Beneath a 70-mile-wide path beginning above the towering evergreens of the Oregon coast and ending over the weathered wharves of Charleston Harbor in South Carolina, Americans across 14 states saw the moon eat the sun.
It was The Great American Eclipse, and it had the American public in the grips of a celestial fever in August 2017.
Quiet towns within the path of totality grew anxious over how to prepare for the overwhelming influx of visitors.
Roughly 100 million people lived within a day’s drive of totality.
On the big day, motorists in Oregon jostled for a spot at a rest stop. Others pulled to the side of the highway, ignoring signs that prohibited stopping.
At Depoe Bay on the state’s Pacific Coast, a noisy flock of sea gulls went quiet as the sky went dark. Scattered throngs of people, among the first to see totality, gasped before erupting in cheer.
One woman there with children described an indelible experience.
“That was so amazing — to witness that in real life,” she told The New York Times. “That was kind of life-changing, especially for the kids.”
Carbondale, a southern Illinois college town of about 20,000 people, might as well have been hosting the Olympics that day: Fourteen thousand people were expected to fill the seats of Saluki Stadium at Southern Illinois University.
A vexed audience chanted, hoping to scare the clouds away, and, briefly, they did, and the eclipsed sun peered at the spectators below. Nicholas St. Fleur, a Times reporter who was there, recalled himself quivering.
“We had seen only a few seconds, but in those brief seconds we had seen majesty,” he wrote.
Across the nation, a chance to see even a partial eclipse drew people out of their homes, too. The White House was no exception.
From the Truman Balcony, the president at the time, Donald J. Trump, Melania, the first lady, and their son, Barron, had their own gander.
Mr. Trump lodged himself in the collective memory of that day by glimpsing right at the sun without protective glasses, at least initially, against safety guidelines.
In New York City, the bustle shushed as people stopped to look far above its tallest buildings.
One person in Brooklyn compared the moment to the shock that had washed over the city after Mr. Trump’s election 10 months earlier.
Indeed, the moon had cast a shadow over a country grappling with a new era of uncertainty and palpable discord.
But on that day, some felt the rendezvous up above brokered a brief truce down below.
“And for a moment, everyone in our nation stopped and looked up in the sky and forgot about hate,” one Times reader wrote.
No sooner than the shadow disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean, people, including those who missed out, began counting down the days.
“Don’t worry. You can try again in 2,422 days,” read a story in The Times, published 2,422 days ago.