I am back from Utopia. Jesus did not return.
Given the one-in-a-million odds of back-to-back full eclipses directly over my sister’s house in a small town called Utopia, I figured if Jesus was coming in my lifetime, this would be my best chance.
Alas, it was not to be. So I’m back at the grind, but still hopeful and optimistic.
I come in a long line of Christians who have been disappointed by the delay in the Rapture. The early Christians thought Jesus was coming any day now. That was two thousand years ago.
My father-in-law Bob Knight, who just turned 87 likes to say, “I know my home is in heaven but I’m not homesick.”
I disagree. A perfected body in heaven surrounded by your loved ones, both currently living and long gone, with no disease, no death, no illness, no stress, no worries. What’s not to like about that?
It’s human nature to fear the unknown and the preservation instinct is forged into our DNA. But I, for one, think the next life is going to be far better than this one.
But we have to wait it out. That’s what God commanded. We have to do our best and persevere. We’ve got to earn our wings, run the race and carry on. If we can laugh a lot and only cry a little along the way, then so much the better.
I saw a perfect eclipse on a clear day in Kentucky in 2017. It took my breath away. I’ll never forget the collective gasp of the crowd at the second of totality.
God gave us a sign with our only two heavenly bodies — the sun and the moon. Though the sun is 800 times farther away, it is 800 times bigger than the moon. So they appear almost exactly the same size to the human on surface earth. That’s quite a coincidence.
At the moment of eclipse totality, this God-given sign is overwhelming. It’s as though for a brief moment God is shouting out, “I am,” right before your eyes.
Having tasted that once, I hungered for it again. And this time instead of a two-minute totality, the moon was even closer to the earth so the totality would be four minutes.
A dozen or so of us sat in lawn chairs at 1 p.m. with our special eclipse shades, staring at the cloudy sky, on a hilltop in Utopia.
The forecast had been ominous for days, but we were hoping for clear skies. I prayedfor such with shameless audacity.
The people in Utopia were praying for the opposite. In church that Sunday, they were praying for rain. That’s how bad their four-year drought has been.
When my sister and brother-in-law moved to Utopia, the Sabinal River was overflowing with crystal clear water. It was a tubing, kayaking and boating paradise. A utopia. Since then, the expected 25 inches of rain a year has dropped to a third of that. The river beds are dry and the well water tables are dropping.
Between 1 p.m. and 1:30, there were numerous times when the clouds parted and we got a perfect view of the impending totality. But then just at the last moment, a big low dark rain cloud decided to plop right over our house and stay. Rats!
We could have jumped in our cars and driven a mile and gotten a good view, but we had no time. So we got skunked.
It did get very dark. All the sensor-based night lights came on. It was dark as night and stayed that way for four minutes. That was pretty cool. But we missed the dramatic shift from bright clear sunlight to instant darkness. That’s what made the crowd gasp in Kentucky in 2017. We didn’t get the gasp this time around. Oh well. Life has its disappointments. One must roll with the punches.
My sister and brother-in-law, both retired, moved to Utopia, population 228, when their former town of Roundtop, Texas, population 90, got too crowded with rich weekenders from Houston, Austin and San Antonio. So they moved from east of Austin to west of San Antonio, just 100 miles or so from the Mexican border.
You would think this area would be dry and desert but it is beautifully green, thanks in part to the dark green juniper trees. Other dominant trees are the mesquite, live oak, spanish oak, and if you’re lucky, the beautiful Texas madrone tree with its orange bark.
Having just come back from India, I realized how much the Texas hill country looks like India, except with one major exception. The diversity of flora in India is ten times that of Texas. Instead of four dominant varieties of trees, India had dozens. I guess that’s why they have so many spices.
As it turns out, as soon as Melanie and Steve moved to Utopia to escape the rich urban hordes, magazines started writing about Utopia as the next big chic rural boom place to buy getaway homes.
Sister Melanie divides Utopians into four basic groups: weekenders, newcomers, locals and old-timers.Many old-timers are land rich and cash poor. Land can sell for $20,000 an acre, spurred by the San Antonio boom. San Antonio is the faster growing big city in the United States and is only 50 miles away.
I met one family of old-timers that owned 1,000 acres, worth probably $20 million. They were just good old salt-of-the-earth people, ranchers basically, who just bought the right land at the right time. Is this a great country or what?
Sister Melanie is a retired CPA. Brother-in-law Steve worked for big oil companies for decades, traveling around the world and collecting amazing war stories. His back aches because a multi-ton piece of an oil rig landed on top of his head. Nobody could believe he wasn’t killed instantly.
Melanie and Steve have an amazing knack of buying Texas land in areas just before they boom. They buy under-valued houses at great low prices, spend a fortune renovating them, then make an even greater fortune selling them. Their place in Utopia is gorgeous.
It’s also just far enough away that you really feel like you are in another country. They live on top of a 1,000-foot hill that overlooks a gorgeous green valley.
As their many friends stopped by for the eclipse party, I kept wondering why there were so many old people. Oh yeah. That’s right. I’m old now. Strange how that sneaks up on you.
My 25-year-old son Lawrence and his best buddy Biggs Henry showed up unexpectedly. They had been working all week at the Texas Eclipse Festival. Free food, free music, free tent and $2,000 for one week of work.
But on the last day, incoming thunderstorms cancelled the event right before the eclipse. The storm was about to create a huge mud pit in which 40,000 concert goers were going to be stuck, maybe for days. They fled in the nick of time, exhausted from working the event. They practically kissed the ground when they arrived. Whether they’ll ever get paid is an unanswered question.
I sat on the porch and smiled as Lawrence and Biggs excitedly recounted all their adventures of the week. So much energy and enthusiasm. I was once young like that. Is this really me, the old man, listening to his son tell the types of tales he once lived?
We stopped off in San Antonio to see Ida Fae Hardy, my 97-year-old aunt, one of my favorite people in the whole world. Four first cousins dropped in to say hello. I have a whole San Antonio clan of 30 or so relatives.
The flight back from Houston to Jackson was one of the scariest of my life. The storm that seemed to be heading north suddenly turned east toward Jackson while we were in the air. We landed at 8:58 on Tuesday night. The minute we landed and everyone turned on their phones, tornado warnings were buzzing on every phone on the plane. We landed maybe three minutes before the storm hit.
On the final approach, passengers were screaming, crying and hyperventilating. The plane swayed in all directions, thunder and lightning was everywhere.
As a pilot I was not too scared. I realized we had a 99 percent chance of landing safely. But the pilot was very wrong to take such a risk. He should have diverted.
On the way out I confronted the pilot. “Twenty miles?,” I said to him. “What do you mean,” he asked. I said, “You are supposed to avoid thunderstorms by 20 miles, especially when landing.”
He stared at me. “It was 20 miles.”
