Excerpt from Bailey’s Beads
by Allison Trowbridge

Allison Trowbridge studied Environmental Studies and Arts and Letters at Prescott College. She is especially interested in the intersection of these two disciplines. By traveling with her family as a child and into her young adult life, Allison was able to experience different cultures and get to know herself in the context of them. This has inspired her to study and write about the human experience and the human’s role within the environment.

            A total solar eclipse happens every two or three years somewhere on the planet when the moon gets in between the sun and a certain part of the earth’s surface. There’s a relatively narrow zone that experiences totality, in which for up to a couple of minutes, the sun is completely blocked out in the middle of the day. In a zone around this central strip, there’s an area where people can watch a partial solar eclipse, where the moon runs across the sun’s face at an angle so that it never completely obscures the light. For these people, the world will grow slightly dim. The sun will look like it is being eaten away by a black disk but it will never hover in the sky only as a violet ring burning against the stars as it would in the area my family always aimed for.
            Before we left home, my dad had sat down with a map of India and charted the path that would experience the eclipse in totality. He found a small wildlife refuge called Sariska in the desert of Rajasthan, the same state where people come from around the world to step up close to the Taj Mahal, a monument made entirely of intricately inlaid stones and carved marble. The place where we were headed was situated far from this regular tourist traffic. It was in the more barren grasslands, populated only occasionally by small farming villages that followed the lines of seasonal water flow.
            We arrived at the Sariska Wildlife Reserve and Tiger Refuge the day before the eclipse and found that the only hotel there was entirely booked by Japanese tourists who had come for the same reason. The manager of the hotel motioned for us to follow him as he walked around to the back of the large building, along its manicured green lawn. He pointed to a patch of grass underneath a tree next to a swimming pool and explained to my dad in stilted Hindi, his second or third language, that we could camp on that lawn for a small fee. When my mom understood what was being said, she nodded along happily. Julian and I set to work, helping to set up our tent and lay out all our sleeping bags. Mom and dad always slept side by side because they had sleeping bags with opposite zippers that they could zip up together and keep each other warm. I was jealous that they got to cuddle up while we went camping and that they didn’t have room in there for me but I took the next best spot next to them, while Julian willingly took the spot at the edge of the tent.          
            When the time came to prepare to watch the eclipse, we had a piece of welder’s glass that my father had brought, to safely view the moon’s progress across the face of the sun. We found a dusty lot on the side of the road that snaked through the reserve where carloads of people had already gathered early in the morning. Most of the people around us were part of the large group from Japan but there was at least one Indian family there and we set up our blanket on the dusty ground near them. The man came over to us and began chatting excitedly with my dad. He spoke English and explained to us that he’d brought his family from Hyderbad to watch this rare event. He spoke unusually fast with broad sweeping gestures of his arms. His wife remained at the blanket, pulling hot chapattis, Indian flatbread, out of a red and black embroidered bag and handing them to her children, two boys and a girl. My mouth watered as I smelled the warm bread, brushed on both sides with melted butter and dipped in sweet chutney. The children each had a set of glasses made out of cardboard with special dark plastic to look at the sun through without burning their eyes. We passed our welder’s glass to the man with a pair of binoculars so he could get a closer view of the sun with a small dark bite out of its left side.
            The air was loud with chatter, but I couldn’t understand most of the words. I looked around the lot. I could imagine the tigers that were supposed to live in this landscape. The red earth was covered in most places by dry grass and the occasional tree, offering very little shade. The sky was a bright shade of blue and contrasted sharply against the dirt. I dragged my hand on the soft, dusty ground and when I pulled it up, it was coated in a bright layer which I wiped on my denim shorts. After six weeks of wearing the same three t-shirts and two pairs of shorts, and taking only the very occasional sponge bath, I was grimy. My mom had given up on trying to get me to brush my hair, which had become bleached in so much sunlight. I liked the dirt. On my body, it made me feel like I blended in; like with it, I belonged just a little more to the parched landscape. I didn’t want to bathe and rid myself of the layer of earth that made me feel slightly less foreign to the land.
            Julian was in charge of the camera. He had to use the welder’s glass in front of the lens until the stage of the eclipse referred to as “Bailey’s Beads”. This is when the sun has become such a thin crescent of light that it pokes out in individual beads and looks like a pearl necklace. At this stage, the people around us started to call out, softly at first, a whoop, a trill. My mother cried, “how beautiful! I can’t believe it.” Only seconds after this moment, a single pinpoint of light shown in a hovering diamond ring and then there was totality. A cannon or firework went off with a loud boom somewhere in the distance. A strange yelping noise came out of my own throat and birds all around us responded in their confused dance. For less than a minute, the moon obscured the sun. A diamond ring became a suspended violet circle, the umbra of the sun, the only part visible. The moon, a pure black disk, blended into the rest of the sky and looked like a gaping hole where the sun should have been. Stars popped out to form sudden constellations against the sky’s temporary blackness. The world of the celestial bodies and the world of the earth felt distinctly different to me at that moment. The sun and its dark predator moved silently, un-fazed. For the sky, time did not speed up or slow down. The moon did not stop or falter, but the earth all around me erupted in chaos.
            Birds panicked as their expectation of time wavered. In the dark, I felt the wind on my skin generated by hundreds of tiny wings, struggling to find their nests in the dark. My mom gasped and cried while my dad whooped with excitement. Day had become night and I could just make out the faces around me. Julian still had the camera up to his eye, calling out to us that he couldn’t see. The camera’s shutter stayed open, trying to take in enough light and Julian missed half of the fifty seconds of totality before he abandoned his duty as photographer and pulled the camera away from his face so he could just watch. People around us talked quickly and made trilling sounds. When the moon continued by, I watched its shadow race towards us on the ground and pass over. I looked around me at the people nearby. I smiled broadly at them. Language was irrelevant. Some eyes glimmered with moisture.

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