hotel rooms in town were booked the night prior to the eclipse, according to the data from the Stowe Area Association, and its nearly 1,100 short-term rentals were booked to 91 percent capacity. Those numbers were only slightly lower the night after the event, and likely grew once travelers got a sense of what the post-eclipse traffic exodus looked like.

Parking was at a premium throughout town, even for those traveling by air. The Morrisville-Stowe airport, normally at capacity with 15 planes, hosted 21 on Monday to accommodate everyone who needed fuel or landed without advance notice, according to the Agency of Transportation.

The event was like the weeks-long fall foliage leaf peeper season sublimated into one day during mudseason, with the tourism industry as eager to capitalize on the event as municipal services were eager to avoid mass chaos.

Miraculously, the whole thing went off without a hitch.

“Not only did we have some of the best spring weather we could have asked for in terms of solar viewing, but we welcomed more guests to Stowe than our busiest fall foliage weekends, which was definitely a nice boost for the economy during a typically quieter time of year,” Jen Greene, Stowe Area Association marketing manager, said.

Main Street in Stowe, as early as mid-morning, begin to fill with visitors and locals alike wanting to glimpse the eclipse from a village backdrop.

Stowe Mountain Rescue, along with state agencies, spent the weeks leading up to the event warning of seasonal trail closures and warning visitors to stay out of the backcountry, or to at least be prepared if they ventured out.

Despite having personnel staged on Mansfield’s ridge, where the highest likelihood of an emergency was presumed, chief Jon Wehse reported that all remained quiet across the range.

“Everything that occurred we had anticipated and planned for,” Stowe police chief Don Hull said.

Totality committed

“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it,” Annie Dillard wrote of witnessing an event like the one that occurred in northern Vermont in Oregon’s Yakima Valley in 1979.

Some took the promise of being plunged into the uncanny day darkness of the total eclipse, the chilling temperature drop and brief shadow world as a sign of the universe’s awesome fragility, and a sign in the sky that it was time to get serious.

On the slopes of Mt. Mansfield, a man dropped to his knees, declaring, “I love you, will you marry me?” His partner, of course, fell into him in agreement, the whole event captured in the dim light by CNN network cameras.

On the other side of the range, romance was witnessed, if not televised. At least one couple was married in the carriage house at Smugglers’ Notch Resort amid the weekend-long eclipse festivities hosted there.

Density-wise, none of it held a candle to Tiffin, Ohio, which, though slightly less scenic than Stowe, hosted about 130 marriages or vow renewals within the span of the total eclipse passing through that region, according to USA Today.

Mass traffic

Arriving visitors over the weekend, and particularly on Sunday, created enough of a slowdown at the Waterbury-Stowe exit on Interstate-89 to merit a few traffic alerts, but immediately following the conclusion of the eclipse, the critical mass tried to decamp at once.

This posed a problem. As many close observers of the occasional Stowe traffic jam have noted, Stowe’s limited infrastructure allows few routes to enter and exit the area.

While probably a familiar sight to anyone who has driven on the Long Island Expressway or the 405 in Los Angeles, bumper-to-bumper taillights are newsworthy in Vermont. A backup on Route 100 persisted from Stowe to the interstate ramp in Waterbury into Tuesday.

Boston psychobiologist Bertha Madras remarked that it took her children 10 hours just to make it back to Beantown.

They tried to leave in the post-eclipse mad dash and didn’t make it back home until two the next morning.

Despite the revelry that surrounded the event — the Stowe valley filled with hoots and hollers as the moon completely blocked the sun starting around 3:25 p.m. — there wasn’t a remarkable number of people driving under the influence, at least not that caught the attention of police or others. A Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department detective said only two such arrests were made on Monday.

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