Following the Blue Line

Waiting for the moon to cover the sun near Newberry, South Carolina, on August 21, 2017.

It was late and raining hard the night of 2007 when I pulled out of the Philadelphia airport in search of the PMI headquarters. I kept glancing at the printed paper map in my lap, but as the exits flew by, sometimes less than thirty feet apart, I realized I was hopelessly lost. It was so black and foggy I could hardly read the giant overhead signs.

Twenty minutes later, I committed to a random exit and followed it into the suburbs. I pulled over to consult my map and discovered I was nowhere near my destination. What should have been a fifteen-minute drive had morphed into a forty-five-minute expedition.

I’m good with directions, but this happened all too often in unfamiliar places. So when my brother-in-law excitedly showed off his brand-new iPhone-1 and opened the map app, my eyes nearly bugged out of my head. A bright blue line traced a route across the screen.

“How do I get one of these?” I asked.

Within the hour, I had one on order.

My travel life changed dramatically. I could talk to the thing. It talked back, telling me where to turn and how far ahead and even showing me a picture of where I was. No more fumbling with creased paper maps. For ten years, I followed that blue line happily around the globe—through Germany, Alaska, New Zealand, China, India.

And then in 2017, we read that a total solar eclipse—one of nature’s most magnificent displays rarely seen in the United States—would transit across South Carolina, less than a hundred miles from our home in Charlotte. We also read all the traffic warnings: potentially hours of gridlock.

I detest traffic jams almost as much as I love solar eclipses. What to do?

Aha! The solution was in my pocket.

My phone could get us back on the deserted side roads. All I needed to do was find the best spot to watch the eclipse, and the app could do the rest. I spread out a highway map beside the solar transit map and searched for the perfect intersection of lines—the center of the shadow and a quick escape to I-77. Voilà! Newberry, South Carolina. Never heard of it. The blue line showed an exit route north out of town about thirty-five miles, bypassing all the expected chaos.

We were all set.

On August 21, my wife, Joeline, three of our children, and I, along with several pairs of eclipse-rated sunglasses, arrived in a field outside Newberry and spread out a string of lounge chairs. Amid the small gathering crowd, we chomped on our lunches awaiting the celestial supershow.

Our family gathered to witness the 2017 total solar eclipse—before our GPS adventure began.

Around 2:20, the sky began to dim. Through our trusty shades, we watched a bite taken out of the sun. Over the ensuing half hour, the bite grew larger until just a sliver of light remained. The temperature dropped—much to our relief—and the crickets and frogs began their nocturnal chorus.

Then came a blinding flash of the diamond ring as the last edge of the sunlight slipped behind the moon. We were thrust into a deep twilight. For 160 seconds, we stood in awe, captivated by the solar corona glowing around the dark disk.

The ancients must have gone out of their minds when the sun vanished. With no internet, no charts, no blue lines, they could only guess at what the darkness meant and, in many cases, they performed unusual rituals to bring the sun back to the daytime sky, successful every time.

Soon the diamond ring flashed again, and the spell broke. We packed quickly to make our hasty exit, celebrating our clever plan. I pulled out my phone, and the blue line appeared. Speeding off into the unknown, we listened carefully for our first directional command. Right turn. Left turn. Straight through the next intersection. Veer right.

Within minutes, we were making good time on a spacious two-lane country road, cornfields on one side, contented cows on the other. Up the road just a few miles, the speed limit dropped from fifty-five to forty-five to forty. The pavement narrowed. Barbed wire replaced picket fences, the cows not as contented.

The blacktop dissolved into gravel, trees now right on the roadside, leaving little room to pull over. With no vehicles anywhere in sight, I flat out stopped in the middle of the road, or trail, or whatever we were on. I checked the app. Yep, we were on the blue line, only about ten miles from the congested interstate. Thank goodness. I thought we might have been lost.

We slowly motored on, watching out for potholes. Two more turns, and we would be there. Except the first turn went onto a dirt road and the next onto two tire tracks alongside a creek and a broken-down, rotted fence. No speed limit signs—in fact, no signs of any kind.

The tire tracks faded into two thin strands of trampled grass and trail dust, ending in a sagging blockade: three decaying planks and a rusted sign that once read ROAD CLOSED. Beyond it lay a bedraggled cow pasture and a rickety chicken coop.

I glanced down at my phone. Our dot still sat confidently on a solid blue line, just centimeters from I-77.

Nothing to do but turn around. After several minutes of jockeying back and forth, trying not to slide into the creek or sink into the berm, we began retracing our steps. Before long, we encountered another car—another bewildered family of five or six, no doubt staring at their own bright blue line. Then another. And another. A whole caravan of lost eclipse chasers, each of us faithfully following the same path to nowhere.

For the next several miles, we drove with our right-side tires off the pavement to squeeze past the oncoming crush of cars, but eventually the road widened. We took the first left onto a reasonably sized byway and headed east toward I-77, followed in the distance by our fellow travelers.

Finally, we joined a mile-long line of cars inching toward a hopelessly choked interstate. I picked my phone up off the floorboard where I’d tossed it in disgust. The blue line had turned solid red, stretching seventy miles all the way to Charlotte.

There was a bright side. We now had several hours to replay the marvelous display we had just witnessed—something so unique and astounding that it’s almost impossible to describe.

That excursion taught me a thing or two about lines. The ones on our screens promise certainty. They glow with authority.

Sometimes they lead us straight home.

And sometimes they end at a broken fence in a cow pasture.

If you get the chance to witness a total solar eclipse, do it. But if you don’t know how to get back, print out a map and draw your own blue line.

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If you enjoyed this story, you’ll find more family adventures in Tent for Seven, my memoir about raising five children, facing life’s greatest challenges, and discovering how family bonds grow stronger when everything else seems to fall apart.