Kat and I are enjoying a mild Pennsylvania summer. For most of the past two weeks we have camped at Penn Wood Airstream Campground near Clarion. It’s a quiet, lovely setting amid a meadow with a clear creek running alongside. They have full hookups, good wifi, showers and a laundry that’s only one greenback (no coins!) to wash and another to dry. The people are friendly, and even let us wash Kat’s Cradle and the Red Sled. Clarion’s best barbershop is still only $10 including eyebrow trim and a hot lather neck shave. Its Wal-Mart Supercenter is just off I-80 no more than seven miles away.
Kat got the word from Amazon that her time has come to take this year’s drug test. That usually means the report for duty date is no more than a month away, often less. She was assigned to a Quest test site in Shelocta, PA, 45 miles away. You haven’t heard of Shelocta because barely a hundred people live there. Clarion’s population is 5,300 not counting a thousand or so students at the University. There are several other big towns nearby, but not one of them has a Quest office. (Quest’s VP of site selection clearly follows neither the Wal-Mart nor the McDonald’s model.)
Eclipse morning’s sun rose in a cloudless sky. We drove through New Bethlehem, Kittaning, and Elderton (named for Sara Elder, its first resident who bought land back in 1786). I thought Kat was drinking water much too soon, but she made it and soon we turned around for our return trip to Penn Wood.
The afternoon weather was partly cloudy and much of the time not even the pinhole and paper method showed anything. The light looked a little strained at peak sun coverage, almost 80% obscured, but still plenty bright. And then it was all over. I didn’t see anyone staring at the sun. I didn’t hear any “Ooh’s” or “Ahh’s”. But here and there people did stare at the sun. I know because of these pictures.
Life on the Blue Highways 
LOL! Love your photos of he whose name shall not be mentioned! We are in Florida for my orthodontic work and had stormy skies on eclipse afternoon. Just as well, as I had neglected to procure any eclipse glasses. It did get noticeably darker here for awhile, but that can happen during storms as well. We watched the eclipse coverage on ABC as they moved across the nation, and it was fun to see all the excited folks who got to witness totality. I envied that. However, I didn’t envy their drives back to wherever they came from!
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A picture is absolutely worth a thousand words?
I had written a hardbitten critique of his first seven months, but my editor feared it might get us fire bombed. So we let the images … other people’s, hope I made that clear … tell the story.
Enough about us. Where are you, Em?
Jackson
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Em is in Florida for othodontia. Duh!
We gonna be in Pensacola most of the month of January. Hope to see ya’s then.
Jackson
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Love reading your escapdes.
We had welder’s lenses, overnighted from Lafayette, LA. (Guess why.) Benny cut a slot in cardboard and taped the lenses in the square of card. It was wonderful. We watched, I felt like we were living in a tinted glass world. The roosters crowed, the crickets chirped, then it returned back to normal and got real cool. It was…real cool.
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Roosters were fooled? Ding dang! I suppose A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was not so far=fetched after all, wotty-wot? And what the hey: tens of millions of Americans were fooled!
Thanks for reading us,
Jackson
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For the eclipse, I got myself and my special glasses to higher mountain ground with a clear sky view.
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There were no roosters crowing, which is surprising given there are farms everywhere around here.
It did get very quiet when the day birds stopped singing, disappeared, and presumably went to roost for a bit.
http://birdcast.info/forecast/eclipse/
There were crickets.
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When I got home, it seemed my cat had been sleeping, but then cats sleep through most of any day. 🙂
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The eclipse was an amazing and awe-inspiring experience. I feel lucky to have seen it.
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Chickens of each gender like to stay out of the midday sun, so it’s little wonder the roosters did not notice. You know what they say about mad dogs and Englishmen? (G B Shaw?) And when a chicken goes mad? Nobody except the rooster can tell the difference.
Glad you got to see it Kahuna.
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