My crew of misfits drove/ferried 8 hours from Ocracoke Island to Francis Marion national forest in South Carolina, the day before the eclipse, with the intention of experiencing totality. It is my understanding that it is legal to do dispersed camping in all national forests and, also, every single accommodation near the path of totality from motels to campgrounds was booked. Only the $1,000 a night airbnb places existed for those who lack creative problem solving. We’re not part of that crowd.
Using a map, which is unusual for millennials, I navigated us to the tip of the forest around 2am. Poorly maintained dirt roads bottomed out our Jeep numerous times. This has been my experience in South Carolina in general. Paulette’s soothing critical comments about a lack of state gas tax to repair roads came to mind, so I shared them with the group at the appropriate time and let them sit in the car with us as we drove.
Our brains were exhausted from lack of sleep and nourishment during our week long primitive camping trip in mosquito hell Island, so it is possible the forest was not as objectively scary as it seemed to us at the time. But damn it seemed scary, even to me.
A good horror movie is slow, steady, and concerted, featuring a group of tired and helpless young people on vacation. We had all of those things. As we got deeper and deeper into the forest, the prospect of camping became creepier and creepier. We had no idea where we were. There was a hint of danger, an element of surprise, and a taste of the unknown. This vacation had officially turned into an adventure.
We had the archetypal scared girl, riding shotgun and reminding everyone repeatedly that this was a scary forest to camp in. “no road is safe in these woods” type comments. We had a confident guy in the back that just wanted to set up camp, “everything is gonna be fine, babe.” We had me, an expert on swamp monsters that was actively and aggressively perpetuating myths that everyone in the car including myself refuted. “you know, I heard there is a Dinocroc in South Carolina, bigger than this Jeep, but I guess that’s probably not true.” This caused an expected chain reaction of cliché dialogue among the group. For the sake of completing the classic archetypal scary movie group of college kids, I’m going to say the last girl with us was inadvertently putting on makeup with a small mirror in her pocket book. If only.
After a brutal campsite screening process involving several potential scary locations, we finally found solace on South Carolina’s “Hell Hole Road,” when a “road closed” sign provided us with a logical place to stop. It also provided me with much needed reassurance that this location was where the swamp monster would indeed appear, if he was around. Swamp monsters love closed roads. Even rarer than an eclipse is a 3,000 pound crustacean with a long lizard-like tongue and 10 foot tail. I vocalized this fact to the group, and even took it a step further: I mentioned my days reading ancient tomes about swamp monsters, which subsequently crumbled into dust, in my dad’s library. I was, after all, the groups know it all. I positioned myself to be the last one living, if the swamp monster did appear. The group know it all is usually the one that survives these types of situations, despite all of his friends getting eaten one by one. This prompted my friend to send her GPS coordinates to her parents. “that’s not going to save you from the swamp monster” I reminded her.
Anyway, Hell Hole Road is a real piece of history, receiving its name in the 1700s for reasons Wikipedia cannot or will not disclose. Apparently French General Francis Marion hid from British troops here during the Revolution. It was nice being a part of untouched US history, although I’d hate to take a swim in that stagnant water. Good food for thought.
We set up camp to the tune of chirping crickets, croaking frogs, and whining mosquitoes, on a small overgrown peninsula. I fell asleep to their song almost instantly, waking only once to the sound of another car discovering the road closed sign and, to our delight, returning the way it came. It was at least 3am. This forest had officially seen an astronomical level of modern commotion.
In the morning light, we realized we were legitimately surrounded by an unfamiliar landscape characteristic of a fantasy film, full of lily pads, fleeting frogs, cicada-devouring spiders, fallen trees, and beautiful wild flowers. The mosquitoes here were no match for us trained veterans from Ocracoke. I was used to waking up and slapping a whopping 30-50 mosquitoes like a morning meditative ritual, as rewarding and exhilarating as a businessman’s 2nd cup of coffee. These wussy mosquitoes in hell hole swamp couldn’t decide if they wanted to bite me or befriend me after only a handful of their friends died. Not the types of mosquitoes I’d want to go into battle with.
Interestingly enough, in addition to attracting mosquitoes, we also happened to attract some city slickers.. The same guys I woke up to the night before approached us on the dirt road, perhaps hearing some of our guitar playing. We joked about how this was a forest straight out of a horror film, and the hippy ish Hispanic guy noticed my perfectly bronzed olive oil Greek skin tone and commented that he and I would be the first ones to die, before wishing us well and leaving us on our way.
A setting of hunger and despair had fallen upon us by now, as we used phones with 2% battery to figure out where to watch the eclipse and worried out loud about the very obvious cloud cover above, threatening to ruin our hopes and dreams. We got on the road, ate a quick lunch, and drove North, randomly pulling off on a small field next to a graveyard. We noticed the eclipse was already underway, and watched as the moon slowly turned the sun into an orange moonlike crescent, while observing the nature around us and searching for some kind of greater meaning. We lit incense and held hands, but still felt normal. Astrology has always felt dumb to me, by the way.
The sun was too bright to look at until the moment just before totality, when it shone like a pinpoint laser on the side of the moon. The lighting was unique and foreign.. Like dusk, but with a single source of light, producing eerie shadows on the short grass. This was the moment before time stood still. Traffic stopped. Birds gave up on their pseudo afternoon chirping, realizing they’d been tricked. The whole world was silent. Inevitably, as predicted, the sun was completely gone, replaced by its alter ego, which was black and dim, able to be observed by the naked eye comfortably, sporting a mane of golden locks that looked like they were vibrating in the wind. It takes a lot to excite me these days, and this just about did it. The street lights obeyed the darkness and flickered on uncomfortably. Silent as a snowstorm, even the air had stopped breathing, and everyone was outside, full of wonder. A little girl in the distance was gasping and screaming.
My companions had wide eyed smiles on their faces and were hopping up and down, advancing the idea we were in a science fiction film. And there was the sun’s long lost recessive allele, making a brief appearance before the dominant burning God overtook it again. Just like that, it was broad daylight again. A group of pigs had had enough, and scampered off into the woods. The sounds of passing traffic were noticeable. A man in the distance got back in his jeep and departed and I quietly and quickly realized the world had started moving again.
I didn’t take any pictures of the eclipse because I figured there’d be better ones online… But I did take a picture of my friends chasing pigs.