For 3.5 glorious minutes, we looked up — and forgot about all the troubles below

I’ll admit, astronomers were on my list.

I’d bought into the massive overhype of the “Supermoon,” which looked entirely like any other full moon you’ve ever seen. I’ve stayed up waiting for a blizzard of meteors that never came, and gazed at historic conjunctions that didn’t seem much different than any other starry night.

And don’t even get me started on comets, whose appearance is about as reliable as George Jones.

So even though I live in the Path of Totality, I was more inclined to side with spoilsports saying this was just one more liberal science-claptrap fantasy.

(MAGA actually seemed to get mad at the eclipse for happening at all; a real-world example of shaking your fist at a cloud — either that or they said it was a sign portending the end of days reflective of the Almighty’s displeasure with Joe Biden. There’s quite an impressive gap between “nothing-to-see-here” and the Lord calling us home, so I give them credit for agile thinking.)

We had been hearing about the eclipse for 18 months, with apocalyptic warnings of massive traffic jams, sold out hotels, booked-up restaurants and jammed cell phones — all of which actually came true.

Tourism agencies were in full gush-mode. Come see the eclipse! The chance to get out in the great outdoors! To experience nature at its most amazing! To get drunk on a Monday afternoon!

Remember that Carly Simon line, “Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia/To see the total eclipse of the sun?” Well, 50 private planes landed at the tiny Saranac Lake airport and 200 more were turned away. So Carly’s ex wasn’t alone.

Not that everyone didn’t prepare, prepare and then prepare some more. Porta Johns were dropped off along highways like seed corn, and bless my soul, I thought if one more person shoved a pair of eclipse glasses at me I was going to smash them over the lemon with a folding metal chair.

And I have to settle one last score with AccuWeather, whose idiots came out with a “forecast” a month before the eclipse, predicting it would be cloudy. Wrong. I know they just did it for clicks, and that they thought people would forget by the time the eclipse rolled around. Well I don’t forget. So if you have this joke-weather junk on your phone, delete it and get you a serious weather app.

And when the eclipse was gone and life began to return to normal, no one said it wasn’t worth it. No one.

This surprised me. This is America, where we boo Santa Claus and find things not to like about bacon. What also surprised me was a meteorologist on TV who said 99% totality and totality were two entirely different things. That didn’t seem right, but as we watched from our hillside, it turned out to be true.

At 80%, 90%, 99% totality you’re thinking “this is kind of neat,” but when that last 1% disappears Mother Nature drops the mic. You enter a different universe that maybe the poets can describe, but I can’t, something like a reverse sunset in which the world goes black, but there’s a rim of fire just at the horizon, 360 degrees around, with a narrow band of blue and then a inky sky above, the brighter stars twinkling and a soft glowing donut where the sun used to be.

It’s incredible but true that the sun is so powerful that just 1% of it can bathe the world in a plausible facsimile of daylight.

Birds tweeted the songs they save for eventide, the wind kicks up and nighttime insects come out when the sun disappears, then are instantly gone when the sunlight returns. But for three and a half minutes there, everyone is gloriously connected in a world where problems are forgotten and troubles do not exist.

If only you could bottle it, instead of having to drive home.

Somebody figured out women's basketball can make money. Is that the beginning of the end?

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: The eclipse connected us, if only for a few unearthly moments