Soon the moon will hide the sun at Sahlen Field, but nothing can eclipse Mark Twain there.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Buffalo is an ideal place to see the coming solar eclipse. That’s why the Buffalo Bisons and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are throwing a viewing party one month from today. It will give NASA scientists and other lucky visitors a major-league look from our minor-league ballpark.
In true Bisons style, there will be a giveaway at the door. No, not a Neil Armstrong bobblehead, but safety glasses for watching the lunar spectacular. These will be given to the first 2,000 folks who enter by the Swan Street gate. And there’s an elegant symmetry in that.
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More than 150 years ago, a boardinghouse stood where the Swan Street gate and the third-base grandstand now rise. Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, lived there for a while when he was editor of the Buffalo Express, whose offices were a short walk away.
That was 1869. Twenty years later, Twain’s satirical novel “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” was published. And guess a major plot point. Why, none other than a solar eclipse.
Hank Morgan is a 19th-century mechanic in Connecticut who suffers a blow to the head and awakens to find himself in Arthurian England in the sixth century. He is taken for a sorcerer and condemned to burn at the stake. Fortunately, he happens to know from history that there will be a solar eclipse at three minutes past noon on this day in the year 528, and he tells the unsuspecting masses that he will blot out the sun unless he is spared.
“There was my eclipse beginning! The life went boiling through my veins; I was a new man! The rim of black spread slowly into the sun’s disk, my heart beat higher and higher, and still the assemblage … stared into the sky, motionless. I knew that this gaze would be turned upon me next. When it was, I was ready. I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun.”
Tom Reigstad, our foremost local Twain scholar, loved to teach “Connecticut Yankee” in English courses at SUNY Buffalo State, where he is a professor emeritus.
“The eclipse scene is the first example in the novel of Hank using trickery to fool the hapless sixth-century Brits,” Reigstad says. “More importantly, though, it forecasts a theme in the novel — Hank trying to replace monarchical rule, darkness representing the king, and the sun’s return standing for democracy.”
Come to think of it, that makes Twain’s time-travel fantasy a fable for our own time. (The Washington Post’s masthead motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”)
Twain would surely enjoy that his first Buffalo residence is a ballpark now. “Connecticut Yankee” has a bit of baseball in it. Hank’s nickname for his sidekick is “my shortstop.” He even tries to teach the game to knights in heavy armor: “And when a man was running, and threw himself on his stomach to slide into his base, it was like an iron-clad coming into port.”
Knights playing baseball offers echoes of the Bisons’ previous ballpark, War Memorial Stadium, where the New York Knights played in the 1984 movie version of Bernard Malamud’s mythic novel “The Natural.”
When Roy Hobbs swats the lights-a-popping home run at the movie’s climax, the ball travels not just out of the ballpark, but across the sky and over the plains and prairies until at last it smacks into the glove of Hobbs’ son, Ted, in a field of golden wheat.
Real home runs don’t leave our airspace, of course, but in baseball lingo homers that soar highest are sometimes called moonshots. The term comes courtesy of Vin Scully, late poet laureate of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Turns out, Scully didn’t mean home runs hit hard enough to strike the moon. He named them after the high homers hit by Dodgers outfielder Wally Moon.
“Every man is a moon,” Twain once wrote, “and has a side which he turns to nobody: you have to slip around behind if you want to see it.”
You need only slip down to the ballpark to see the eclipse come April 8. You can see it other places, too, but where else offers the serendipity of a spot where Twain once lived — and where Bisons hit moonshots?
The day promises a bit of everything: Light and dark. The sun and the moon. Buffalo and the heavens above.
Come early. Use the Swan Street gate. And raise a pint to Hank and Wally.
Blue Moon, anyone?