Fear and loathing in Latvia

Though the sky was clear, the day had dimmed, and the air was cold. The city streets, which had been crowded and busy half an hour before, were completely empty of people. I peered around at the silent city and shivered.

In retrospect, I suppose I could say that this moment was like living in a fantastical Disney version of my own life -- a supernatural cinematic moment where I learned a moral lesson on the importance of human interaction. The thing is, I wasn't thinking about Disney or morals. For an instant, all I felt was raw, irrational fear.

The fear slowly faded, but I must have stood alone on the street for a full minute before a passing car diverted my attention to an odd sight. Two blocks away, on the corner of Merkela and Brivibas, a crowd of about 10 people stared up at the sky. Breaking into a trot, I made my way toward them, occasionally glancing up to try to figure out what could possibly be holding their attention. I was half a block away before I noticed that one of the men on the corner was wearing welding goggles.

Suddenly, everything made sense. The world was not at an end; Riga was simply experiencing a partial solar eclipse. I'd read about the coming phenomenon weeks earlier, but -- amid my efforts to eliminate distractions and write -- I'd completely forgotten about it.

I nearly laughed when I realized what had just happened: Instead of experiencing the eclipse as an informed consumer, I had experienced the eclipse in the context of superstition, of brief medieval terror. Latvia had trumped my expectations again.

Crossing to the other side of the street, I entered Esplanade Park to discover a public spectacle that looked like a cross between a block party and an alien invasion. Inside the park, hundreds of Latvians looked skyward, shielding their eyes with darkened glass and floppy disks and silvery-lensed paper glasses. When I tried to squint skyward, a smiling man came up and handed me a strip of undeveloped photographic film. Taking the film, I looked up at the muted orange glow of a thinning crescent sun. I shivered again.

"The world is wilder in all directions," wrote Annie Dillard 25 years ago, "more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain or Lazarus."

Standing there, watching the sky go out, I knew exactly what Annie Dillard meant.

I also knew, however, that even Annie Dillard had to bind whoopee from her mind and let Lazarus rot in order to write that very passage.

Once the sun began to wax and the day began to warm, I caught the trolley-bus back to the suburbs. There, in the quiet confines of my yellow-walled room, I shuffled a fresh deck of notecards.

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