Al Ferrari wasn’t absolutely sure where he was going last Sunday morning, a few hours before sunrise. He was acting as informal advance scout for some Buffalo Astronomical Association “eclipse chasers,” even though Ferrari didn’t have much to formally do with the BAA until he decided not long ago to come to Buffalo for the total solar eclipse.
Ferrari lives in Westchester County. He works for JetBlue and builds handcrafted acoustic guitars. Since childhood, he’s had a passion for the heavens, and he sometimes buys high-tech telescope accessories from Anthony Davoli, who has taught astronomy for 30 years at Clarence High School.
Based on their shared mission, eclipse chasers help one another. Knowing Buffalo was on the centerline of the path of totality for the eclipse, Ferrari, on “a self-guided mission,” had made one potential plan to drive to Elma to watch it happen with Davoli and his family. To cover his bases, he booked and canceled plane tickets to Texas, twice, where totality was also set to occur.
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As the day grew closer, forecasts made it evident Buffalo was going to be cloudy. Dan Marcus of Grand Island, a retired steelworker and director of the BAA observatory at Beaver Meadow – and a guy who’s traveled the world to see a total eclipse, five separate times – led what Ferrari described as a “pretty compulsive” day-by-day scan of weather reports to nail down the absolute best spot.
For a while, right into last weekend, it looked as if it would be Plattsburgh, in New York’s North Country. Ferrari Googled around and found a nearby vineyard that seemed like a magnificent viewing point, and he had it tentatively arranged that they’d all meet there for the eclipse.
By Saturday night, when it was evident the clouds were on the move, they scuttled that plan and looked farther east.
“At 3 a.m. Sunday, when I hit my car, I was 100% certain I was going to Vermont,” Ferrari said.
Eileen Carroll Selig is 105 years old. She remembers what she was doing – and what it was like on Elk Street – on Jan. 24, 1925, the day of the last total eclipse in Buffalo.
Marcus, his wife, Melissa, his sister Anita and another BAA member, Thomas Szed, would travel to Vermont later that day, in a little camper. BAA eclipse chasers Davoli and Geoff Koch, a Clarence chemistry teacher, would also head that way with their families.
So Ferrari, arriving first, sought out a location. Based on the forecasts, he went to Vermont’s town of Derby, population 4,600, where there was a probability of blue skies. He had no clue about the best local spot for watching the eclipse, but he had an idea of where to hear suggestions:
He walked into an American Legion post. A bunch of people had gathered to play bingo. “I talked to a guy who said: Try Shattuck Hill Road,” Ferrari said.
That’s where he went. It’s a two-lane road that climbs a hill, offering a stunning view of the Green Mountains and Lake Memphremagog, a curving body of water between Newport, Vt., and Quebec.
The problem: There was no public land near the road. They’d need permission from a homeowner to set up their elaborate telescopes and cameras, since the goal of this quest for many in the group involved creating memorable images of the eclipse.
“I decided to pull a Dan,” said Ferrari, who’d learned quickly how Marcus was never afraid to ask permission. Ferrari pulled into the driveway of the first house he saw. A dog named Rosie – thankfully friendly – came tearing toward him, followed by a farmer who owned the place.
That was Andrew Delabruere. He and his wife, Kathy, are dairy farmers. Andrew wore a cap for the outfit that buys their milk:
The Upstate Niagara Cooperative, based in Buffalo, some 520 miles away.
“We were really happy to have everybody come in,” said Andrew, exactly what Ferrari wanted to hear.
They had blue skies, though a few wispy clouds floated in later. Ferrari was soon joined by the Marcus-led crew in the camper. Davoli, his wife, Lisa and children Anthony, Gianna and Malia – and Geoff and Stephanie Koch and children Abby and Ethan – drove there separately.
“My wife kept describing it as being my Super Bowl,” said Koch, who – like all of us – has waited basically since birth to see the Bills win it all, and always knew the prospects weren’t a whole lot better for seeing a cloudless total solar eclipse within driving distance of his home.
Everyone in the group had held out hope for as long as possible, even into the last week, that Buffalo would have clear skies for the event. They acknowledged the bittersweet feeling of leaving home, at the once-in-a-lifetime heart of the path of totality, to find an ideal spot hours away to see the whole thing.
Teaching about the eclipse is an opportunity in both obvious and profound ways, said Michael Humphrey, president of the Buffalo Astronomical Association. He's always pleased if he “opens minds” with his talks, if children caught in the rhythm and pressures of everyday life abruptly see something more in the wonders of the sky.
The eclipse chasers know of ongoing arguments in Western New York about whether Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz was right or wrong to leave town to watch the eclipse in clearer skies in Ohio, on a day when so many visitors arrived in Buffalo. None of them wanted to get tangled up in the debate.
As one traveler put it, an eclipse – in this troubled and confrontational era – is the rare thing he can typically talk about with joy and awe and communion, above and beyond any trace of politics.
What they all agree upon, with passion, is that the clouds in Buffalo weren’t some indicator of a civic curse: April, by its essential Western New York nature, is always a cloudy month, and much of the path of totality throughout the nation was lost to clouds.
The BAA stalwarts, understanding the scope of a total eclipse, were willing to push out a long way for a good view.
“I’ve said it before,” Marcus said, “but seeing totality is like having a million-dollar lottery ticket, and totality with clouds is like having a million-dollar ticket with one number off.”
He’s loved astronomy since he was a child, when he and his best friends figured out how to build a telescope from parts. He was already teaching astronomy to children when he met his wife, Melissa Price Marcus, when both served as teen counselors at a summer camp in Java Center.
They’ll celebrate their 50th anniversary this year.
Marcus experienced his first full total eclipse as a young man, in Manitoba. To watch that phenomenon on a clear day, he said, changed his life and left him eager, always, to see the next one — trips that four times now he’s made with Melissa.
The group from Buffalo was on a snow-dusted hilltop Monday when the eclipse began, making ski trails on the Green Mountains shine like silver veins. Marcus said “shadows and weird sunsets” emerged in a panoramic sweep across the landscape, while his friends noted how each mountain peak, one at a time, seemed to blink out into black shadow.
Finally, they saw that glint of golden light at the perimeter known as “Bailey’s beads.” As Jupiter and Saturn emerged in the darkened afternoon sky, the pilgrims from Buffalo watched the moon completely block the sun.
The long journey was worth it.
“This eclipse meant so much to me,” said Melissa, a former kindergarten teacher and Western New York’s district director for the Federated Garden Clubs. She and her husband are driven by complementary visions of beauty in nature, she said, a bond at the heart of their marriage.
On that Vermont hilltop, the eclipse was ultimate affirmation.
“I think we got blessed, so lucky,” said Ferrari, the guy who found the spot.
Davoli wishes his entire hometown could have seen this phenomenon so clearly above Buffalo, beyond that wall of clouds. We live in an era when many fear artificial intelligence will someday diminish perceptions of reality, but Davoli said that even if you fed every iota of information about this eclipse into AI, he is utterly confident of this:
It couldn’t rival that sky above Vermont. Not even close.