Oct 29, 2003 9:35:06 AM
A Short Day's Journey into Night: A History of Daylight Saving Time
As an Arizonan, I get all kinds of pity for living in Seattle. But it's not the wet that gets me down: it's the wretchedly short days of winter. I go to work in the dark, and I come home in the dark, making my life a tight circle of fluorescent lights and black skies. And we don't just ease into this endless cave-like existence. No, one evil Sunday in October, like a nail closing a coffin lid, the day is suddenly one hour shorter than it ought to be. I blame it on Daylight Saving Time.
It's 6 PM and I'm driving home from my first day at a new job. It's mid-October. As I cross Lake Washington on the I-90 bridge, I notice a lucky soul on the pedestrian path, cranking his bike into the sunset. "Why can't that be me?" I think. "I can ride my bike this far. Oh yeah, because of that damn Daylight Saving Time, it's going to be dark by this time next week."
I find Daylight Saving Time confusing. I can't figure out when it starts or which way the clock is supposed to go. Of course, my big question is, how are we saving any daylight when it's dark in the winter at five PM? In Arizona, the sun never set before five, and the shortest day of the year was still ten hours long. The wretched eight and a half hours we get on that same day in Seattle sends the average person to work and back home in the dark. I feel somehow the bizarre ritual of "changing the clocks" must be to blame, since we never bothered with that nonsense in Phoenix. If the clock stayed the same from July to December, I'd have twenty minutes of natural light to enjoy after I left work - just like I did back home.
The idea of "saving daylight" was originally proposed by Benjamin Franklin, who thought that having the sun set one hour later would be a great way to reduce the amount of oil used to light homes in the evening (since there would be one hour more of sunlight in the evening). The benefit of saving energy through "daylight saving" is what drove its adoption during World War I and again during WWII (when it was called "War Time"). Finally, during the early 70s, Congress passed a law (the "Daylight Saving Time Energy Act of 1973") to make the annual time change permanent.
In Arizona, however, the whole concept of more hours at home when the sun was shining was not received very well. In editorials from the era, people complained about it just being too darn hot during those sunny evenings. And so Arizona decided to opt out of the whole thing, giving me a childhood in which I was blissfully unexposed to the ritual of "spring forward" and "fall back." (Hawaii and other tropical American territories, which have little sunlight to gain, do not follow the practice; Indiana, with its three time zones, is a law unto itself, with the central part of the state, like Arizona, staying on standard time year round.) And the whole question of "standard time" or "saving time" was irrelevant. We referred to "California time" instead - we were either the same or an hour ahead.
Thanks to this, I have to pay careful attention to the newspapers (and the conversations of others) to keep on top of when the change is going to happen. My ears start to perk up around the equinox - a logical time to mark a change to "summer time" - but instead, officialdom dictated change happen more than a month later, on the last Sundays of April and October. I ask around until I can figure out which way to set my clocks the night before, then grumbling get up at the correct new time the next day.
October 26, 2003: it's 6:30 PM on the first day of "standard time" and I'm wandering around the International District looking for some dinner. Even if I think that it was 7:30 PM this time yesterday, it still seems much later, like it is almost nine. I feel like it's too early to be eating dinner, but the restaurants seem packed, much more so than at 6:30 just last week. The sky is utterly black and I feel this urge to just go home and go to bed. Is the rest of Seattle suffering from the same cave-man like tendencies?
It was seven years after I moved to Seattle - during the writing of this article - that I discovered that "standard" time is, to my dismay, the short, bleak days of winter. Standard time is "time zone" time, telling time across a geographic area by synchronized clocks instead of the position of the sun. But it is unspeakably depressing that having the sun set at 4:30 PM could ever possibly be "standard." Even in Maine, where sunset on December 21st is at 4 PM, they still have a longer day than we do, by almost half an hour.
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
"Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Dylan Thomas
Why doesn't Seattle abandon "standard" and stick with the "saving?" We have more sunlight in the summer than we know what to do with in both the morning and the evening. So let's move that "saved" hour into the winter permanently, ending the tyranny of changing clocks mechanical and biological and moving to a world where, during the grayest depths of the northwestern winter, we have just a little bit of sun as we trudge home at end of day. In addition to reducing the number of pedestrians hit by cars (a true statistic associated with daylight saving time), it might do wonders for reducing wintertime depression. And I would be free to go back to the happy life of the "saving time" impaired, no longer doomed to spend precious time trying to figure out what "fall back" has to do with how long I can stay in bed. My relatives in Phoenix would understand. I'd be living in Seattle time.
For more information on Daylight Saving time, see:
http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/index.html
and
http://www.dlapr.lib.az.us/links/daylight.htm
[more]
Posted by webcowgirl @ Oct 29, 2003 9:35:06 AM [Link]
Oct 27, 2003 11:05:55 AM
Yet another sad story about the closing of Koraku in the Asian Weekly. I'm still heartbroken. It would be cool if they took the whole thing and made a sculptural environment out of it, like Kienholz's "Beanery".
[more]
Posted by webcowgirl @ Oct 27, 2003 11:05:55 AM [Link]
Oct 26, 2003 7:54:17 PM
We went out for dinner tonight to the Phnom Penh Noodle House in the International District. Our goal was to go to a restaurant we had never been to, and in this we were successful. However, the "goo nam noodle" (Cambodian spiced beef stew with wide noodles) and Chicken Chow-Geataoi (chicken with wide rice noodles and vegetables) were both completely uninspiring. I suspect many of the patrons there were truly enjoying their food, but the two of us considered leaving our copious leftovers behind. I think we wish we had just gone to Hing Loon - less "ick" factor and more flavor, but still cheap.
[more]
Posted by webcowgirl @ Oct 26, 2003 7:54:17 PM [Link]