The Bucket List is a movie with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, with Nicholson playing an extremely wealthy (mostly retired) businessman who’s pretty much a total jerk, and Freeman is a middle-class man who finds himself in the next hospital bed, both of them stricken with diseases they are unlikely to recover from. Feeling his mortality in a particularly acute way, Freeman’s character (who is also relentlessly nice in the face of Nicholson’s boorish behavior) proposes that, if the two of them each survive their current health crisis, that they embark on a series of adventures that each has wanted to do but kept putting off. Freeman’s good-natured charm gradually softens Nicholson to the point that he’s willing to using his resources to fund their adventure, since they both do make it past their respective crises, and off they go. This gives the movie its name (things each wanted to do before kicking the bucket) and provides the foundation for all the other subplots. With two such acting heavyweights it’s a good film, and actually not “Hallmark Channel predictable” either. I recommend it.
Anyhow, yesterday’s events got me thinking of Bucket Lists. Unless you were living in a cave, you almost certainly knew that we here in the US of A experienced a remarkable (and rare) celestial event in the form of a total solar eclipse; I read that over 200 million people live in the path of the shadow (complete or partial) as it swept from the Oregon coast to South Carolina, and a huge number of people traveled to sometimes remote sections of the country to sit in the dark for a couple of minutes (I read that the longest stretch of totality was in Carbondale, IL at about 2 minutes and 47 seconds). I was in far western Oregon at ground zero and had just under 2 minutes of darkness as the moon completely blocked the sun. My friend Mark Elliot had decided some time back that we wanted to see this literally once-in-a lifetime even (a total eclipse that covers so much of the country), so we planned out generally where we wanted to go (a remote spot to avoid the biggest crowds but still relatively accessible, high probability of a cloudless day, and so forth).
I flew into Boise planning to camp out at my friend Mark Kaye’s yard while the other Mark (along with his daughter Blair, her boyfriend Duncan, and Duncan’s sister Maddie) drove from Seattle. Mark et al were planning to scout good viewing spots as they got close to Boise. I still have no idea how they found the spot they did (nearly 20 miles up a gravel road west of the tiny town of Huntington, OR off Interstate 84) in a bovine-free cow pasture (based on the desiccation of the cow poop it look like no mooing had been done in this particular pasture for several years). I drove up from Boise (an easy hour or so drive) and met them in Huntington and we took off for the hinterlands, camped under the stars on Sunday night and had a perfect spot for watching the eclipse. Not a cloud in the sky, high 80’s for temperature and not another viewer in sight (there were a couple of other groups not too far away, but the hilliness of this area hid them from us and we felt like we were the only people for as far as we could see.)
Given the path of this eclipse, most people in the US were not only aware of it, but a great many got to experience it in some fashion. Either directly watching (hopefully with appropriate eye protection), or at least noticing the drop in temperature and darkening as the moon’s shadow crossed the country. It was an amazing event, and I’m really glad I went.
I got to cross off something from my bucket list. But the very presence of such a list gives me a bit of pause; the obvious implication is that the clock is ticking. And in point of fact it is, and for all of us. So I guess the point is that none of us are going to live forever, so if there’s things we want to do we better get moving.
Turns out there’s another total solar eclipse predicted for less than 8 years from now here in the US; this time it starts in Texas and sweeps up in an arc to Canada, leaving the continent in the Canadian Maritimes. Cathy and I have already begun plans to get there. You might want to update your personal bucket list.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer.
Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.
Eclipses, buckets lists and mortality.
Anyhow, yesterday’s events got me thinking of Bucket Lists. Unless you were living in a cave, you almost certainly knew that we here in the US of A experienced a remarkable (and rare) celestial event in the form of a total solar eclipse; I read that over 200 million people live in the path of the shadow (complete or partial) as it swept from the Oregon coast to South Carolina, and a huge number of people traveled to sometimes remote sections of the country to sit in the dark for a couple of minutes (I read that the longest stretch of totality was in Carbondale, IL at about 2 minutes and 47 seconds). I was in far western Oregon at ground zero and had just under 2 minutes of darkness as the moon completely blocked the sun. My friend Mark Elliot had decided some time back that we wanted to see this literally once-in-a lifetime even (a total eclipse that covers so much of the country), so we planned out generally where we wanted to go (a remote spot to avoid the biggest crowds but still relatively accessible, high probability of a cloudless day, and so forth).
I flew into Boise planning to camp out at my friend Mark Kaye’s yard while the other Mark (along with his daughter Blair, her boyfriend Duncan, and Duncan’s sister Maddie) drove from Seattle. Mark et al were planning to scout good viewing spots as they got close to Boise. I still have no idea how they found the spot they did (nearly 20 miles up a gravel road west of the tiny town of Huntington, OR off Interstate 84) in a bovine-free cow pasture (based on the desiccation of the cow poop it look like no mooing had been done in this particular pasture for several years). I drove up from Boise (an easy hour or so drive) and met them in Huntington and we took off for the hinterlands, camped under the stars on Sunday night and had a perfect spot for watching the eclipse. Not a cloud in the sky, high 80’s for temperature and not another viewer in sight (there were a couple of other groups not too far away, but the hilliness of this area hid them from us and we felt like we were the only people for as far as we could see.)
Given the path of this eclipse, most people in the US were not only aware of it, but a great many got to experience it in some fashion. Either directly watching (hopefully with appropriate eye protection), or at least noticing the drop in temperature and darkening as the moon’s shadow crossed the country. It was an amazing event, and I’m really glad I went.
I got to cross off something from my bucket list. But the very presence of such a list gives me a bit of pause; the obvious implication is that the clock is ticking. And in point of fact it is, and for all of us. So I guess the point is that none of us are going to live forever, so if there’s things we want to do we better get moving.
Turns out there’s another total solar eclipse predicted for less than 8 years from now here in the US; this time it starts in Texas and sweeps up in an arc to Canada, leaving the continent in the Canadian Maritimes. Cathy and I have already begun plans to get there. You might want to update your personal bucket list.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer. Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.