Zoned Out
Does anybody really know what time it is?
A subscriber who lives in Virginia called the other day a few bleary minutes before seven in the morning—our time. Fortunately, we were already up. (By "we," I mean that my wife was awake and ambulatory and I was trying to block the morning sun with my pillow. She answered the phone, bless her.) The caller burbled with apologies when he realized what time it was in New Mexico, but he needn't have: We get such calls all the time. Somehow, people on the East Coast can't grasp the concept of three additional time zones stretching across the western three-quarters of the contiguous United States. It's like that classic New Yorker cover showing Manhattanites' view of the world, with Chicago somewhere cheek by jowl out near Seattle, which is almost in Japan.
We grew up in Central Time, which I always felt was the only real time zone. Eastern Time seemed impossibly foreign, even slightly subversive: What kind of godforsaken place would make you wait until 6:30 p.m. for Walter Cronkite to come on? A place that doesn't eat dinner until 8 p.m., that's what! No wonder New York City had so much juvenile delinquency and gang problems (hey, I'd seen West Side Story)—what do you expect from a city where "Gunsmoke" doesn't even start until children should be tucked into bed?
Our stints actually living in that exotic Eastern Time were always near the margins—in Pittsburgh and later in Cincinnati, which looks as though it ought to be in Central Time but somehow lost a bet or something and fell in with the East Coasters. So the days always seemed almost an hour off from the sun. I guess you can't see the sun in New York City, anyway, with the smoke from all that gang warfare (or hear the noon whistle over the din of "The Jet Song"), so the Eastern Time Czars don't think about such things.
Now our daughter has moved from Nashville (almost due south of Cincinnati, but in Central Time—go figure) to Washington, DC, where our nation's leaders labor under Eastern Time (which may explain a lot—they're cranky from having to stay up so late to catch the end of "ER"). So we have to adjust our mental clocks to a two-hour difference from New Mexico. Fortunately, our daughter stays up late anyway (ah, youth!), so this puts her pretty much in sync with us. When she calls at 9:30 p.m. our time, I think, "Shouldn't she be in bed? It's almost midnight out there."
Living here in Mountain Time has its compensations, despite the occasional early-morning wakeup calls from out East. At least the television programming matches what we grew up with in Central Time. (Now if only we could get Walter Cronkite back on at 5:30 instead of Katie Couric.) As we grow older and like to nod off earlier, we appreciate being able to see the ball drop in Times Square on New Year's Eve at 10 p.m. our time, rather than having to stay up until midnight. Pro football games start at 11 a.m. on Sundays here—a bane to churchgoing, but a boon to NFL fans. (What do they do on the West Coast, where kickoff is at 10? That starts to cut into Sunday morning newspaper-reading time. Poor bastards.)
Given the relative paucity of big cities in Mountain Time, though, we've had to get used to being overlooked by the rest of America. TV announcers will say, "8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, 7 Central," skipping over us as though broadcast signals haven't yet made it into the hinterlands here. ("Here there be dragons," the maps must read, vaguely placing Denver somewhere near Montana, "and no TV reception.") When planning calls to interview people or complain about some customer-service outrage, I'm always doing the mental addition or subtraction to figure what time it is there, which is hardly ever the same as the time here. Fortunately, of course, most of the customer-complaint calls are actually to Mumbai or Manila, where it's already tomorrow; thank goodness we don't have an International Date Line snaking through the middle of the country, so New Yorkers wouldn't even know what day it is in New Mexico. Not that they'd care.
At least Tucson, which we often fly out of, is in Mountain Time—except during Daily Savings Time, when it and the rest of Arizona stubbornly stick to what amounts to Pacific Time. This makes catching a plane almost mind-bendingly difficult: "Let's see, it's a three-hour drive and we have to get to the airport 90 minutes before the flight to be strip-searched, but there's a one-hour time difference, so that means we need to leave. . . yesterday?"
Now, I'm a big fan of Daylight Savings Time. I like the long, languorous, light-filled evenings, and the extended daylight helps me stay awake long enough to catch the end of "ER." The morning sun doesn't creep in the windows quite so early, so I'm still asleep when the phone jangles with a call from Out East.
Back when we lived in Iowa, I actually wrote a column poking gentle fun at farmers' dismay over Daylight Savings Time and how the clock change plays havoc with milking time and such. I imagined an interview with a time-addled cow:
"'We always dread the last Sunday in April,' said the cow, Matilda (not her real name). 'First of all, Bob, our farmer (not his real name), can never remember whether to set the clock back or ahead. Every year we tell him, "Spring ahead, fall back," but does he listen? He says, "What do cows know? Your hooves are too big and clumsy to set your Timex, anyway."'
"I looked down and saw the dairyman was right. Matilda's watch read 6:05, although it was the middle of the afternoon. The watch-face was splintered with tiny cracks, but it did keep on ticking."
This little exercise in farce did not exactly get me ridden out of Iowa on a rail, but there were definitely some dairy farmers heating up tar and borrowing feathers from the chicken farmers down the road before we hot-footed it to Pittsburgh. (Yes, Eastern Time—we were desperate.)
Of course, Daylight Savings Time no longer waits for the last Sunday in April, but has now been advanced all the way to the second Sunday in March—that's March 11 this year. And it stretches far into November, which may cause some consternation come 2008 when it's still light enough late on Election Day to see the election being stolen.
Again, I'm fine with the time change—looking forward to it, even. Daylight Savings Time, coupled with the lengthening days, makes it easier (not to mention safer) to barbecue at dinner time. There's less chance of, say, setting the patio furniture on fire or igniting an unwary cottontail.
But Arizona needs to get with the program. After March 11, a simple run to Trader Joe's in Tucson (is it illegal to bring six cases of wine across the border?) will turn into an episode of "Quantum Leap" (or "Time Tunnel," for my fellow Baby Boomers out there). Get up at the crack of dawn (or what feels like it to me) to hit the road by 7 a.m., to arrive in Tucson at what's now 9 a.m., making the outbound trip effectively two hours. But even if you head home at 3 p.m. (it takes time to cram six cases of wine into a Miata), you won't get there until 7 p.m.—having missed Katie Couric and endured what's now a four-hour drive!
One of our friends tried to pull this "Quantum Leap" trick on us last summer, seeking to entice us to drive to Safford, Ariz. "It's only an hour drive," she insisted. Yes, we learned much later, but a three-hour drive home!
We'd solve this problem by simply seceding from New Mexico and joining Arizona—heaven knows they'd never miss this corner of the state up north of I-40—except that it would mean, in effect, joining Pacific Time for eight months of the year without the cooperation of the TV networks. Come September and the long-awaited kickoff of football season, games would begin at 10 a.m. Sunday papers would pile up, unread. "ER" would finish at, what, 9?—leaving me no choice but to go to bed. We'd miss Katie Couric—starting at 4:30?—entirely, though that might be a good thing. Those early-morning phone calls would now startle us into groggy semi-wakefulness before 6.
All things considered, I'm starting to sympathize with the cows.
You can set your watch by David A. Fryxell,
who's editor of Desert
Exposure.