When I come home to Albuquerque, there are a few sensations I consistently delight in. The brilliant warmth of the sun, of course, as well as a growing anticipation for that first pungent bite of green chile after months of enduring the Northeast’s ghastly jalapeños. The subtle lightness the air takes on at a mile of elevation. Even thinking about the quirky floor of the airport, a patterning of buff and pink bricks, makes me a little moony. All of that is especially true now: With most travel put on hold because of the coronavirus pandemic, endless afternoons rattling around my apartment near Boston have left my mind with little to do but wander. My nostalgia, though, goes deeper than mere sense memory. What I’m really longing for is the more ambiguous perspective that arriving there imparts. Returning to Mountain time doesn’t just mean turning my watch back: It means calving myself free of the schedules that set the nation’s agenda; it means a more humane relationship to the passing of the hours.
Though it covers roughly a quarter of the continental United States, the Mountain time zone contains less than 7 percent of the country’s population. There are only three cities large enough to sustain major-league sports teams here, and one of them is in Utah. That so few Americans call the Mountain West home is ample explanation for its low profile, and the reason its time zone is both constantly threatened and oddly sought after. For the past two years, a lawmaker in Boise has sought to wrench Idaho’s panhandle away from Pacific time, while El Paso fought the State of Texas for decades to avoid being enveloped by Central time. And then there’s wishy-washy Arizona, which splits the year between Mountain and Pacific thanks to its refusal to participate in daylight saving time.
Rural grandeur is all that comes to mind when most outsiders think of the Mountain West. For the rest of the country, the fact that people actually live there seems somewhat inexplicable — especially when they find themselves in the improbable position of placing a call to Denver or Salt Lake City. “Wait,” these coastal suits are forced to ask their assistants, “what time is it there again?” Whenever I’m back home, I delight in being slightly askew from the daily rhythms of white-collar productivity — two hours behind New York, one ahead of San Francisco — and how that translates into a feeling of freedom from the liabilities of membership in civil society. Comfort with our hinterland status is also what distinguishes those of us on Mountain time from our neighbors on Central, forever ensnared in an unwinnable game of catch-up with the East Coast. Unlike in Dallas or Chicago, there’s not much wealth to be had on Mountain time, and even less notoriety. What the time zone offers instead is a sense of detachment from the economic and cultural centers of the nation.
The appeal of that apartness should be evident to anyone who has welcomed the slackened pace of life under quarantine. What’s special about Mountain time, though, is its resonance with the natural splendor it encompasses. When your daily life includes views of snow-capped peaks, vertiginous canyons and crimson buttes, the exigencies of the present have a tendency to fade from notice. So you miss a conference call or forget a doctor’s appointment. Take a breath. Go to a window. Watch the sun set behind the far mesas, casting the horizon into bands of orange and lavender. Once darkness falls, admire the candor of the stars. Mountain time is governed less by minutes or days than by a metronomic knowledge that the landscape that overawes our funny little species predates us, and will outlast us, too.
Some of that feeling is, of course, illusory. There are still offices on Mountain time, as well as ranch hands who need to be mindful of the daylight and truck-stop attendants dozing off on the night shift. Sure, maybe the part-time denizens of glitzy retreats like Aspen and Jackson Hole keep their iPhones close even as they kick up their Lucchese boots. But for those who actually live on Mountain time, hours can be more than mere rows on a Google calendar, each day dutifully color-coded into a rainbow of commitments. One can only hope that as the pandemic drags on, the disconnect that many people elsewhere are feeling with their old lives will prompt them to follow the West’s example, to slough off the strictures they previously tolerated.
Last year, I was reporting a story on the Navajo Nation and forgot that it, unlike Arizona, follows daylight saving time. Thinking I had plenty of time to kill before an appointment with a source in the town of Kayenta, I took a detour through a hamlet where a tall grove of shady cottonwoods stands opposite the shuttered Shonto Trading Post, the height of the trees seeming to defy the region’s aridity. I paused to admire how the cottonwood leaves shone yellow in the October sun, then watched, heart momentarily caught in my throat, as a school bus came lurching down the cliff face that overlooks the village, its bulk somehow negotiating the hairpin curves of the narrow, unpaved road. All seemed well when I finally rolled into Kayenta, until I glanced at the clock in my motel room and realized that, rather than arriving right on time, I was now an hour late to my meeting. I called my source and apologized profusely, but he couldn’t have cared less — he drove back over to meet me, and we chatted well into the evening.
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August 18, 2020 at 10:58PM
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Mountain Time Is the Best Time Zone in America - The New York Times
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