D e s e r t E x p o s u r e 
january 2005
D e s e r t E x p o s u r e |
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Wake-Up Call
The cats woke us up this morning, as usual, with an assist from the first faint glow of sunrise turning the sky from black to slate. By the time we actually gave in and gave up on sneaking another hour or so of sleep, pink and orange rivulets were spilling Our coffee maker--a stylish retro-1950s design clad in sleek stainless steel--has a built-in timer that will start the coffee brewing whenever I tell it to, as long as I've filled it with water and ground the beans before going to bed. This has long been an essential gizmo in the Fryxell household coffee maker, but I hardly use it anymore. These days, unless we've got a plane to catch or some other early-morning appointment we don't want to take chances with, we have no set wake-up time. No, the difference is more a matter of how than of when. If you have a half-hour or longer commute that must be figured into each weekday morning's calculus, and you need to be seated at your desk by some zero hour on the clock, you can't take the chance of trusting the dawn to wake you up. What if you oversleep? What if clouds or fog mute the sunrise? What if the cats for once don't interpret the first light of morning as a signal from God to start a wrestling match on your prone tummy? That panic of "omygod we overslept" hits you like an air-raid siren. Maybe the power went off sometime during the night and now the alarm clock, which you thought you could trust, is blinking meaninglessly at you instead of buzzing or booming with the weighty insights of "Morning Edition." You sprint to the bathroom, debate skipping a shower this morning, pray your dentist never knows how cursory your tooth brushing is on days like this. The power outage means your faithful friend the coffee maker has likewise let you down, so breakfast is a gulp of juice and some pre-packaged oatmeal bar that pretends to be good for you but you know it's not you just don't care because you've gotta run. . . . Oh geez look at the time! I still can't sleep well if I know I really, really have to get up early the next morning--to catch a flight, for instance. In one of those little ironies that life is so good at, when I most need sleep because the new day will start early, I toss and turn the most. Every hour or so I blink awake: Is it time to get up yet? Have I overslept? A bleary squint at the clock radio or my watch reassures me, then it's back to the pillow to struggle for sleep until the next panic attack. How did our ancestors know when to wake up? Most days, I suppose, they awoke pretty much as we do now in our post-alarm-clock life. The initial rays of dawn slanted through the cave entrance, or their pet sabertooth came galumphing in to show off the night's fresh catch, plopping a bloody, five-foot proto-shrew at the foot of the sleeping family's pile of wooly mammoth-hide blankets. But what if Mr. Neanderthal had an important appointment early in the day ("6 a.m.--Meet Urk for mammoth hunt," scratched into a cave-wall version of a Daytimer)? By 1620, the mechanical clock had begun to come into early-adopter households, and many included simple alarm mechanisms. The first American alarm clock was supposedly invented by Levi Hutchins in Concord, NH, in 1787--just in time to wake up our Founding Fathers ("7 a.m.--Meet Madison re fixing Articles of Confederation"). The bedside alarm clock, that essential tool of everyday existence for today's commuter crowds, was not patented until 1876, by the Seth Thomas Clock Co. Westclox, the preeminent maker of alarm clocks, at least in the pre-digital era, was founded in 1885 and introduced its Chime Alarm ("First he whispers, then he shouts") in 1931. New Mexico's role in waking up the world comes in the person of Lew Wallace, territorial governor during Billy the Kid's day and author of Ben-Hur. According to ClockHistory.com, at least one source credits the multi-talented Wallace with inventing the snooze alarm. I'm guessing he was inspired by the Land of Enchantment's somewhat more laid-back lifestyle: What the heck, might as well grab another 10 minutes of sleep. (Another source credits the snooze alarm to Wallace's Civil War foe, Confederate Gen. Jubal Early--ironically named, if true. Supposedly Early was chided by his fellow generals for being "not so early" in advancing his troops on Washington, DC, and thus letting victory slip through his fingers. He later became a reclusive inventor, this story goes, best known for the mixed blessing of the snooze button.) More than a third of American adults, according to still more trivia, hit the snooze button each morning, averaging three wakeup postponements per day. What does that say about us? Are we so sleep-deprived or so unwilling to wake up and face the rigors of a new day? If you're this loathe to wake up, what is the point of being alive? Nature, after all, has figured out a great way to get plenty of uninterrupted rest--it's called death. Being truly alive means waking up, not merely in the morning but in all the hours thereafter when the gray numbness of daily life beckons you instead to a kind of sleepwalking through existence. I've realized that no alarm clock--not even the timer on a coffee maker--can wake you up in this deeper, richer sense. Sure, you can shuffle out of bed to the blare of NPR's latest tidings from Uzbekistan, pry your eyes open with caffeine and put on a convincing simulation of wakefulness. But that's just going through the motions, hitting the universe's snooze button to postpone an authentic encounter with reality. I like the moment when I step out onto the porch to retrieve the morning papers. Pajama-clad, with only thin slippers between my bare feet and the gravel that's as hard and cold as the departing night air, I breathe deeply and look around. Even on these winter mornings, I linger. The headlines can wait. Even the coffee can wait, a minute more. A lone yucca stands silhouetted against the lightening sky. Trucks grumble past. Cars--driven, I'm guessing, by people who've already hit the snooze button three times--whoosh along in the distance. In town, lights begin to wink off. The cold air--mornings can be brisk here in New Mexico all year round, regardless of the heat of the day--reminds me I'm alive. The gravel bruises my feet. Silly not to put on a coat, real shoes, or at least to swaddle in a bathrobe before stepping out. But I don't want anything to keep me from coming fully, even uncomfortably awake. Life provides its own alarm clocks, if you listen closely. Or you could always get a cat.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.
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across the sky and the cats had settled back in their self-appointed corners of the bed to snooze. The newspapers on the front porch were no use to them, anyway, and cats don't drink coffee. Getting the coffee pot going is my first priority when I actually stumble out of bed. After a cup or two or six, I'm ready to face the new day.