In 1979, Annie Dillard and her husband, Gary, travel to a small town near Yakima, Washington, to view the solar eclipse. In the hotel room, Dillard notices a hideous painting of a clown. Earlier in the day, while driving to the hotel, Dillard and Gary encounter a pass that has been blocked by an avalanche slide. Highway crews create a tunnel through the debris, and Dillard and Gary continue onward. In the hotel, Dillard sets the alarm for early in the morning.

The next morning, Dillard and Gary drive into the countryside until they find a hillside overlooking Yakima Valley. Others begin to arrive and set up camp on the hillside. The eclipse begins, and Dillard describes its strangeness and wonder, which begins to evolve into a kind of temporary madness: “I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong” (8). Colors become inverted, commonplace things look supernatural and frightening, and people appear as though they are dead: “I looked at Gary. [...] Everything was lost. He was a platinum print, a dead artist’s version of life” (9). People on the hill begin screaming as it suddenly appears that part of the sky is detaching, and the sun is being covered up by something “enormous and black” that Dillard has trouble correlating with the moon, since it materializes “out of thin air—black, and flat, and sliding, outlined in flame” (11).