This essay was submitted to the 2021 Waterman Fund Essay Contest.
For centuries, navigation was a tricky business, because in order to know where you are, you first needed to know when you are. A compass and sextant could find heading and latitude, but it was accurate timekeeping that was crucial for wayfinding at sea, where, without landmarks or other reference points against which to measure the continual spinning of the Earth, position could easily be misjudged. Sailors relied on intricate spring chronometers to match the timing of celestial observations to complex charts from which longitude could be calculated. Ports used signal guns, flags, or the dropping of a time ball to aid mariners in ensuring their instruments were set correctly. In more ways than one, Greenwich Mean Time was their lifeline out of the inhospitable expanses, charting the course home.
On land, there was no “correct” time. In the 19th century, cities set their clocks according to the position of the sun, its zenith marking exactly twelve noon. This meant that each had a different local time as defined by its longitude, with a difference amounting to about four minutes per degree. Discrepancies of up to half an hour or more across larger or more northerly states were not uncommon, though mostly inconsequential.
With the advent of the railroad, however, differences in local time became both a logistical hurdle for scheduling arrivals and departures as well as a safety concern. More exact timekeeping became necessary to avoid collisions on the tracks. Railroad companies solved the problem by adopting a standardized time along their lines, synchronizing stations and headquarters via telegraph signals. People increasingly began to think on “railroad time” and civil authorities adopted standardized railway time over local mean time. This shift in attitude was exemplified by American businessman and politician William F. Allen, who said that “Railroad trains are the great educators and monitors of the people in teaching and maintaining exact time.”
Ever since then, we’ve been chasing time. Spring-driven devices and signal guns have been replaced by quartz crystal chronometers updated by radio signals and atomic clocks that track the passage of time to a precision of 10^-15 seconds. Advances in physics, mathematics, and computer science have made possible modern electronic communications, which rely on tight synchronization for reliable data transfers. But even that is not enough. Satellites in orbit must take Einstein’s theory of relativity, the bending and stretching of time, into account in beaming their signals across space, for time evades our attempts to pin it down even at the speed of light.
We like to talk about time as if it were a commodity, a thing. We make time, save time, strive to be on time. Musicians play “in time”. Accurate timekeeping anchors our sense of shared experience and is in some respect the structure of the modern world. Of course, that wasn’t always the case. Prehistoric peoples measured time only by the rhythms of the sun and moon, the seasons, great migrations of game, the transit of stars and planets across the night sky. Their cosmology was cyclical. Indeed, in a civilization without technological progress, every year is identical to the last. The arrow of time would have made no sense. Even now, the concept is alien to many indigenous peoples. To them, time is an activity itself—there is planting time, harvest time, milking time, lunch time, nap time. Lives and mythologies are simply a series of events, with no regard to the periods in between, or at least no need to measure them.
Much could be said here about the arrogance of imposing abstract Western concepts on the unspoiled natural landscapes and peoples of the Americas, or of the colonial ambitions of corporate capitalists in exploiting that defenselessness, or about the detachment from the natural world that results from reductionist physical materialism, but I’ll spare you. It may suffice to say simply that the concept was useful, it worked. Commerce flourished, trains ran smoothly, communications more efficiently. Still, there’s something about our need to mechanize time, splitting up the infinite into discrete units that can be counted, added, and sequentialized that seems like some kind of violation, like we’re missing the point. In the modern conception, after all, time doesn’t exist without the instruments used to measure it. Is time a measure of the world, or the world a measure of time? I’m not so sure any of us really knows.
The fossil record, on the other hand, tells a different story. In something so ordinary as a rock plucked from an exposed face, I hold in my hand a record of billions of years of deposition, subduction, uplift, and erosion. Reach down farther, and you reach back further. But look closer. Fossils of ammonites, polypods, and the fish-like ancestors of amphibians and humans. Despite their appearance of separateness, all things are connected, part of a single churning system generating and recycling its core components and refining them into ever more complex iterations. Life forms and earth, water, sunlight, air, conducting sweet alchemy amid the fabric of deep time.
In spring of last year, these two worldviews collided. A novel respiratory virus, borne of that alchemical conjuring and unleashed in a live animal market a world away, was enough to bring the globe to a stumbling halt. The effects rippled quickly. Schools and restaurants closed, social gatherings were banned, the stock market tumbled, routines were disrupted. Can I commute? Should I? Masks, a practical necessity, also became a metaphor for the changing face of our world, organic individuality papered over by blankness, conformity, and fear. There was a gaping hole of uncertainty at the center of daily life. A kind of suspended animation.
From the beginning, time was a primary way to make sense of the pandemic. There was talk of latency periods, flattening the curve, induced comas, quarantine, and isolation, all attempts to manipulate time to our advantage. Scientists were hard at work developing a vaccine, which we were told could be years away. Even now, with them being distributed, we’re still talking months until we’re in the clear.
I’ve been lucky. I haven’t been sick, kept my job, have had time to read and pursue my own projects, reconnected with friends, gotten outside. Funny how sometimes it takes extraordinary circumstances to remember what really matters, to not be caught up in the surface layers. That’s not to say that the long, gray Buffalo winter hasn’t taken its toll. Especially now, with nowhere to go and no one to see, the four walls of my apartment sometimes seem to be closing in, squeezing and straining. The slow, tectonic stress of a year has etched its history somewhere deep down. How much longer?
In fall, wood frogs burrow under the leaves and perform a kind of miracle. As their body temperature drops, their liver floods their vessels with glucose and other protective compounds, and they go into hibernation. They can tolerate up to 65% of their tissues being frozen for up to eight months. Find one this time of year and it would appear frozen solid, with no heartbeat, no breathing, no movement at all. It’s an unbelievable strategy, to overcome the harshness of winter by skipping it completely, one that allows them to be among the first amphibians to be active in spring, when resources are available and conditions more suitable for life. That’s the state we’re in—slow the metabolism, conserve resources, and wait.
Getting outside has been a salve this past year, and luckily I don’t need a sextant and chronometer to find my way. A map, compass, and some decently marked trails will do. In the woods, the flow of time is noticeable only in terms of my experience—the evaporation of dew from spruce boughs, the looping whistle of a wren, clouds passing against an unblemished canvas of blue, rocks warming in the sunlight. I am there for all of it. We define wilderness primarily by the lack of human interference, its being left to progress according to its own direction. In that sense, any sufficiently wild place creates its own time. The only requirement is that we adapt ourselves to it, not the other way around.
That fact is often most obvious in the worst of conditions. There were days as a summit steward on Marcy or Algonquin when the cold, wind, and rain were almost too much. No one to talk to and nothing to do but wait it out. Nowhere even to sit—everything wet, wet, wet. I would huddle behind the largest rock I could find, teeth chattering, the throbbing in my fingers and toes registering their dropping temperature. Minutes passed as if they were hours, every stinging raindrop or ice pellet another insult, the buffeting of the wind against my hood a roar that nearly drowned out thought itself. Why am I here? How much longer? With each gust, the sedges bobbed back up like springs, as if to taunt me with their resilience, or maybe just to wave hello. I wasn’t in the mood. I glanced at my watch to rescue me from discomfort, but it meant nothing. Rather, I realize now that in that fleeting attempt, I was the railroad man, conspiring to control and label, importing abstractions where they did not belong. Admirably, the sedges payed no mind, content to go about their day on their own, as they always have.
In fact, wildlife in general seems to get along just fine without it. During Covid lockdowns last year, there were reports from around the world of wildlife reclaiming areas that were previously too noisy, polluted, or dangerous to venture: dolphins in the Bosporous Strait, wild boar in Israel, coyotes roaming the streets of San Francisco. Even in national parks, where, without the dense throngs of tourists that normally pack roads and viewing locations, animals relaxed. In the midst of human crisis, life returned to a more natural rhythm.
Chernobyl is another interesting example. It has been 35 years since the nuclear disaster in northern Ukraine that forced the evacuation of over one hundred thousand people and shook the world to its core. When the disaster struck, the Soviet government permanently evacuated everyone within a nearly 20-mile radius known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or CEZ. In their rush to flee, people left things exactly as they were, abandoning their homes, farms, vehicles, and schools. Images from the nearby town of Pripyat are like those from a modern-day Pompeii, life eerily frozen exactly as it was on that day.
The immediate effects of the fallout were horrific. About fifty people died of acute radiation exposure from the blast, including twenty-seven firefighters who rushed into the heart of the reactor to put out the blaze. Most succumbed to radiation sickness days or weeks later. Another 4,000 deaths (some counts put that number much higher) across the region are attributed to exposure from contaminated particulate in the air, and to this day, children are born with birth defects. Thousands of animals were slaughtered. A nearby pine plantation was dubbed the “red forest” for the color its poisoned leaves turned that April day.
The CEZ is one of the only places on Earth that used to have humans but no longer does. The forest has begun to reclaim villages and streets, and wildlife, knowing nothing of the danger, has followed. Wolves, once abundant in the area until they were nearly extirpated through hunting and deliberate slaughter, have returned in great numbers. The same goes for lynx and bear, not seen in the region for over a century. Moose, roe deer, red deer, and wild boar were found to have similar numbers within the CEZ as compared to three uncontaminated nature reserves in nearby Belarus. The list goes on. Bison, elk, hare, beaver, otter, badgers, martins, mink, fishers, foxes. Hawks, eagles, owls, storks, and swans. More than sixty species of rare plants. Most notably, it has been a haven for the Przewalski’s horse, an endangered species that originated in Mongolia and nearly became extinct. In the 1990s, thirty were released in the CEZ, and camera traps indicate that those originals (identified by brand) are still alive. Unbranded adults, juveniles, and foals have also been observed, evidence that successful reproduction is occurring. The CEZ has accidentally become the third largest nature reserve in Europe, the continent’s “largest experiment in rewilding”. In 2013, Ukraine’s Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, in coordination with UNESCO, approved a request to create the Chernobyl Biosphere Reserve, designating the 1,600 square mile area for preservation and research.
The current level of radiation exposure in animals within the CEZ is disputed. Research on large mammals has found no evidence of suppression of populations within the zone, but other work suggests impacts to insects, spiders, voles, birds, and microbes. The one consensus: human presence has a bigger negative effect than radiation. Radiation will linger at Chernobyl for another 20,000 years. To protect future generations, the reactor was encased in a “sarcophagus” of concrete and steel, where it will remain for all eternity. Talk about forever wild.
What is the half-life of disaster? How long before experience fades into memory, from memory to recollection, recollection to emotional impression, becoming fossilized somewhere inside? How fast must it move to be seen at all? I am reminded that, amid nuclear incidents and global pandemics, there is another, slower-moving disaster closing in, one that also has at its root our abuse of the resources of time—climate change. In extracting and re-releasing the energy of “fossil” fuels, the distilled matter of ancient plants and animals, we have endangered the delicate balance of life on Earth here today. Now the talk is, do we have enough time to change course? Einstein’s equations support the flow of time in both directions. It may be simply a quirk of this universe or of our minds that we experience it as we do, in only one of them. It reminds me of Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet, in which an elite squad of intelligence forces harnesses a new weapon that “inverts” time, allowing them to travel backward through it to conduct operations from both sides at once. If we could change things, would we? Would it turn out any differently?
We’re told that a pandemic is a once-in-a-lifetime event, but it strikes me that that’s not quite right. Events have definite causes, easily told stories of good and bad, right and wrong, a resolution, an end. This, rather, is more of a predicament. There is no easy out, no simple story. There will be much to reckon with in the months and years to come. Many questions to answer, much to grieve and remember. It’s tough to tell where we are right now. Tough to tell when we are.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, though, it’s to remember the present. Again, to not get caught up in the surface of things. To get out among the trees, the music of birdsong, to smell the soil. To savor the quenching rains and glorious sun. To demand less and listen more. I can see things a bit better from that side, have learned a bit more to trust the deep, submerged rhythms of the world. It’s about time.
In spring, a wood frog thaws from the inside out. First, its heart starts beating, then its brain becomes active, then its legs begin to move. We don’t yet know what starts the heart beating after the long winter frozen in the dirt. How does it know that enough time has passed, that spring has arrived? I’d like to be there when it happens, to greet it upon waking. Welcome back, old friend.
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