The moon came up when the music started.
Nobody planned that part.
I had flown into Colorado before most reasonable people were awake. Crack of dawn. At Scott and Melissa Fortson’s house in Broomfield by eight, laptop open not long after. Work all day. Somewhere beyond the screen, rain moved across the Front Range.
Scott and I met in college. We both married our college sweethearts young. Had children young.
He and Melissa had Will and Ben.
Christy and I had AK and Stephen.
Then life started moving us around.
Georgia to Florida to Texas for us.
Georgia to Tennessee to Florida to Colorado for them.
Some friendships survive because people stay close.
Others survive because distance never quite gets the final word.
By late afternoon, Scott, Ben and I were headed toward Morrison to meet my brother Jay. The rain had just moved through.
And there he was.
Thirty-seven years old now.
Billy Strings shirt.
Big smile.
A rainbow behind him.
You cannot manufacture an entrance like that.
We walked through the Red Rocks museum before the show. Jay and I drifted naturally toward the Hall of Fame.
Old concerts.
Old ghosts.
Names that had climbed these rocks before us.
Then the mountain shows.
Woodstock.
Yasgur’s farm, baby.
Maybe brothers recognize the same things even when seventeen years separate them.
Outside, the storm had done something useful.
It had washed Colorado clean.
Low sixties.
No humidity.
The clouds lifted enough that from Row Forty we could see for miles.
Denver sat out there in the distance.
The rocks rose around us.
The wind howled through them.
Then Goose walked out and opened with Eminence Front.
There are introductions.
And then there are declarations.
The first notes went into those rocks like they had been waiting there awhile.
Scott had never seen Goose.
Ben had never seen Red Rocks.
Jay had never seen Red Rocks.
Ben had just finished a tour with the Marines. I had known him his whole life, back when neither Scott nor I could have imagined sitting beside our grown sons in places like this.
He looked blown away.
So did Jay.
Probably all of us.
Then somewhere over the south to southwest horizon, the moon appeared.
Massive.
Orange-red and impossibly large, hanging just above the distant horizon. A thin ribbon of cloud crossed its face.
And almost as soon as we noticed it, the earth began taking it away.
Goose moved into Rockdale.
Sixteen minutes.
The song stretched and wandered and built while the shadow kept moving.
Then Rockdale gave way to Silver Rising.
That was the moment.
The eclipse had begun in earnest.
Silver Rising beneath a blood-red moon.
A song about something changing under moonlight, played beneath a moon visibly changing above us.
You could not have programmed it better.
For a few minutes Red Rocks stopped feeling like a venue.
It became theater.
Not the kind with curtains.
The older kind.
Stone.
Wind.
Darkness.
Music.
And something happening in the heavens that nobody on the stage controlled.
The show kept moving.
Strange Overtones.
Spirit of the Dark Horse.
(7hunder).
Dragonfly.
The wind kept coming hard through Row Forty.
But the band somehow held the balance.
Weather on one side.
Sound on the other.
Neither won.
By the second set the moon was no longer enormous on the horizon.
It was higher now.
Smaller somehow.
And darker.
The earth’s shadow had moved farther across it.
Thatch went somewhere else entirely, with those little flashes that sounded like Dire Straits floating through the jam.
Then Madhuvan opened another door.
Fish in the Sea.
Red Bird.
Wysteria Lane.
Long songs becoming longer.
The moon becoming something different.
Every few minutes I looked away from the stage.
There it was.
Another piece gone.
Then another.
Four men in Row Forty watching two shows at once.
Scott beside a son I had known since he was a boy.
Me beside a brother who was not born when Scott and I first met.
College boys become husbands.
Husbands become fathers.
Boys become Marines.
Little brothers become men.
Georgia becomes Tennessee.
Florida becomes Texas.
Colorado becomes home.
And somehow, decades later, everybody winds up in the same row.
Maybe that was the eclipse I came to see.
Not something disappearing.
Something passing across everything that had been there all along.
Time moves slowly enough that most days you do not notice.
Then occasionally life gives you a night when you can actually see the shadow moving.
The encore came.
The crowd began filing toward the stairs.
I looked back out over the rocks.
The moon was finishing the last touches of the eclipse.
Almost the whole concert.
From moonrise to encore.
Nobody hurried away.
At least that is how I remember it.
Maybe because some nights deserve an extra minute.
The rain had passed.
The air was cool.
The humidity was gone.
The wind had spent itself against the music.
Behind us were the stage and the rocks.
Ahead of us were Denver and that moon.
Scott.
Ben.
Jay.
Me.
A friend from college.
His son.
My little brother.
And a man old enough now to understand that you do not get many nights when everybody you love stays exactly where you can see them.
The shadow passed.
The moon remained.
Boutwell Jones
redclaygospel.com