My Time Zone Can Beat Up Your Time Zone

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise

-Benjamin Franklin

Quiet, serene, peaceful, and full of turkeys (open to interpretation)—I live in a great region of the country. Our remaining forests are beautiful and full of cute critters and colorful plant life. White pine, western larch, Douglas fir, and ponderosa pine dominate the landscape and provide habitat for all the cuddly forest dwellers. I love trees and don’t think I could be happy without them. To brag a little more we have big mountains, gorgeous valleys, and clean rivers and lakes galore.

Now on to the people. If I were to paint everyone with the same brush, I would say the people of northeastern Washington are honest, distrusting of outsiders, humble, hardworking, and overly afraid of the government invoking a police state. Not too bad, really. I’ve been to much less-likable places. The county does a good job plowing our roads during the winter. Our property taxes are quite less than that of economically and educationally superior Spokane County. And our local building department will look the other way on that new shop if it isn’t visible from the main road.

So while thinking about some of the niceties of my rural community I came up with another one that is usually overlooked. One that is so ignored I’ve not seen it noted on real estate listings, job advertisements, or tourist destinations. I love my time zone. I’m on Pacific Standard Time, of course, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. My time zone rocks.

This may sound silly to some, but my time zone is very important and directly affects my quality of life. If you’re thinking that all time zones are the same and that they are in place to account for a round planet circling and spinning around the sun, then you are only partially correct.

I’m a sports nut. I love competition—meaningful competition—and I love my teams. So I can’t be made fun of, I’m not going to mention who my favorite teams are, but I love competition. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s the NFL, pickleball, curling, or ballroom dancing. If talented people are competing and they are competing their hardest then I can get into it. The bad side to this is that I watch a bit too much televised athletics. I admit it.

I have a schedule where I go to bed early and wake up early, just like Benjamin Franklin advised. Can you believe that people in New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago sometimes have to stay up until midnight or later to watch their teams play. That sounds absolutely horrible. I rarely stay up past ten o’clock, even on the weekends. If I lived in New York I guess I’d have to get a DVR and then be one of those guys who tells people not to talk about the game until I have a chance to watch it. Those guys are annoying.

As someone who works in the health and fitness field I advocate getting a full night’s sleep. Some people function perfectly fine on five or six hours but not me. I feel great on eight hours of uninterrupted sleep and that’s when I wake up smiling and ready to take on all obstacles. If I were to watch the Bears (oops) on Monday night and the game didn’t end until midnight I would scarcely get four hours of sleep. I’d be a zombie. I’d have to get a new job or, even worse, not watch my beloved Bears that night.

Now that I’ve proclaimed my love for Pacific Standard Time it’s now the moment for me to discuss another time related topic—daylight savings time (DST). Many of the people I know and work with haven’t a clue what daylight savings time is actually for and believe it’s a big government conspiracy to make them either one hour late or one hour early for everything. Al Gore probably had something to do with it, suggested one co-worker.

I’m here to tell you that the purpose of daylight savings time—which begins in Spring and ends in Fall, not the other way around—is to give people more daylight during the evening hours. For the US this only works during the summer months when the days are long, hence DST ends in the fall. DST in the United States began back in 1918. The reason being that since most people work during the day they would appreciate an extra hour of daylight once their workday concludes. Some proponents of DST are convenience stores, outdoor recreation venues, and tourism operators. More daylight hours after the typical workday ends results in more revenue for these types of establishments. Opponents of DST consist of farmers, movie theatres, and television stations. Farmers tend to not like their animals’ schedules getting messed with and television providers don’t want people outside during evening hours.

Not all states participate in DST. Indiana, home to many farmers, did not start “springing forward and falling back” until just 2006. My wife’s family is largely from the Hoosier State and on the eve of changing their clocks for the first time a relative called my wife in a tizzy hoping for some answers from an experienced DSTer. “Why do I have to do this? What if I forget? What is going to happen to this hour? Is it just going to disappear? Why is Al Gore doing this to us?”

Crossing time zones is a drag and jet lag is a real bummer. It takes time to adjust to a new zone. Experts say it can take up to one day for the human body to adapt to every one hour of time zone change. So if I were to travel to the southern tip of Africa my body could take up to ten days to feel normal again. And no matter what the energy drink companies might tell us, there is no magic solution of sugar, caffeine, acai, and more sugar that can help alleviate jet lag. There are no magic pills either, but that doesn’t mean travelers don’t have options.

When my wife and I lived in Montana her parents drove west to watch her graduate. They don’t travel out of their time zone very often and doing so was a big deal. Leaving their time zone was unsettling and disconcerting for them. The way they remedied this was by forgoing Montana time and sticking with Indiana time. They ate dinner when most people were pouring their first cocktail, went to bed when dessert trays appeared, and woke up with the newspaper delivery boy. A little strange, some might say, but no jet lag and no feelings of lethargy, headaches, or light-headedness.

I found my in-laws devotion to their time zone quite respectable and even honorable. Being that it was only a couple hours difference they didn’t cause any inconvenience for anyone else. And they did this for troublesome Eastern Standard Time. I live in a much better zone than they do so the next time I travel in the US it’s going to be Pacific Standard Time all the way (and all day) to show my dedication to my time zone.

Happy Travels.

Are you SCARED of the DARK?

My parents still live off a dusty road among a scattering of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees. Over a small wooden bridge, up a gravel driveway, and in a blue, cedar-sided house is where I spent my younger years.  On the other side of the county road, up on a sunny slope, used to live a man who was like a third grandfather to me.  He took my brother and me fishing, on a camping trip to the top of Kalispel Peak, to the bowling alley, and to the circus for a ride on an elephant.  I have a wealth of fond memories from those days.

This neighbor fashioned himself an outdoorsman- actually now that I think of it he called himself a sportsman.  He owned a great deal of land, complete with small ponds laden with trout and mountainsides ripe with deer, moose, elk, and bear.  Every October brought the start to hunting season and he and his sons went off tromping through the woods and fields in search of prey with their calf-high leather boots, binoculars, and orange stocking caps.  The four of them would hunt until dark on the land surrounding his house and then come home in time for a late dinner and then bed.

I didn’t tag along on these trips, even though I was often asked.  My mom didn’t care much for guns and nearly lost her mind when, as a four year old, I told her I had shot a pop can with a rifle while in my neighbor’s field.  It was fine that I wasn’t allowed on these hunting trips because there were plenty of other things to do, like building rafts to float in the ponds, flying gliders, or playing catch with a Frisbee or baseball.  So although I didn’t spend much time thinking about it, it would be safe to say I assumed my neighbor was an accomplished and wide-ranging outdoorsmen, meaning he knew how to find his way in the woods, build a shelter, start a fire, identify wild plants to eat, and other things that people who recreate outdoors are supposed to be able to do.  And CERTAINLY there would be no way a rough and rugged sportsman would be scared while out in his element.  Wild animals, escaped convicts, and monsters that could be creeping through the woods might frighten a little boy like myself, but definitely not a great hunter.  And being scared of the dark?  Preposterous.  Children were afraid of the dark, not adults.

So imagine my surprise when, as a grown man, and visiting my neighbor and rehashing a backpacking trip that I had taken into the Bitterroot, he confided to me that he had always been scared of the dark.  I was stunned. No, actually I was outright shocked. I tried not to show it didn’t because I didn’t want to cause any (additional) embarrassment on his part but I doubt I did a respectable job of it.  He then asked me if I was scared of the dark.  Caught somewhere between trying not to laugh and attempting to salvage what was left of the man’s ego, I said, “No, not really.”

I’ve spent hundreds of nights outdoors, alone, and without anything that could be called a weapon.  Sure, there have been times I’ve been scared; two instances that come to mind are when I was setting up my tent in the dark and a perfectly healthy-looking fifty foot tree fell over not more than ten yards from my tent and also when twenty Tennessee hillbillies, driving five “muddin” trucks decided to use the Appalachian Trail as a proving ground and nearly turned me and my tent into a pancake.  Where I’m from it’s not uncommon for people (loggers and firewood cutters mostly) to get seriously injured or killed by falling trees and for anyone who has ever seen Deliverance I don’t think I need to explain why I was a little on edge in the deep south with gang of rednecks about.   My point being that just because it was dark outside doesn’t mean that was the reason I was frightened.

I’ve been scared shitless during daylight hours too.  Riding in the passenger seat while my wife drives is a prime example.  She insists that her drivers education teacher never taught her about a two second following distance so while tailgating the car in front of her she likes to get close enough so that she can read their fuel gauge.  I admit I have some fears (and one debilitating phobia I will talk about sometime in the future) but I don’t see the dark as being one of them.

It is a fact there are people who are afraid of the dark so now the question that arises is just how many scaredy cats are actually out there.  And to be clear, I’m talking about adults here, not children.  Kids are afraid of everything.  I would know, having been a little nancy pants in my younger years.  The pig-man, whose existence I learned about in a supermarket tabloid and then had confirmed by an episode of Seinfeld, was a creature who tormented me for years since he did, in fact, spend his nights in the hallway between my bedroom and the nearest bathroom.

So how many adults are afraid of the dark?  What percentage?  And how many of you little sissies out there are willing to admit it?  Well, the answer to that second question is somewhere around ten percent, according to a Wikipedia page on irrational fears.  A friend of mine from work says this percentage is definitely on the low side since most males aren’t going to admit an unmanly fear and that there are also a lot of people who don’t know if they are afraid of the dark since they live in urban areas where artificial light is practically as constant as hurt feelings at a Costanza family Festivus.  And I do agree.  If a person always has light from gadgets and other things illuminating their space they would be more likely to see things that weren’t there if they were all alone and in the dark on a moonless night.

It’s not hard to figure out what makes people afraid of the dark.  For most, vision is the strongest of the five senses.  Take that dominant sense away and the subconscious mind begins to imagine all the scary things that could be lurking in the shadows.  If the conscious mind is not able to counter with reason and logic then panic is very likely to set in.

Let’s say that you are one of the unfortunate ten percent of people who have an irrational fear of the dark.  The good news is that there is hope for you.  My lovely wife used to be petrified of being alone at night when I first met her.  We like to vacation at a place with no running water or electricity and an outhouse about one hundred feet away from the house.  The first few years we stayed there she was terrified to go to the bathroom at night, but now, after having lots of practice with the nightly jaunt to the latrine, she doesn’t seem to mind at all.

Gradually facing your fears (systematic desensitization is what smart people call it) is largely regarded as the best method of reducing or eliminating phobias and fears.  It worked for my wife and it has worked for lots of other people too.  Good luck.