The Total Eclipse of August Twenty-First, Two Thousand Seventeen
Near Casper, Wyoming
On the morning of August twenty-first, two thousand seventeen, more people were standing in Casper than had been there in any living person's memory. Estimates put the crowds at somewhere between two and four times the city's normal population of roughly sixty thousand. Motels had been booked for months. People camped in fields outside town.
They had all come for about two minutes and twenty-five seconds.
Casper sat almost exactly on the centerline of the path of totality for the Great American Eclipse, the first total solar eclipse to cross the continental United States coast to coast in ninety-nine years. Its position near the centerline gave it a long stretch of totality, more than two minutes.
When the moon's shadow arrived, the temperature dropped, birds went quiet, and the sun's corona appeared as a white halo around a blackened disk. Then it was over, and Interstate Twenty-Five backed up for hours.
