My flight from London to the Caribbean island of Bonaire seemed entirely normal enough; after all, two points connected make a line, and lines have a way of wandering. But when Benj flew from Canada to Costa Rica a few days later, it marked more than a simple trajectory, but what can only be termed a "convergence." "Agent 13, this is Agent 47," I said into the Chicago answering machine, "Benj and I are both in target region. Rendezvous set for 7 february, general post office, Panama City. Please transmit your arrival data to the machine or to the network. I'm very excited to see you. Agent 47 out." ...And that's how it had been from the start of the whole endeavor: using voicemail, the internet, and some few direct communications, all nine of us had arranged to converge from all over the planet on the jungles of Panama, there to witness an even greater convergence, perhaps the greatest on earth, a total eclipse of the sun.

So that two weeks later, as I landed in Panama's Tocumen Airport, I felt a rush of excitement, not only the freedom thrill of a new place, an adventure beginning, of learning an unfamiliar environment, feelings which I so often associate with unguided movement and travel-drift; but this time with the added kick of that elusive substance: direction, motion towards, a coming-together of forces usually left to their own devices. I generally shun the idea of planning, or at least the predetermination of minor details, preferring to let my world unfold around me and then working with what I'm given on a spur-of-the-moment basis. Thus I had achieved successful adventures traveling alone to previous eclipses. But this one had to be a special case, because here I had a special goal: to see the eclipse, my fifth consecutive in as many countries, only this time with friends from different places and phases in and of my life, all coming together from a wide assortment of locations and times, a confluence of many lifeworlds focused upon Panama, with me as the pinpointing lens, at the mandate of the shadow of the moon. For this I was willing to abandon my customary abandon, to coordinate and scheme, concerning myself with logistics and scheduling, the assembling of the group.

A year earlier, poring over NASA maps with 13, we had selected a small coastal dot on the Panamanian-Colombian border called Jaque as the ideal place to watch the event. We only half-jokingly agreed to meet at the Jaque post office the day before the eclipse, at noon. But since that time, so much had changed: more and more friends with whom I keep in touch had, one by one, agreed to come along, to meet me and each other, to see the magic of celestial mechanics, and to escape what for most of them would be the depths of winter, opting rather for the steaming humidity of the Darien jungles. Nine people. This would not be a simple trip. To facilitate the process, I constructed a web page, a forum where everyone interested in participating could meet and discuss the planning, to work out the necessary details of the trek. And in that web page we saw the first blinding glimmers of what would come. Everyone pitched into the process, doing independent research on various and necessary aspects of the challenge before us, and posting their findings. Alexis, an old friend and now an MD, reported on health precautions for the region. 13, master of maps and navigation, contributed crucial analyses of the topography of our target area. I gathered information about visas, local guerrilla activity, and the eclipse itself, while others found out about flights, equipment, and in a remarkable way, each other, as we turned from a hopeful collection of interested parties into an impromptu symphony of friendly, motivated, directed cooperation. As each new bulletin and letter appeared on the web, the trip began to take on life, forming itself under our power, evolving in shape and ultimately solidifying into a concrete future.

All this preparation, months in the making, suddenly became real as I stepped out of the airport and caught a cab into Panama City. Benj had arrived the previous day, and now I was about to see him for the first time in over two years, to get the project underway in reality, dragging it off the computer screen and into the world. In what Spanish I could muster, I told the driver to take me to Plaza Catedrale, the post office. He seemed wary, warning me that it was an unsafe part of town. But I had no choice: Benj would meet me there, and I him. So off we set through my first view of a city built of razorwire and cinderblocks, security guards and street-strewn rubble, to the original Spanish post office in the oldest part of town. We picked up a few additional passengers along the way -- they were headed the same direction, after all -- and when we finally arrived at the post office an argument erupted between the driver and my fellow passengers. It seemed that they shared concerns about letting me go, sure that I'd be mugged or killed or worse. Benj was nowhere in sight, and I admit that the area did seem a little scruffy, but I was determined to be at the rendezvous on time and wanted very much to get out of the car. Ultimately the debate resolved itself, to the effect that I should first check into a cheap hotel in the area, on the presumption that if I could stash my pack before coming to meet Benj, at least I wouldn't lose everything I had when I got mugged. Everyone seemed agreed, and since their knowledge of the area was clearly better informed than my own, I acquiesced, and the cab started moving again.

One block later I spied Benj, knapsack on his shoulder and not a worry in the world, sashaying down the street on his way to meet me. I asked the cabby to stop, thanked everyone in the car for their help, and hefting my pack, strolled over to greet my friend. It was good to see him after so long. We'd met seven years earlier in Austria, and since that time written two plays together, one in Chicago, and one in Toronto, his home. But since the second run of the second play, we'd confined our togetherness to the phone and the internet. Now we once more walked side-by-side, and nothing had changed, the spark was there as ever, aided by the complicity of the task before us, and the delight of exploring a new place. Our job now, along with 13, who would arrive two days later, was to survey the needs of the group on-site, working out the details of accommodation and transport, food and fun. We were the advance team, and we had two weeks to sort out the eclipse before the others were due to trickle across the border.

Benj had already begun his recon effort, finding us a nice place to stay, a little hotel with a few comfortable amenities and a low price tag, situated exactly between the old and new parts of town. We walked there, catching up with each other and delighting in being together in Panama. Passing through the old buildings into a busy commercial walking-street lined with shops and swarming with people, I began to get a feel for the territory, a city taken from a collection of indigenous tribes by the Spanish and then later returned, modernized, and converted into an international trade center by the building of the Canal in 1914. This combination of Native, European, and U.S. influences, and with the addition of black people from the West Indies, made for as thorough an ethnic blend as anywhere I've seen, a city of coexistence, development, and spirit. Under U.S. control and despite numerous local political excesses through the years, the Canal has allowed Panama an economic boost toward prosperity, with the looming promise of the return of the Canal to Panamanian administration in 1999. On the street, this all manifested itself as a mixture of cultures and people, of 3rd- and lst- worlds, squalor next to gleam, with the sharp edge of danger requiring an overabundance of razorwire and security guards in front of every business and building.

Benj and I went out that night, just to walk, to see, to digest. And over the next few days we did a fair job of learning the basics of Panama City, how to get around, and the fundamental geography of the area. While parrying a constant stream of thug-warnings from police and passers-by, we talked a bit about the upcoming adventure, found the internet and some of the city's other resources, but let most of the actual work wait while we oriented ourselves to our environment and each other, in anticipation of the third member of our advance team.

On the evening of the 10th at dusk, with the full sun half below the horizon and the full moon half above it across the shining purple sky, I went to the airport to collect 13. After more than a year it was a pleasure to be together again. In the five years since our first meeting, we had taken many road-trips together, connecting the dots on hotspring maps across the US, and as well as a true friend and a compatible traveling partner, he'd proved himself to be an extraordinary navigator. For all these reasons and more, I knew I'd be glad of his company in the weeks ahead.

Back at the hotel, we three drank to the task before us, full of excitement at the thought of the project. We also began to assess our position relative to our goal. We needed, essentially, to get nine people to a roadless, phoneless town reputed to be in the heart of the guerrilla insurgency zone, with all the food and gear we might require, see an eclipse, and then get everybody home. For this we had to arrange transport round trip, gather supplies, and possibly go to explore Jaque itself, its resources, its security, and the surrounding area. 13 had come equipped with, among other things, a GPS, with which we hoped to locate the precise spot, in the jungles outside Jaque, of the eclipse's maximum umbral duration.

But for the moment, that vague elucidation of our goal was enough. We went out that night, Benj and I showing 13 some of the nightlife we had discovered in his absence, including a bar called "My Place," a seedy dance floor full of off-duty American military types and too many beautiful young Panamanian girls to count, girls who, as one G.I. explained to me, "aren't hookers... they're in it for marriage." It made for quite a scene, a treat for voyeurs like myself and my two friends, to watch the bodies moving, the men wiggling with pleasure at the beauty of their partners, and the women wiggling too, trying to wiggle their way up the social ladder. Also that night I met Chris, a naval meteorologist, whom I plied with questions about cloudcover and El Nino, both a threat to clear-day viewing of the eclipse for which we had come so far. He gave me lots of useful information, although not all of it promising, and suggested that before we head out into the jungle, we come to his office and get some up-to-the-minute satellite weather-maps. I gratefully accepted his offer, told him I'd call him, and then passed a few more hours dancing and watching other people dance, before we ultimately set off for home.

As we stumbled along the streets of Panama that night, after repeated toasts to "Team Recon," as we called ourselves, I pointed up to the moon, full and bright in the warm tropical sky. "This, gentlemen," I said, "is how much time we have left. Every night starting tomorrow, the moon will get smaller, a meter counting down to zero. When it's gone, it will make sneak appearance the next day, and blot out the sun." And there we three stood, staring up at the cause of all this impending madness, struck by the power of the whims of the cosmos to bring us together to that foreign sidewalk. Eventually, feeling ready for the job we had set for ourselves, we eased our way home, and to bed.

The following day we went to work, preparing for our adventure even as the city of Panama began its preparations for their Carnaval festivities. As the roadblocks went up and decorations started to encrust the major thoroughfares, our first order of business was to secure transportation for us and our friends. We had something of a head-start: Alexis had been e-mailing with a British journalist named Jon Mitchell who lived in Panama, reporting on the political situations there and the build-up toward the hand-over of the canal. Jon had claimed that he could help us charter a boat for a small sum, in which to travel with us to the umbral zone near Jaque. We called, set up a meeting with him in a posh cafe of his choosing, and met him punctually that afternoon.

He was not at all what we expected to find. Far from the worldly wisdom and penetrating quietude of a deep journalistic thinker, Jon came off as something of an upstart, tense, young, fierce in a way, and honestly, a bit of an asshole. His insights into Panamanian culture and politics were no doubt interesting and well-informed, but his hard-edged method of speaking and his general demeanor left room not for conversation or discussion, but only for acceptance. Add to this his brutal stories of various girlfriends in the city and his businesslike deceptions with regard to their intentions, and we began to form a strong dislike to him from the start. However, we shared a common goal, which seemed enough to help us endure his increasingly boorish company, so we buckled down after a bit of chatter and began to talk terms. It turned out that he had done none of the transport research he had offered to do, so cock-sure was he of easily finding a cheap boat. And so our initial meeting came to nothing but an introduction, and a promise to keep in touch as we all pursued our various paths of investigation.

Privately, Benj, 13 and I agreed that we could not depend upon Jon to come through, but must do our own work to secure passage to Jaque. Since our group was so large, we did have the luxury of being able to charter an airplane, something I'd never done before... but it was not a luxury we wanted. Far better, we thought, to travel down the coast by boat, to see the land go by with the knowing anticipation that each passing tree and beach meant we were that much closer to the path of the moon's shadow. And so Team Recon spent its time -- time we originally planned to spend in the Darien jungles scouting out terrain -- trying through myriad and branching avenues to book transport for our group.

We passed afternoons and evenings at the Balboa Yacht Club bar discussing umbral coordinates and boat availabilities with high-priced sport fishermen and wealthy yacht owners. For the yacht-club bulletin board, 13 drew a beautiful poster advertising our needs, and we met a fascinating range of boatmen, from slouchy American water-gypsies out to see the world without a care in the world nor a possession beyond the contents of their boats, to cocky deep-sea game-hunters intent on proving their personal value in every sentence they uttered. We even met a middle-aged American man in a white shirt and blue insignia cap, who claimed to own all the land surrounding Jaque including the village itself. And we talked to them all. We had our maps, we had our coordinate charts, we had our schedule; we explained and explained and explained. And in every case, the price asked far exceeded our capacity to pay.

Following another potential lead, we wended our way through stacks of lumber and crated cargo at Panama's seedy and squalid commercial dock, in search of a worthy banana-boat to make the journey southward. These boats, while not as pristine or comfortable as those moored at the Yacht Club, were to my eye far more beautiful, with their old wood and peeling paint, their ramshackle construction, the very essence of functional dilapidation. They also came cheaply, at only 8 dollars a head for the journey we required. The problem was dependability -- there was none, and we needed some -- and timing, since Carnaval had completely altered the normal schedules, what schedules there were, of the vessels' embarkations. So we made tentative deals with their owners, and sought further for better solutions on which we could more heavily rely.

We spent untold hours calling charter boat- and airlines, wrangling over prices and then wrangling over prices, and then calling them back to wrangle over prices some more, bargaining and negotiating, trying different combinations of various-sized craft, bringing prices from one agency to another, and working out scheduling and weight restriction issues.

We even went so far as to visit the various Universities, seeking out their physics and astro departments, trying to get invited along with any expeditions they might be mounting to the Jaque region.

And although all of these efforts did bear fruit, in their way, we felt ultimately forced, against our preference, to fly: what yachts were available and capable of holding a group our size for the time required cost far too much to consider; the banana-boats were all leaving either too early or too late, but definitely not during Carnaval; and Jon's efforts, what little he made, yielded exactly nothing at all. And so, in the end, we concluded our deliberations and reserved two small planes: enough for ourselves and our stuff, set to drop us, our packs, equipment and food into the jungle the very morning of Carnival Tuesday -- Fat Tuesday -- Martes Gordo -- and pick us up Saturday afternoon, four days later. Even this turned into a trial: because a local tour company planned to bring a group of eclipsechasers to Jaque to witness the event, many of the available planes had already been taken. So though we were able to book the two planes necessary to get us all down to the umbral zone, only one plane was available to take us back. We did what we could, sure that in the end everything would work out.

Of course, we had not been working solidly around-the clock during all this time; we were in Panama after all, we were together, and we wanted to have some fun. Our exploration of the city's daylife fascinated us, with its thriving street action, its variety of cultures all mixed into one relatively small city, and the distinction between its squalor and wealth, sitting side-by-side with high walls between. We visited markets, went to a cockfight, played bingo, we wandered the streets, and soaked up the blinding light of the hot Mayan sun. Equally, our investigation into Panama's nightlife never ceased, and was aided by invitations to parties, extended to us initially through Jon, at several private homes. Jon actually came in handy for something after all, because through him we met a whole range of very cool people, French and American, Swiss and Panamanian, and got along with them far better than with Jon himself. We all danced and laughed and talked, and got invited to still more parties, and generally made a good time of our Team Recon off-hours. But the work for which we had come was tantamount, and sometimes evidenced itself during these leisure periods. I met a Swiss pilot at one of the parties we attended, and spent time with him, even while we all danced, trying to work out a deal. One American party-host lived by himself in an absolutely enormous apartment with a stunning view of the water and more space than he could possibly need, so we approached him with the idea that he could cover two months' rent by letting our group stay with him for the few days we would all be in Panama City; but he had, at his fiancee's behest, to refuse our offer. We mixed our work with our pleasure, but since the work was to us a pleasure in its own right, we thoroughly enjoyed all of our time and relished each moment as it passed us by.

But once the planes were reserved, we did indeed feel in need of a respite from nearly two weeks of urban rush. So, to cap off our tripartite experience as Team Recon, Benj, 13 and I boarded a small plane across the isthmus, bound for the San Blas Islands. These tiny dots of land make a chain all along Panama's southeastern coastline and are so small in many cases that, for example, our stilt-and-thatch hotel there was actually bigger than the island it occupied, the water lapping underneath the floors as we slept. The sea, limpid green and nicely salty, thinned to such a shallow in places that we could easily walk from island to island, exploring the tiny villages they contained, and enjoying the slow freshness of rural island air. Three days of hammocking and swimming did us a world of good, and we returned to the city refreshed, and ready for more friends to join our adventure.

The evening of the 20th, as the moon reached its fourth quarter, one week from the eclipse and on the first night of the mad Carnaval celebration, Max and Alexis flew to Panama City from New York, and the Team Recon phase of our adventure was officially at an end.

Max and Alexis are both friends from college, assigned to live in the same first-year dorm as myself by forces almost as inscrutable as those which convened us now. Both of them had since been living in New York, Max as a geek, Alexis as a neurologist. Both would be assets for the expedition. Max, with his careful, intelligent wisdom and strong problem-solving will, is the sort of person I would absolutely want alongside me in any survival situation, while Alexis, beyond being a brilliant doctor, which always comes in handy, is a brilliant person in general, energetic, with an additional edge of insane unpredictability which had caused so much fun for us in the past. They arrived, we taxied back to the hotel, and met up with Benj and 13 to catch up on details, get oriented to the situation, and go out on the town.

During the interim days that followed, our group, now five, enjoyed the city and each other. Carnaval was slowly building toward the onset of Lent with outdoor music, firetrucks spraying down the crowds as a respite from the tropical heat, lots of confetti, and startlingly large quantities of beer distributed by the palletload to dozens of tent-kiosks all along Via Espana, the main commercial avenue of the city. The street had been claimed for pedestrian use, and police units on either end of the designated area thoroughly controlled the foot traffic, netting themselves a wide variety of clubs, machetes, batons and knives, which they kept on display in the carefully guarded security of an open-topped cardboard box. We five strolled through the crowds, enjoying their enjoyment, and our own, squirting each other and passers-by with newly acquired water pistols, and drinking in the sunlight even as we drank down can after can of flavorless Panamanian beer.

And at last, on the afternoon of the 22nd, Lee, Daedalus, Sarah and Micheline all flew into Panama City, four days before the eclipse, and deep into the Carnaval festivities. Lee was my oldest friend joining our group: we became friends in junior high school, but since college had lived in very different places. I looked forward to this journey as a re-establishment of a friendship which had weakened through separation, but never through intent. A sharper wit you won't find, nor a cleverer mind or a better frisbee player. His decision to join our adventure had been a very welcome one. Micheline was a relatively new friend. We had gone dancing together every night in Hong Kong during the weeks preceding the frenzied change-over celebrations the previous year, and had quickly formed a solid friendship in that time of societal instability. Originally from Martinique, she had been living in Asia for a long time, using her impressive polyglot powers to find translation jobs as she traveled. She had also come the farthest to get to Panama, having left from Vietnam only a few days before. Smart, fun, Spanish-speaking: I was glad she had decided to come along. And rounding out the group, Daedalus and Sarah were the wildcards. 13 had met them at a Chicago bar, where they easily agreed to come along with us. No one really knew anything about them, but far from being a source of concern, this element of randomness and new faces seemed appropriate, friendly, and welcome as a constructive force, adding unknown strengths to the collective abilities of our party.

Two hours later, all nine of us in full assembly gathered on the roof to drink champagne and discuss our imminent expedition. Now, with the completion of our roster, the trip took on the character of a pilgrimage, an alignment between ourselves and the heavens, with us circling the globe to focus on Jaque, while, in parallel with our intentions, the celestial bodies moved, shifted, and schemed in the clear sky above us, the twin physics of the cosmos and of our team both working out the last-detail preparations for the eclipse which seemed, with the rapid waning of the crescent moon, tantalizing, promising, and drawing ever closer to that final moment we would share with the sun, the moon, the earth, and each other.

Eclipses are delimited by four distinct moments, called contacts. At first contact, the apparent edges of the moon and the sun collide, and the slow process of occultation begins, with the moon's solar obstruction increasing patiently over a few hours toward second contact, at which point the moon completely covers the sun: the moment of totality. As far as our group was concerned, second contact had been reached. Now we were in the heart of the project: those precious moments of complete and unified assembly. This would last, like the darkness of the moon's shadow sweeping over the Panamanian jungles, for only a brief time before the advent of third contact, and the beginning of the end. We thrilled at the prospect, and set to work on our final preparations.

That night we worked out our menus and supplies, everyone chipping in with what they had brought and what we might need, and everyone cooperating so skillfully, so seamlessly, I felt no small personal gratification in being instrumental in the construction of a project which had taken on such a warm lifeforce of its own. The discussions proceeded without argument, but rather with a spirit of objective-achievement, amid laughter, happy new acquaintance, and anticipation. Bearing in mind the possibility that we might not find food or shelter where we planned to go, and also considering the bare-bones weight restrictions we would be subject to on the planes, our packs became streamlined, consolidated, and efficient. We made a group journey to a large supermarket, buying the staples we had determined would be necessary. Our menu ended up as a relatively basic one; since the needs of nine people over five days turned out to entail quite a bit of food, we decided to forego extravagance and only ensure that we would be able to eat, rather than to eat particularly well. We had dry grains, powdered milk, cheese, foil-pack campfire meals, and some other vegetables and staples. But it was enough. The feelings of community, complicity and participation which evolved out of that first night's preparation set a pattern, a unity, a common purpose and determination. We all worked for each other, and we knew that everything would be all right. On our way out of the hotel that evening, a passing policeman was nice enough to take a group photo for us, after which his partner was nice enough to take a group photo of us with the first policeman included in the picture. Our spirits high, we set out to wander through the Carnaval.

The 23rd passed in final detail planning and shopping, in talking to the naval meteorologist I had met so many weeks before, and in exploring the crazed streets of the ongoing celebrations which rocked the city with music and jubilation. Our group dynamics too were phenomenal. It's hard to walk and explore in such large numbers, so we split into smaller units, which constantly recombined throughout the day, everybody mixing and meeting, everybody part of the whole, and independent as well. We watched Panamanians dancing through the streets, we watched police patrolling the craziness, and we watched as we all bonded to each other, the newcomers sinking into and becoming one with our goal and mission. I felt an exhiliration in the fact that so many different places and times in my life had so successfully consolidated into a single functional -- and more: congenial -- here and now. We were a team, we felt like one, and all together we retired early that Monday night, eager for the big day ahead.

The endpoint of the city's party was literally the beginning point for ours. The passage through Mardi Gras to Ash Wednesday marked for us a major transition: from the city to the jungle, from deliberation to realization; for on Carnaval morning, as Panama awoke to its final day of excess and spectacle, we boarded our two planes and an hour later, an hour full of roaring propellers and lush coastal landscapes, coasted to a stop on the rugged earthen airstrip of Jaque. It was glorious to watch the town emerge from the coastline, not only as a relief that all the stresses of planning and logistics had successfully worked themselves out, but also that we had actually managed to arrive in Jaque at all, after years of throwing the name around as the best place on land to be for this particular eclipse.

We strolled, laden with gear, into the village and somehow managed to immediately meet the people we needed to find. Sometimes things work out that way, and we thus stumbled right into a chance audience with Jaque's community leader and its schoolteacher, enjoying a drink in the shade of a spreading tree on the main village road. Micheline's Spanish was now coming in very handy indeed as she filled them in on our situation, why we had come and that we were looking for a place to stay. They knew all about eclipse, since not only was a tour-group due to arrive the next day, but the President of Panama also had plans to pfly to jaque the morning of the eclipse. However, since we were the first and the most independent visitors to the town, we found ourselves almost too easily handed the keys to the community meeting house, a large cement-floored structure with chest-high walls augmented by chain-link reaching to the corrugated roof. It came equipped with some benches and tables, a blackboard, and a band saw, and delighted us as a secure place to keep our things and ourselves. We thanked our benefactors, moved in, and set out to explore Jaque.

Still having a few logistical issues to tackle, we decided to get them out of the way first. For although Jaque was the best town on earth from which to see the eclipse, it still received 8 seconds less darkness then a point nearer the Colombian border, the sight of a tiny Indian settlement called El Guayabo 15 kilometers further down the coast, which fortunately enough for its 25 inhabitants, would spend a full 4 minutes and 4 seconds bathed in the eerie darkness of the moon's shadow, longer than any spot on land on earth. With that in mind, we once more approached the Mayor and through him arranged for two canoes to Guayabo on Thursday morning, returning the same afternoon. With that taken care of, we then tried unsuccessfully to secure passage on a cargo boat back to Panama City after the eclipse, since we had only been able to reserve one of the two planes necessary for a complete return journey. "Totalmente occupado," said the boat captain, when we finally located him dancing in a Carnaval party on a small basketball court -- but I didn't care. The village vibe, with its broad sense of space complimenting its tranquil conception of time, had already begun to so infect me with a passivity so different from the rush and anxiety of the preceding weeks that I felt ready to wait, endlessly if necessary, for later transportation, with the certainty that I wouldn't even really be waiting at all, but simply passing pleasant time until an opportunity arose.

Our group split up into ones, twos and threes at that point, and drifted about, often recombining into different permutations throughout the afternoon. For my part I wandered the town, the beach, the dusty streets, reveling in the being-there of it, a culmination of so much forethought, hope, effort and luck. We had collectively united, from a host of continents and countries, a collection of independent and carefully directed life-paths, we had managed to coordinate and converge, and in so doing to align ourselves with that ever more patient and deliberate conjunction wherein the moon, with calm precision, would dominate the sun in the afternoon sky, for a short time only, and in only a very few lucky locations, of which this was the best one of all.

The balance of that first day passed in a sort of non-directed orientation. We'd bump into each other in dusty pathways between shambling houses: "Where you headed?" "Oh over that way," "Oh yeah? I was headed over toward this way." "Oh yeah?" "Cool. See 'ya." "See 'ya.", so that when we all met again for dinner, we had collectively collected a fairly complete idea of what Jaque was, i.e. a lazy little town with no roads or phone lines leading to it, but lots of paths leading everywhere within it: to the houses and the small grocery stalls; to the tiny shack of a post office and the even tinier shack of a library; to the school and the clinic; to the airstrip at which we entered and the town hall at which we lived; and of course, at the end of every road that didn't run parallel to it, the broad brown strip of sandy beach separating the peace of Jaque from the tumult of the Pacific Ocean. A nice place, a quiet place, made only a bit lively by the perhaps 20 people dancing in a central square, barely dressed in the blasting heat of afternoon and with beers in their hands, to the cardiac thudding of 3 djembes being beaten into a mesmerizing gallop of hollow rhythms. After all, it was Carnaval Tuesday, a party is a party, and besides which, Jaque's Carnaval felt downright visceral, authentic, a refreshing sight after the commercial conquest of Panama's celebration. Here we felt more than ever the Latin-American spirit, wild with energy and fervor, and beyond an accident of mere geography, this seemed the right place to be for the eclipse. The eyes of the Panamanians are eclipses in themselves, the glowing shining black dots surrounded by their radiant white sclera. Their pupils, their irises, as dark and fiery as the occulting moon, conceal and reveal a power just behind them, deep beyond, full of the magic of the energy and mysticism of the Central American soil. It made for a comfortable mixture of life and peace, a cozy wide open place, so that when we all assembled at city hall at dusk, I felt something of a tacit consensus that Jaque already felt, for all of us, a little bit like home.

Micheline, whose grasp of Spanish became more and more invaluable with every passing hour, had arranged for a local woman to make us dinner at her home, on the likely assumption that when the hundreds of local-resource-dependent tourists would arrive the following day, we might not have the option again.

Dinner was delicious, if crowded, and stumbling out into the quiet mosquito-laden night, we felt the cool warmth of the humid jungle air, the brilliance of the stars overhead, and that special freedom of isolation, of unreachability, of solidarity: we were together, and only we knew where. Disassembling into small groups again, we drifted about the town, or wrote, or read, passing the time pleasantly, until finally all congregating on the beach to sleep. For although we certainly had the option to pass the night in our city hall, the wide strip of brown sand offered an irrefusable invitation. A few of us set up the tents they had brought, but for the most part we simply crashed out right on the sand, pressed to the ground and open to the sky.

I awoke last the following morning with the sun battering down upon my body through a crystal clear sky: a good sign. This day would be the first do-nothing day for me in weeks, and I relished enjoying this long-awaited dolce far niente in such a nice setting. I rose and wound my way through village paths to our base camp only to find Daedalus sitting, writing. The rest were out and about, so I took advantage of the opportunity to talk to Daedalus, to learn more about him. He didn't disappoint me. He worked in the theater in Chicago as a techie, and had the sort of clear-thinking goofiness, the lateral logic, that comes from and leads to such theatrical associations. He spoke with a soft, thoughtful clarity, and thus inaugurated my day into the same attitude of meditative pension. I enjoyed a haphazard breakfast of some of the food we had brought, contemplated the magic of the various worlds on earth, and then considered the day ahead: I wanted to be under the sky at the precise moment 24 hours before the eclipse would become total, and I had long ago made a very important promise which I wanted to fulfill. Two easy pleasures. So thinking, I set out upon my way.

I found some of my friends swimming in the ocean surf -- or rather trying to stay above it. At this point, the moon and sun, so close to occupying the same position in the sky as one another, were already certainly pulling in the same direction with all their gravitational mights. This made for wild water and extreme tides. I watched for a while, and then wandered on. I did some writing. I saw the first planeload of Eco-Tours tourists arrive, all wearing white Eco-Tours shirts and bright orange Eco-Tours caps. I watched them move into the small camp of tents which had been set up in a nearby field. I asked people the time with increasing frequency as it mounted towards the minute of the next day's event. When that minute came, I stood in the middle of a dusty road with my arms outstretched to the clear blue sky, happy in its purity and hoping that it would remain so for the next day at least. Last year, in northern Mongolia, the day before had been as beautiful as you could want, only to become one day later a raging blizzard which all but eclipsed the eclipse itself. Any eclipse journey risks clouds, but the freshness of the air and the glory of the sky gave me hope for what would come.

Meandering on, I talked with some locals in what Spanish I could find. (Several weeks in Panama had certainly strengthened my abilities, but not as much as I would have liked.) And promptly at noon, on this the day before the eclipse, I stood before the door of the single-room shack which for Jaque functioned as post office. I waited. A breeze came by. I waited longer. Some locals, braving the heat of the day, walked past me and said hello. After a half-hour or so, I sadly abandoned my post, and in mock-anger went off to find 13 and mock-yell at him.

I found him at city hall having a snack. "Where were you?" I demanded. He looked at me confused for a moment, and then our years-ago rendezvous appointment dawned upon him. The post office, Jaque, noon, the day before the eclipse. "Sorry," he said. And that was enough.

Throughout the day more Eco-Tours people coasted to a stop on the town's airstrip, and settled into their luxury tents. All wore the same day-glo orange caps, and they kept pretty much to themselves. I spoke with a few of them, Spaniards, to find out how they had decided to come to Jaque, and learned that like myself, they had been shadow-chasers for several years. We talked shop, comparing locations from previous adventures: while I was in Bolivia they were in Chile; I went to Borneo, they to Thailand; I was in a small town in Mongolia, they in a large town in Mongolia: always so close to one another, and finally now in the same place. Our eclipsetalk continued, full of bandied-about references to to durations, contact timings, and even our inchoate plans for the following year's event.

All the while, more orange hats arrived. Dozens and dozens of orange hats. The way their camp had been set up for them, they comprised a village in themselves, and perhaps didn't even notice that while they slept in expensive tents and paid top-dollar to the only tour company that would bring them here, we slept on the beach and lived on the cheap, taking advantage of their presence in the form of latrines and showers. Meanwhile and against all concept of normalcy, Jaque had been suddenly flooded with gringos. The eclipse would certainly be a special piece of Jaque history, but I think that the townspeople will likely remember it more for the tourists than for the eclipse itself, especially because of the local belief that eclipses are a force of evil to be shunned, not watched. According to one person we asked, if a pregnant woman ventures outside during an eclipse, her child will be born half-lizard. But even beyond this inscrutable power, nothing like this had ever happened to Jaque before, such an influx of foreigners, white skin, money. The townspeople did their best to make use of the situation: prices for sodas and small food items in the little shops skyrocketed. Beer went at a premium. One local business had had the foresight to paint T-shirts for the event, which sold at prices only the rich could afford. It was a circus, but a mellow one; the people of Jaque know no other way to live, and I hope they used their town's temporary special status to lasting good effect.

The townspeople seemed to sense that we were not like the hordes of high-end tourists who had descended upon them from beyond the trees, and we felt as though we had to some degree integrated ourselves into Jaque, making friends and becoming something of a fixture in the town. We met Melchior, the local missionary, who showed us around a bit, and we spent a good deal of time with many of the children who were always in evidence at our city-hall home. Benj nicknamed the skinniest of them "Gordo," who, with his friends, spent hours hanging around our place, showing an interest in us and also in all the gear we had brought. They had never seen anything like us. And so when that afternoon Lee, Benj, 13 and I gathered for a game of frisbee, we soon ended up teaching the local children to throw the plastic disc properly on their own. They loved it, never having seen the magic of frisbee before, and joined us in our game. Also that afternoon, we reversed our decision to canoe down the coast to Guayabo, choosing instead to enjoy the celestial spectacle in Jaque, since the Eco-Tours people were such a spectacle in themselves, and also since the President of Panama was due to arrive by helicopter for the eclipse the next morning. Besides, all things told, we liked the town, even with all the tourists around. It was a fun atmosphere, lunar-festive, and somehow the extra 8 seconds didn't seem worth missing the total Jaque experience.

When night had fallen, we enjoyed a tremendous feast. Micheline and Lee had arranged during the day to buy fresh fish from a local fisherman, and between that luxury, the staples we had brought with us, and 13's, Max's and Micheline's cooking skills, we all enjoyed a campfire-cooked culinary delight. They toiled over the fire, 13 in particular, streaked with smoke-smeared sweat and taking constant swigs of beer as he cooked fish after fish after fish. In fact, we had enough to invite a few other independent travelers, who had a fire down the beach from ours, to join us. All the feelings were warm and open as we all sat around our fire, drinking tequila and vodka we had brought, beer from the town, and talking and talking and talking, full of the joy of well-planned fun and anticipation of the ultimate thrill the following morning. An eclipse is a function of the new moon, and the night sky glowed with the unchecked splendor of the milky way, a huge billowing mass of dust with each speck a star, a galaxy in full bloom. It made a spectacular canopy for our fire and festivity, especially with the added knowledge that somewhere out there, hidden from sight, lurked the moon, inching ever closer towards her conquest of the sun.

Nobody pitched a tent that night, so comfortable was the sand next to the fire with the dazzling show above. But since the previous evening some of us had been touched -- though not really pinched -- by crabs while we slept, Alexis took it upon himself to warn them off. The concern for life so generally cultivated by members of the medical profession apparently, at least in Alexis' case, doesn't extend to arthropods, because from the darkness around our fire we could hear him, "Whack!" killing crabs with a heavy stick, "Whack!" assembling a perimeter "Whack!" of dead crabs as a warning "Whack!" against the intrusion of others. "Whack!" We all marveled at the incongruity of this man of medicine killing small animals with such relish, but considering his unpredictable nature and the enthusiasm for pretty much everything he ever sets his mind to, it seemed not so very strange after all. But of course it was all to no avail, since the dead crabs only served to attract, rather than frighten, their survivors, who visited us harmlessly in the night despite all of the good doctor's precautions.

Sarah was the quietest of the group. Throughout our entire time in Panama, she uttered hardly a word, being instead content, or at least acquiescent, to go along with our plans and decisions. Quietly she always sat; quietly she always walked; and quietly, beneath the power of the tropical sun, she turned redder and redder and redder. It hurt to see, but more than that, I was glad she chose not to wander out of the visible area illuminated by our campfire. She could too easily have been mistaken for a lobster, and then against Alexis she wouldn't have stood a chance.

And deep into the night we talked and laughed and drank and snacked and tended the fire and bathed in the glories of our good fortune, until the last one of us had happily drifted off to sleep.

Again the sun woke me up, but I didn't mind in the least. I knew he would not rule the day for long. I did mind, however, the scattered but intensifying mass of clouds slowly drifting over us from the south, threatening the occasion with the possibility of opaque grey. Through the morning, the clouds gathered and thickened, until the sky was a platinum sheet with a smear of white for a sun, and not a trace of blue in sight. "Oh, well," I thought. "You take your chances." I felt a bit disappointed, but not overly so... clouds are always a possibility, the dreaded C-word, and such fates cannot be combatted. I also maintained a small but dwindling hope that the sky might clear... we had a few hours left, and the clouds had appeared so quickly, it seemed to me that they might as rapidly dissipate. So my spirits remained high. I had a good time wandering through the masses of orange hats, meeting their scowls with smiles and their despondent shrugs with hopeful grins. Everyone constantly watched the sky, consulted their watches, and looked at the sky some more.

The President of Panama arrived, preceded by security military with big guns and camouflage clothing who swept the area and secured the perimeter. The President himself flew the helicopter that brought him (one of his hobbies) and then with his wife, occupied a bench on the beach near where we slept. Some of us got our pictures taken with the President, some with his wife, but for the most part, we wandered around, looking at the sky and hoping.

Jon Mitchell also showed up. He flew down that morning, and would be returning on one of the Eco-Tour planes the same afternoon. We said hello to him, he looked doubtfully at the overcast sky, and then he stalked off to take pictures and talk to people for the story he wanted to write.

The moment of first contact was quickly approaching when, almost against all hope, the clouds began to thin. A strong southern breeze had brought the grey sky with it, and now worked to scatter the wall which separated us from the object of our journey. People looked up amazed. Holes began to appear in the fortress overhead, and when first contact occurred at 10:09 am, the beach was once more, miraculously, bathed in the bright sunlight, beneath which we gazed excitedly through our welder's glasses at the barely perceptible nick the moon had already eroded into the smooth edge of the sun's disc. Now came the real anxiety, for the clouds could just as easily reclaim the heavens before and during totality. We had two hours to wait for second contact, and tried to be as patiently optimistic about it as the moon, which never accelerated, but simply advanced, chipping away further and further into the bright power of the sky.

Our group had assembled on the beach, all with black glass over our eyes staring heavenward. More and more the sun waned into a crescent. More and more the attenuated light became surreal and dreamlike. And on and on pressed the moon in its deliberate orbit. Just before second contact was to strike, we moved into the water. The sea stood calm, motionless, trapped by the same magic as we, and as the scores of upturned heads on the beach behind us. So we stood, all together, knee-deep in the Pacific, which in the bizarre light had taken on the quality of mercury, a thick warm heavy slosh spreading our before us into the distances. The light now rapidly drained from the sky, the breeze picked up and cooled the land with an eerie, chilling breath. When so quickly, in the distances before us, on the surface of the ocean in which we stood, the shadow approached. Like the breeze which it had sent ahead as messenger, the darkness swept toward us and enveloped us all.

The plates of glass dropped from our eyes and we stared up at the fierce majesty which benignly crowned the midday sky. I heard Lee say, "Oh my god!" but that was all. Eclipses are quiet phenomena: I could not hear, I could only see, and I could see a perfectly circular hole burnt into the deep surface of the sky, revealing behind it a shiny depth more black than any universe. The edges of the hole blazed with streaked smears of coronal fire, a white so pure, and so full of color, containing all the brilliant shades of light and life visibly within its glow. A few planets had taken advantage of the moon's occulting presence to make themselves visible too, all of which left us only gaping, gawking, necks craning upward, unable to believe what we had known to expect. The quality of the darkness which surrounded us was, like the thin bright light which had preceded it, bizarre, unreal, the product of a skewed sky, the substance of a fantasy. And we stared, mesmerized with awe for the beauty of the power, and the power of the beauty, we beheld.

...

Three minutes and fifty-six seconds after second contact had begun, the sun sent us a warning, a bright beam cast through a lunar valley, a brilliant, piercing flash on the edge of the moon's black disc, and then with rapidly widening intensity, the light swept over us again as the shadow disappeared behind the hills, and the total eclipse was at an end.

A moment passed, then a cheer went up from the beach behind us. Awakening from our sky-induced stupor, we all looked around, and up, and at each other, filled with the moment, filled with amazement, awe, disbelief, a reality which had yet to fully sink into our minds, the euphoria of having gotten so far, and of having been rewarded so richly. We felt high. And we hugged. Out there in the water, we clumped into a mass and held each other with joy and satisfaction. We had done it.

The moon still had two hours in which to disentangle itself from the sun, but only as denouement: the real show was over. The time between third and fourth contacts is merely clean-up. Jaque had a clean-up too. The Eco-Tourists drained out of town on a series of chartered shuttle-flights to Panama City. Jon went with them, leaving a camera lens somewhere on the beach. The President lifted off beneath spinning rotors and went back to work, and his escort snipers and goons disappeared as well. A few hours later, all that remained beneath the clear sky were our team of nine, a few stragglers who would be going on later flights, and the town of Jaque, suddenly restored to its quiet self once again, only slightly tinged with residual echoes of the previous days' aberrations and excesses.

And although we still had a few days remaining in Jaque, it was the beginning of the end for us as well. We made the best of our time, visiting a traditional Kuna village upriver from Jaque, and relaxing in the calm that followed the craziness, feasting and sleeping on the beach and trying to maintain the high, to prolong the feeling of ascension even as the peak sloped up behind us in our minds.

On Saturday, everyone but Max, 13 and I boarded the plane which came to fetch them, and were whisked away to the big city. We three remained to await some other vessel or craft, knowing that, unlike our friends who had planes and plans, we had enough time to wait it out if necessary. But as it turned out, we were offered three extra seats on the last of the Eco-Tours planes that afternoon, and thus rejoined our friends the same day in Panama City. But the dispersal had begun. Daedalus and Sarah flew out early the next morning. A few days later, Benj too left, bound for Canada. The rest of us, six in all, split up into two groups, determined to meet up a few days later to climb a mountain in the north of Panama, and then to separate again for good, splintering into our various paths and lives. The eclipse had passed, and had drawn us all together; but now the sun and the moon were headed in different directions, not to meet again until the following August. And we too were headed in our separate ways, only with the joys and satisfactions of the whole project firmly rooted in our minds, and the hope that when the sun and moon would next collide in the daytime sky, we might again be there, as a group, to see it together.

It was a logistical nightmare to pull off: nine people with food and equipment, brought out to the jungles to sleep on the beach outside a town with no real resources; but pull it off we did, with style, with no real problems, and with fun glistening from every facet of the whole experience. But thinking about it on the plane back to Panama City, it seemed only natural to me that everything had gone so well. The moon and sun had aligned, their gravities pulling in exactly the same direction, all their combined energies focused upon a small spot of land... and all we did was allow ourselves to be swayed by that collective force, to be pulled toward its power, sucked into the shadow, from all over the world.