Lisa Cron’s books, “Story or Die” and “Story Genius,” should be right up my alley, as she offers brain science suggestions for improving one’s writing. She has helped me realize why my stories are flat, but her suggestions have blocked me more than empowered me. This piece is to work through my issues. I apologize for the nitpicking. She has two quality books.
I get hung up on the word misbelief. As Lisa claims, the protagonist has a misbelief that prevents her from achieving her goal. A story revolves around the protagonist’s struggle to relinquish this cherished misbelief in the “aha” moment. The external events that force this transformation are the plot. So what is the problem?
Misbelief makes it sound like the protagonist has the emotional IQ of an idiot. Lisa suggests that the protagonist is a proxy for the audience. In my head, I have formulated this syllogism: If the story’s protagonist is an emotional idiot and a proxy for the reader, then the reader is an idiot.
My readers are bright and emotionally intelligent. They don’t identify with someone who holds on to stupid beliefs just because that is their backstory. They can argue and defend a mental model but can change their thinking without an existential emotional crisis when presented with new information that improves their understanding.
In “Story or Die,” she uses the example of a Water is Life ad with a two-minute video about a four-year-old Kenyan boy who doesn’t have access to clean water. The NGO created a video about helping him complete his bucket list to get the waterworks flowing from the potential donor’s tear ducts into the boy’s village. In this example, the implicit protagonist is the viewer who can save the day with a donation. I have a problem with her analysis. Here is Lisa describing the misbelief of the viewer:
“The misbelief: Drinking water is safe and plentiful, and of course, a four-year-old will live a long and full life.”
I don’t believe the problem is naivete. I, for one, as a viewer, know damn well that not everyone has access to clean water, and people, including young children, suffer because of it. It’s not a misbelief. It’s not that I don’t care, either. I know it’s a tragedy, but I have not donated to that cause. My takeaway from brain science is that the brain, above all else, is a filter for extracting meaningful information from noise. Like many other good causes, this one got lost in the noise.
I question her interpretation of brain science. Yes, I have read that we evaluate things emotionally. However, our thinking brains construct scenarios, and our emotional brains assess them. The brain needs the plot to build scenarios as much as it requires the emotion to decide. Those dry, boring facts about the severity of the problem matter to me, maybe because I am a “Logician,” according to Myers-Briggs, a decidedly small minority in their catalog of personality types.
Why has my brain filtered out this boy and all like him in the past? My brain has evaluated if donating to that four-year-old boy (who, by the way, has already satisfied his bucket list items) will make my life more meaningful than all the other things I do with money to make my life meaningful. That is the basis of my decision, not merely giving in to pathos.
So, just because you get me to cry and feel miserable doesn’t mean I will donate. As Lisa points out, telling people what to do will cause them to shut down, but on the flip side, a tear-jerking story alone only makes me feel manipulated.
So, I don’t want to throw away the baby with the bath water because Lisa’s books are powerful writing tools. Here is what Lisa has given me so far (word for word):
There is one person (the protagonist, the person who will experience the conflict)
With one unavoidable problem (the external conflict)
That spurs one internal struggle (misbelief versus truth, the core conflict)
Leading to one “aha” moment (the protagonist’s realization, the point your story will make, resulting in the emotion you want your audience to feel)
Which allows the protagonist to solve the problem and take action (the transformation).
To progress, I want to change her misbelief and truth into concepts I can write to. I need something else.
Trust or mistrust is a good thing to build a story around. The internal struggle is evaluating your level of trust and misreading intentions. What could be more valuable to survival than knowing who and what to trust or mistrust? Arguably, our big brains evolved to ferret out the honest people from the psychopaths. In this model of human evolution, art, including storytelling, is a tool for expressing empathy and outing those who lack it. Evolution is not the survival of the fittest; it is the survival of those who cooperate the best. Adapting Lisa’s framework to “trust and mistrust” instead of “truth and misbelief,” a story is about trusting someone when you shouldn’t or not trusting someone when you should. The “aha” moment is the realization that the opposite is true.
Titanic comes to mind as a story that fits the trust framework rather than the misbelief. Lisa would say Rose’s misbelief is that she has to live as a prisoner of the well-to-do in high society. But that doesn’t hold up. She is looking for an escape from the beginning, contemplating diving off the backend of the ship if that is what it takes. The “aha” moment for that premise comes halfway through the movie when she says, “I know. It doesn’t make any sense. That’s why I trust it.” The movie’s arc isn’t overcoming that misbelief but trusting Jack as the catalyst for her escape. She doesn’t trust herself to do it, but it is not because she has misbelief; she must learn from Jack how to shed her high society shackles. She is briefly tested again with the alleged “Heart of the Ocean” theft but doesn’t succumb. Her training is complete when she peels Jacks’s frozen body off of the wooden bed frame. I don’t think that is an “aha” moment: “See you later Jack. I can go it alone now.” The more significant trust issue is the faith of all those unfortunate people who trusted Titanic. Spoiler alert: the Titanic sinks.
Vulnerability is just another face of trust. It involves revealing something about yourself to someone that could cause harm, whether physical, financial, or emotional. In this model, the story simulates the risk and reward or lack of reward for the reader so the reader can make an informed emotional decision about the value of the revelation.
Another story model could be finding meaning out of the noise. Story is about meaning. It is the transformation from what gives the protagonist meaning at the start to what provides the protagonist with meaning at the end. Meaningful decisions are about hard choices. When I say hard choices, I mean they are defining. There is no right or wrong choice, misbelief, or truth. I don’t think it is “Story or Die.” It is “Story, or you might as well be Dead Inside.”
Meaning is also about making a difference. How will my donation make a difference in the world, and what reward will I get? The movie About Schmitt comes to mind. A small donation to strangers in a faraway place makes more difference, as revealed by a thankful letter from his donation recipients, than all of his other failed attempts with those close to him. I want my thankful letter, not your manipulative story and endless requests for more money.
Misbelief, trust, or meaning? Depending on the story, you can choose any of the three, and I’m sure there are many more frameworks to choose from. Think guidelines, not rules.
Spoiler alert, details including the ending are discussed. This discussion is for reading after you’ve watched or if you never intend to.
I spent 16+ hours with Do Do-Hee and Jeong Gu-wan, so I have to say something about it. They make the perfect couple with all the complications of wealth dating an evil demon while her step-family plots to kill her to keep her from inheriting the family business. My logline: A handsome evil demon becomes the bodyguard and lover of a beautiful CEO.
The drama wallows in sentimentality and sappiness, one-dimensional secondary and tertiary characters, and water-drop sound effects, to say nothing of the manual for demons. How many times can Do-Hee and Gu-wan stare lovingly into each other’s eyes? If someone stared at me like that, I would run for the mirror to see if there was a bear in the cave or worse. And if happiness means I have to brush someone else’s teeth, I want no part of it.
The devil has no horns, and Do-Hee could be doing product placement modeling. In what I believe was a moment of self-reflective but perhaps unintentional candor about the series, Do-Hee’s female employee says, “Don’t you think her bodyguard is unnecessarily handsome?” Her male employee might as well have responded, “Don’t you think our CEO is unnecessarily beautiful?” Especially for a woman who runs a dessert company. This series revolves around the beautiful people and those who serve, aspire, and resent them. In another telling line, when an office worker observes that Jeong is “glowing” in the follow-up to one of those sexless, intimate love scenes found only in K-dramas, the same office girl undercuts his statement with, “He’s always glowing, when is he not?”
For all its shortcomings, it does have its moments. The stars shine, and the writers had some fun with it. For a demon with nearly unlimited powers, Jeong Gu-wan uses it relatively sparingly on annoying people, like exploding an airbag on an annoying driver. He keeps his gruff character throughout, thinly masking his affection for his human companions. He says, “I just want to live eternally as an apex predator who never ages or dies. Is that too much to ask?” The wordplay provides some fun tension to the relationship. Jeong says, “For a demon, as an apex predator, to marry an insignificant human would be like a meat eater marrying a pig.” After a metaphorical explanation involving insects, Do-hee asks, “Are you comparing me to a long-horn beetle?”
I couldn’t help but admire the Tango fight scene. With Jeong’s powers stored in Do-Hee’s wrist, Jeong must hold her arm to use his powers, but the two are initially separated. Do-Hee pepper sprays her way to Jeong, and the dance battle begins to fight off the gang trying to avenge their dead boss. As the couple tangos away, sidelined combatants twirl their weapons overhead in time with the music while the couple pummels each attacker in turn and in step with the music. Eat your heart out, Jackie Chan.
Pearls of wisdom emerge now and then. “What’s peaceful about marriage? It’s more violent than anything,” says Star Jin, a victim of Jeong’s unrequited love. “Fate is nothing more than a web woven by a myriad of choices of your making,” says God, a street lady living the Oscar the Grouch lifestyle with the dentition to match and wearing a baseball cap with Good missing an o as the lettering in case you weren’t clear who she is. “The words are so sweet, they could give me cavities,” says Do-Hee. And my favorite line, which I hope to use someday, “I wasn’t crying, I was just sweating out of my eyes,” says Jeong, attempting to deflect a display of human emotion.
Maybe the bottom line is, “Humans are each other’s personal hell,” and “Happiness can sometimes be poisonous.” Still, they wrapped up the series nicely, with everyone getting what they deserved, even if it wasn’t what they wanted. The psychopath gets locked up, the mother who overlooked child abuse starts a foundation, Star Jin becomes an angel to an abused child like herself instead of running away to England, Do-hee’s unrequited lover and step-cousin Ling Sang-yi becomes the CEO, Secretary Shin Da-jeong and Park Bok-gyu come out of the (heterosexual) closet to announce their office romance that was secret from no one, and the gang defeated in Tango wars manages to open a legitimate restaurant without scaring all the customers away. Even the dead people of importance got their backstories fixed. All with the oversight and approval of the beautiful couple.
I wonder if making God less than attractive was an attempt to balance out good and beauty or double down on it. Does beauty even trump omnipotence? “Jeong manages to defeat God once. I didn’t know that was possible,” says God after Jeong manages to break one of her rules without suffering the consequences of “a fiery death like a campfire.” No one else’s love is God-defying. The relationship between the seconds, Secretary Shin Da-jeong for Do Do-Hee, and Park Bok-gyu (F**k You) for Jeong Gu-won is outright cartoonish. So I reject that they were going for the love conquers all theme. And when that unavoidable ending comes to pass, when Jeong does, in fact, experience a fiery death like a campfire, God can’t bear to see the beautiful people suffer either and so intervenes Deus ex Machina style to give us the happy ending we want. And, of course, they live happily ever after, or at least as long as a mortal human can live with a demon, Do-hee managing to overlook all the moral dilemmas of living with a benign demon who henceforth only sends people to eternal fire if they deserve it, the scumbag class. A love story, sure, but if the story has any purposeful deeper meaning, it is to expose how much we bend our morality with our beauty bias. The story is a desert so sweet it could give you brain cavities.
Roseanne Roseannadanna: What’s all this I keep hearing about global worming? If worms want to live anywhere on the globe, I say let them. Well, Jane, it just goes to show you, it’s always something — if it ain’t one thing, it’s another.”
In “The Green Hills of Africa,” Hemingway takes us deep into the back country of Kenya and Tanzania in pursuit of big game, “pursuit and conversation,” “pursuit remembered,” “pursuit and failure,” and “pursuit as happiness.” The book fluctuates between in-the-moment hunting scenes and philosophical sidebars given in conversational pursuit, like the play-by-play and analyst format of the coverage of a modern sporting event.
Hemingway never uses the phrase or describes the backcountry as green hills, although he once mentions that he saw nothing on the green hillsides when looking to kill a kudu. He does mention the blue hills three times, hence the recast of the title, not the most vivid imagery I’ve ever read, but he is a writer, not a landscape artist.
To improve my writing, I once bought a tool called Hemingway, which rated the complexity of your sentences to simplify and shorten them. That is to make them more Hemingway-esque. Hemingway wouldn’t have scored well with his eponymous tool, at least not with this book, with sentences like:
“Passing the skinner’s tent he showed me the head which looked, body-less and neck-less, the cape of hide hanging loose, wet and heavy from where the base of the skull had been severed from the vertebral column, a very strange and unfortunate kudu.”
The tool would have shortened that to two sentences. That is not even a particularly long sentence compared to many others in the book, but I chose it as a sample because it does strike me as a very Hemingway-esque sentence for another reason. It’s not necessarily short but very raw and visceral.
He lives the hunter’s ethic, killing in one shot so the animal doesn’t suffer (why shoot in the first place?). He loves to hunt as long as he kills cleanly, but as he demonstrably writes, it doesn’t always work out that way. Or, to use more Hemingway-esque language from a passage where he gut-shot a kudu, the worst thing a hunter could do because the animal escaped but would not live,
“…they (hyenas) would get him before he died, hamstringing him and pulling his guts out while he was alive.”
Nothing goes to waste if the animal drops dead and the hunting team finds it. The animals are skinned, beheaded, and chopped up for meat. They ate the meat and kept the hides and horns. Hemingway doesn’t kill female animals (does*), either, at least not on purpose. (*Grammarly needs help distinguishing between the noun plural of doe and the verb does.)
Hemingway competes with another member of his hunting party for the trophy head of the largest bull, fill in the blank of the species, rhino, sable, kudu, and so on. Killing the fittest animal contradicts everything Darwin had to say on the subject. It’s hard to read how beautiful and extraordinary the animal is in one sentence and how proud he is to have killed it in the next, rationalizing it all away with, “…they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute, and I had no guilty feeling at all.” Of course, we stand at a point in history where all those minute killings add up to one global genocide of just about anything more significant than a coyote.
Before throwing all this behavior on the bin heap of macho, it is worth noting that his wife accompanied him on this expedition and hunted on several of the forays he describes. But I can’t imagine a woman writing this scene where he fights with one of the members of his support team, M’Cola, who forgot to clean the rusty bore of Hemingway’s rifle as promised. We pick up the action where M’Cola sees the rusty gun and realizes he forgot to do his job.
“His face had not changed and I had said nothing but I was full of contempt and there had been indictment, evidence, and condemnation without a word being spoken.”** (**According to Grammarly, Hemingway has as many problems with commas as I do.)
Nothing visibly happened, but the tension between the two men is there because of the silence. It’s a nice piece of emotional minimalism.
The most disturbing sentence in the book is a bacterial shot to the gut:
“Already I had had one of the diseases and had experienced the necessity of washing a three-inch bit of my large intestine with soap and water and tucking it back where it belonged an unnumbered amount of times a day.”
I think I would have just fed myself to the hyenas.
On one point, I can agree with Hemingway, “Beer is food.” On another, I hope he is wrong, “…what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer…Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.” I’d prefer not to survive a war to become a decent writer, although I understand you can’t get that kind of experience in a writing class.
If you are going to read a Hemingway book, this hunting memoir is probably not his best. It’s a dated piece that I read for particular motivations:
Descriptions of Africa to help me visualize the country for a book idea set in Africa.
Examine work by a premiere author.
Get into the mindset of a hunter.
It met all my goals. Happy hunting for whatever yours are.
Or an African Horror Story, as I would retitle it, from the battlefields of the National Parks of Kenya, her life spent treating the collateral damage of the genocide of elephants and rhinoceros and the onslaught of human expansion and global warming on all animals in Kenya. As Daphne puts it, the animals always lose. Here are some online statistics to give you an idea of the numbers.
“In 1500, there were over 25 million elephants in Africa. By 1900, this had fallen to around 10 million; by 1979, it was down to 1.3 million. There was a rapid decline in population size over the 1970s and 1980s, such that by the mid-1990s, numbers had fallen below 300,000. Over the following decades, conservation efforts across some countries managed to restore populations to over 470,000 in 2008. But increased poaching rates over the past decade have sent numbers back into decline.” (Source: https://ourworldindata.org/elephant-populations)
Daphne calls her book a memoir, but technically, it is an autobiography, starting with her grandparents, who settled in Kenya before she was born, continuing through two marriages and two daughters, life in the National Parks that her second husband David Sheldrick had a big part in modernizing and protecting, taking her well beyond her retirement age while contributing to the foundation she created in honor of David Sheldrick. She lived and worked in places I remember from my 1983 African trip: Tsavo, Masa Mara, Amboseli, and Mt. Kenya. She moved to Nairobi National Park after her second husband’s death, a smaller park I skipped on the 1983 tour.
It’s a heart-wrenching story with a few successes but many tragic endings. After many failures, Daphne learned how to make a baby formula capable of sustaining orphaned elephant calves. A newborn baby elephant sucks on the mom’s teat every 15 minutes, the poster child of high maintenance. She reared and reintroduced elephants and rhinos to the wild. It takes a decade to successfully reintroduce an elephant to a wild state, a labor of love. Drop a rhino into the wild without helping it establish a territory, and another rhino is likely to kill it as an intruder. One of her reintroduced rhinos helped repopulate rhinos in Tsavo. Some of her elephant orphans went on to give birth and raise calves in the wild, contributing to the rise of that population in the first decade of this millennium.
It’s also a tale of the inner lives of animals, from mongooses and dik-diks to sheep to warthogs to elephants. Daphne learns to read the body language of her wards. Anyone with a pet knows that animals have an inner life, and after reading the book, this applies to elephants in spades, as Daphne watches them grieve, support one another, and make inferences. She recounts stories of elephant memory and intuition. An elephant in the wild for twenty-five years tenderly greets her trainer from age five. Her penned elephants wait at the gate for new arrivals to her orphanage before they arrive without any apparent means of knowing they are en route to their remote location. Daphne belly rubs her way into the trust of rhinos. She learns the personality of the creatures she cares for, even a sheep she uses to befriend and butt heads with an orphaned rhino. It amazes me that it took scientists so long to catch on. See Frans De Waal’s work for more on that.
But despite her most loving efforts, no elephant has ever chosen to stay in a stable, always choosing a more dangerous wilderness existence over a domestic pen. However, on occasion, once-resident elephants returned for medical help or help for offspring, sometimes entrapped in snares, wounded with machete cuts, injured with darts, or suffering the effects of drought, which shuts down lactation. Acknowledging their sentience and intelligence in the context of brutality is what makes this such a heart-wrenching and inspiring story.
Using words like murder instead of poaching would more accurately describe what is going on. Would we tolerate people getting slaughtered for molar extractions or having their noses ground down for some old man’s erection? Maybe. People don’t treat outsiders much better (where an outsider is relative to anyone’s particular point of view). Daphne survived the turbulent times of the end of colonialism in Africa, a less than peaceful process. She recounts tales of a family of her neighbors getting burned alive in their own house and other atrocities. Park Rangers were trained in World War II combat tactics to stop the poaching, but many were killed in the effort, anyway. She survived a lifetime of tragedy and death, both animal and human.
How does she get through it all? Daphne says despite all the tragedy, the dead are at peace and no longer suffer. You have to move forward and help those who can still be helped, focusing on the problems before you and not the tragedies of what has passed. She encourages us to think like elephants who forgive even when they can never forget.
She survived through it all, through two marriages, raising two daughters, and contributing to the knowledge of rearing and reintroducing animals back into the wild, creating the David Sheldrick (2nd Husband) Wildlife Trust that continues its work with orphaned animals, conservation, and community outreach. Her life was a love story told in the context of a still ongoing one-sided war.
Amidst the towering smokestacks of steel, Nature’s emergence seems almost surreal. The rush of traffic, the sound of the wind, A secret spot, for wildlife to hide in.
The city hums with machines and gears, As the birds and bees dim in my ears. The concrete jungle rises tall and proud, While trees and flowers hold their ground.
Transmission towers with commanding might, Like ancient oaks in the fading light. Electric lines stretch to the sun, Like a spider’s web that cities have spun.
The sun sets behind factory’s walls, Stars peer through smoking squalls. A contrast stark, yet somehow the same, Industry and nature both lay claim.
Nature forges in a world of steel, Surrounded by slag, melting its heel. Amidst the chaos, a glimmer of hope, A chance for nature, a way to cope
Author’s Note: See the first in this Astronomical Series:Totality
Day 1: 220 miles. Escondido to Kelso Dunes
“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Annularity is totality’s brighter cousin in a rare competition where being dimmer is better. We aim to seek annularity in the backcountry of Nevada, an event predicted to occur on October 14th at 9:30 a.m. near Ely, Nevada. I wouldn’t have planned a trip so close in time to a trip I just finished. But a celestial event is on a rigorous schedule that you can’t slip to the right, no matter how skillfully you bargain with the cosmos or Sir Isaac Newton.
It’s already 2:30 p.m. before we launch and 550 miles to Ely. We, a convoy of two motorcycles and a Compact Prius, want to cover 220 miles of it to Kelso Dunes. There is no way to beat LA traffic this late in the afternoon. In Riverside County, the afternoon temperatures hit the low 90s. I’m expecting the cooler temperatures of San Diego County and the higher elevation of the desert. Long underwear is a poor wardrobe choice. The only way to beat the heat is to lane split through the on-again and off-again stalled traffic of the I-15, something I am loathe to do because it is the cause of so many motorcycle accidents, trying to wobble our way through cars and trucks. If the vehicles pay attention, they split like Moses parting the Red Sea. Sometimes, those two fearless classes of motorcyclists, the leather-bound speedsters in crotch rockets and the half-helmeted Harley riders in jean vests blaze through the stopped traffic like a hot knife through butter. I’m just trying not to get killed.
We fuel up at the Outlet malls in Barstow and wait for our Prius to catch up to us at a Del Taco, which boasts of being the original. A little research uncovers that the first Del Taco was at Yermo, just down the road, and that another Del Taco by Barstow Station is the oldest. But I digress.
An earthclipse occurs at about 6 p.m., completely dimming and obscuring the Sun and accurately predicted by scientists. We watch the Sun fade over the horizon, which means we will be night riding the hundred-plus miles to the Dunes. Riding up Kelbaker Road north from the I-40, the temperature drops into the upper 50s as we summit. The long underwear is a good choice now. Gearing up and gearing down is the ongoing battle of any long-distance bike ride. The only guideline I can go by is that the next road segment will not correlate with the previous one because of the altitude, the time of day, changing weather conditions, and even traffic conditions.
We head down the dirt road that fronts the Kelso dunes, looking for a spot to camp, a challenging feat in the dark. One that I’m not up to. I see an open area on the side of the road that isn’t marked with a no camping sign. I slow down to see it better in the dark, hit a sandy spot, and drop the bike. It is a slow-motion fall, and I walk off the bike as it goes down—just like old times.
The campsite is just down the road, though. They’ve added vault toilets since the last time I was here Singing Dunes, a welcome addition as far as I’m concerned. We have a few drinks and finish up the Indian food brought for the ride, but no one is hungry after our snack at Del Taco. We compete on shooting star counts in the Milky Way banded sky. The urban glow of Las Vegas and Los Angeles show on either horizon. After everyone else turns in, I stay up for another hour to work on my nighttime photography skills.
Day 2: 330 miles. Kelso Dunes to Ely, Nevada
“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
The morning light illuminates the dunes from the east, making nice shadows on their west sides, perfect for Dune photography. Sand verbana and chinchweed add a lovely purple and yellow color to the landscape.
The big decision of the morning is whether to drive to Baker or Primm. Baker is closer. We know we have enough gas to make it. Primm will save us nearly an hour if we cut across the Mojave National Preserve, but the gas situation would be precarious. Outside the major cities, gas stations are a precious commodity for those riding on a motorcycle. Take advantage of every opportunity to fuel when gas stations are fifty to seventy-five miles apart.
So, we opt for Primm, turning right at the Kelbaker train depot down the creatively named Kelso-Cima road, which takes you from Kelso to Cima. We keep the speed at a gas-saving 65 mph, which gives us the time to soak in the creosote-lined valleys that lead up to the rugged mountains in mid-distance. As we reach higher elevations, we roll through a Joshua tree forest, a sparse arrangement of spikey-leaved trees where tree neighbors give each other a wide berth. Hole-in-the-wall campground is just twelve miles down the road. I hear its frigid, windy hillsides calling us for a future visit.
We make it to Primm, not exactly brimming with fuel but enough left to get us there without panic. Primm has an interstate vibe with high-volume gas stations and a motorcycle club blaring out music at top volume. We stutter our way through Vegas, admiring its skyline but not so much its traffic.
On the Highway 93 turn North into the heartland of Nevada, I ignore my advice never to waste an opportunity to fuel up. The next town on the map is Alamo, about seventy-five miles north. I expect a sign saying, “next services in so many miles,” but I never see it. There is no guarantee that we can gas up there.
The 93 is a road where, one day, someone said, “We need a route from the I-15 to Alamo.” An engineer took a ruler and drew a line from one place to another. The road skirts the Desert National Wildlife Range on its west side, which has abundant water for an October desert and a veneer of green. We pull into the Visitor Center a few miles short of Alamo. I have to think that Lisa Williams, the ranger in charge, doesn’t see that many people and welcomes our interruption. Lisa advises us to visit a BLM office on the way up to Ely to find a decent place to camp. Why I remember her name, I don’t know, but the imagined isolation of her mid-Nevada outpost piques my interest in the type of person that could endure it.
We fill up at Alamo and decide to head up the 318 instead of the 93 to Great Basin. It’s already getting late, and we want to avoid wandering around in unknown territory, trying to find a place to camp in the dark. The 318 is a more direct route to Ely, where we must gas up after the 150-mile trip, a road devoid of gas stations.
As we progress, the roadsides become more vibrant, with yellow rabbitbrush (ID not confirmed) lining the road, patches of white grass in matts of red, and a veneer of green. It’s a full spectrum experience. The road cuts through a gorgeous cliff section that comes up to the shoulders and opens into a long basin surrounded by mountains. The beauty of the roadside flowers, the mid-distant green, and the mountain-rimmed horizons astound me. But my riding companion tells me not to be fooled. The remnants of Hurricane Hilary came this way and dumped more water in one day than it usually gets in a year. We witness a second spring, the plants either taking advantage of or fooled by this watery aberration. We are seeing the brochure, not the Nevada we would return to.
In Ely, the register lady at the gas station says to head out of town and pull off at any dirt road. She says they expect tens of thousands of people, a regular Woodstock event, in my estimation. In Ely, or somewhat north of it, we find an ad-hoc campground next to a horse track willing to put us up for the night for a mere sixty dollars cash, a little bit of event gouging in my opinion. Wasn’t Woodstock a free concert? We pitch our tents on the volleyball courts of a local park and set up a kitchen on one of the park picnic benches. Another scientifically-predicted earthclipse obscures the Sun from our view. The temperature drops to an overnight low of thirty degrees. The long day of riding and the cold night send us to an early tent.
Annularity.
“The black dragon swallows the sun, everything is silent; the moon has eclipsed, and the white rabbit has eclipsed.”(黑龙吞日，万籁寂静；月有食色，白兔已蚀
Ancient Chinese Eclipse poem, possibly manufactured by ChatGPT.
In the morning, the worry is the clouds. A thin layer obscures the Sun when we first wake. The Sun is covered but visible. Still, it is not the ideal viewing conditions when a thick band of clouds intervenes between you and annularity. But the clouds drift off, and the moon takes its first bite out of the Sun, a nick in the perfection of its sphericality. The event is on.
The complete unfolding of a solar eclipse is not exactly a horse race, and in the interim between viewings, we discuss the celestial mechanics of a solar eclipse.
Begin Digression: Fast forward to the story’s future, now my past.The trip resumes at “End Digression.”
As the eclipse progressed, I explained the annular version of the solar eclipse as the difference between apogee and perigee. But later, it occurred to me, what are the odds that apogee and perigee line up precisely at the point where the moon’s orbit crosses the ecliptic? That would be an extraordinary coincidence if solar eclipses depended on that alignment. Why wouldn’t the eclipse occur at some other intersection point of the moon’s orbit with the ecliptic? Spoiler alert: it does. But I’ve never heard anyone describe a thick “ring of fire” or a “thin ring of fire.” And in retrospect, I do not know how close we were to full annularity.
I waded through at least fifty different online articles, seeking an answer. Either I couldn’t ask the question the right way, or the general understanding of the qualitative mechanics of an eclipse needs to be better understood. I suspect the latter, but I finally hit an article that explained it in a way I understood. I will regurgitate (my understanding) here.
An eclipse occurs at syzygy, the configuration of the Sun, the Earth, myself, my companions, and the moon in a straight line, like the pieces on a shish kebab skewer. Syzygy has no common etymology with Zzyzx, the exit to nowhere from the I-15 in the Mojave. They don’t even rhyme. But again, I digress.
It took me a while to visualize all the different orbital motions. So, let’s start with the most basic. The ecliptic is the plane of the Earth’s orbit about the Sun. The plane of the moon’s orbit about the Earth is inclined by five degrees with respect to the ecliptic. The nodal line is where the plane of the moon’s orbit and the ecliptic intersect.
There are two nodal points. The ascending node is when the moon goes from below the ecliptic to above. The descending node is when the moon goes from above the ecliptic to below. And if you follow the path of the October 14th eclipse, it cuts across the Earth from Northwest to Southeast. The April 7th eclipse of 2024 will cut across the Earth from Southwest to Northeast. In the first case, the moon moves from above to below the ecliptic. In the second, the moon is moving from below to above.
The Earth is at one of the two focus points of the ellipse of the moon’s orbit. When the moon is at perigee, it is closest to the Earth. As a side note, when the full moon corresponds with perigee, it is called a super moon. When the moon is at apogee, it is farthest from the Earth. The line from apogee to perigee is called the apsidal line.
An eclipse can only occur when the nodal line points directly at the Sun, sometimes referred to as the eclipse season. A solar eclipse occurs during a new moon when the new moon crosses the ecliptic in front of the Earth in relation to the Sun, and a lunar eclipse occurs during a full moon when the full moon crosses the ecliptic behind the Earth in relation to the Sun.
The orientation of the nodal line with respect to the line from the Earth to the Sun changes as the Earth moves around the Sun. In three months, the nodal line will be perpendicular to the line pointing directly from the Earth to the Sun. In three more months, the nodal line will again align with the Sun, but this time with the opposite nodal point facing the Sun. So, you would expect to see an eclipse every six months.
So far, so good?
Now, we start with the complications. First, the most eclipses recorded in a year is five, not two. One of those extra eclipses is a happenstance of the calendar. The first eclipse of that year occurred in early January, the second in June, and the third in late December. In other words, the eclipses occur every six months, as expected. They happen to fall on the year boundary.
Each of the other two extra eclipses occurred one month apart from another eclipse. I infer that the nodal line orientation had a similar aberration to the calendar in that there is a window for an eclipse of about a month. If the first eclipse occurs at the beginning of that window, the second eclipse occurs at the end. So, occasionally, you can sneak in an extra eclipse in a month. In the record year of five eclipses, this happened twice.
The second complication is that eclipses aren’t on an exact one-year cycle. In other words, the nodal line will not be in the same orientation with respect to the Sun after a complete orbit. In fact, it will be off by 1/18.6 of the Earth’s orbit or about three-quarters of a month per year. The nodal line has an 18.6-year precession. It takes 18.6 years for the nodal line to return to the same orientation at the exact location in the orbit. Ancient astronomers could predict eclipses based on this cycle without knowing celestial mechanics. Good day to you, Mr. Newton.
The third complication is that total and annular eclipses do not necessarily alternate every six months. There is even something called a hybrid eclipse, where the eclipse starts out as totality but ends in annularity.
Now, we can go to the part bugging me, which I could find little about. If the apsidal line is perpendicular to the nodal line at syzygy, the moon would always be at the same distance from the Earth when an eclipse occurs. The focal point is equidistant from the ellipse perpendicular to the apsidal line. If this were always the case, the eclipse would always be the same kind. It would be either annular or total eclipses or even hybrid, but whichever one, it would always be the same.
If the apsidal line is coincident with the nodal line, we would have both annular and total eclipses separated by six months. On one side of the Earth’s orbit, the apogee would be between the Sun and the Earth, while on the other side of the Earth’s orbit, the perigee would be between the Sun and the Earth. Six months from the annular eclipse of October 14th, there will be a total eclipse on April 7th.
But this alternation is only sometimes the case. It turns out that the apsidal line also precesses over 8.85 years. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession] for a good graphic showing this. The apsidal line will change with respect to the nodal line so that you wouldn’t expect an exact six-month progression of annular to total eclipse. It reverses after 4.425 years. If a total eclipse occurs in October, 4.425 years later, the annular eclipse will occur in October, not correcting for other factors.
Syzygy, nodal line procession, and apsidal line procession are my deeper, qualitative understanding of the eclipses. I know a lot more than when I started. Regardless of what I know, the fact that I showed up at a time and place predicted to have an annular eclipse, which it did with flawless precision, is a tremendous and tremendously underappreciated accomplishment for astronomy and physics.
End Digression: Return to the story present.
I check the eclipse’s progress every few minutes and snap a picture. The annular eclipse doesn’t viscerally move me like totality. You can’t see it without unique ISO-rated sunglasses. The Earth doesn’t go dark, only a little dim. If you are observant, you might notice that your shadow gets slightly fuzzy, with the two light sources coming from either side of the horns.
Still, watching the moon’s progression covering the Sun is a thrill. I’m not sure if the black dragon eats the Sun or the Sun puts its fiery jaw around the moon, only to find it indigestible and have to regurgitate it. The event culminates when the U of fire becomes the ring of fire, achieving syzygy. Even at this juncture of conjunction, the Sun is far too bright to look at directly. I snap some pictures and put the camera aside to take the time to appreciate what will likely be a once-in-my-lifetime event.
When the ring disappears and the regurgitation starts, the event is over for all except the high-end photographers who want to film the entire end-to-end progression. The Woodstock event is twenty or thirty people watching and photographing from the dirt parking lot beside the racetrack. Most of them pack up their equipment and tents and leave. For me, it’s like a baseball game. You can only go after the last out in the ninth inning. When that last dark node at the edge of the Sun’s perimeter, a black diamond if you will, disappears, it’s time to return to more Earthly pursuits.
Day 3: 200 miles. Ely to BLM land somewhere south of Alamo.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky.”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
With the return of full sunlight, the temperature has soared to 50 degrees (sarcasm). I wear most of my warm-weather gear as we head out of town. We plan to procure one of those lakeside campgrounds we saw at the Desert National Wildlife Range, just north of the visitor center we stopped at, taking the long way to Alamo, heading east toward Great Basin National Park on U.S. 50, then following 93 south to Caliente.
As we turn south onto the 93, we stop for a photo op of Wheeler Peak, the 13,000-foot peak inside Great Basin National Park I climbed six years earlier on my trip to achieve totality. I remember sucking oxygen back then. Six years later, I doubt I have the cardiovascular endurance to summit. I will stick to safer things like driving five hundred and fifty miles back home on a motorcycle through Riverside traffic.
Great Basin is a vast geographic area extending over Nevada, Utah, California, and Oregon. We ride in a basin within the basin that stretches for a hundred miles, lined with distant mountains on either side and lots of cold in the middle. After reaching Pioche, we drop in elevation, and the world becomes a warmer place.
Just after Pioche, we stumble onto Cathedral Gorge State Park, a hidden gem in the heart of Nevada. A scenic overlook provides spectacular views into the weather-eroded gorge and a self-guided walking tour describing the sparse but not barren flora. The namesake feature is a cathedral structure jutting upward from the canyon’s floor. The lengthy gorge has an extended, rippled wall banded with tans and browns, fronting a distant mountain range.
We stop for gas at Sinclair and food at the J&J fast food restaurant for greasy and unsettling fare. Exiting the town through a narrow canyon and passing more scenic country, we elevate through the picturesque countryside of juniper trees, descend into another basin, and pass on the opportunity to hunt for trilobites. Fool! How often will I get the chance to mine for trilobites? Torschlusspanik. So much to do. So little time.
Our dreams of a lakeside campsite in the Upper Pahranagat Lake campground evaporated like gasoline on a Nevada highway. In the Paiute language, Pahranagat means “Valley of Shining Water.” I translate it as mocking water because all the campsites were fully occupied, the Visitor Center was closed, and the park was infested with Park Rangers, making a stealth camp impossible.
Our leader finds us a stealth site on the other side of the highway, down a dirt road to nowhere, as far as I can tell. We have the place to ourselves, but the price for primitive camping is the open-air, wallless bathrooms. We aren’t the first to camp there but benefit from this arrangement with boards and half-burnt firewood to start a fire. We watch the hillsides paint red in the sunset of another Earthclipse and speculate on the previous owner of a sizable, carnivorous jawbone. After dinner, we start a sizable fire that lasts late into the night, and so does the drinking. The conversations are all a hazy memory. We talked about seeing totality next April and, at some point, decided the benchmark of outdoor experience is how often you’ve taken an outdoor crap. Such is the talk of campfires.
Day 4: 400 miles. Somewhere south of Alamo to Escondido
“…we gotta go and never stop going ‘till we get there.”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
There’s not much to say about this day other than I elevated my outdoor ranking leaving more than footprints buried at our primitive campsite. We slog all the miles, fast miles, on the long, straight highways and the I-15, eating at gas-station restaurants and concentrating on negotiating through the post-eclipse traffic. In Riverside, the temps soar to 102, a seventy-degree temperature swing from the freezing temperatures of Ely, still wearing my long underwear. But after a long day, we all make it home safe and sound, and I like to think better for the experience.
