Saving season, years more important than an hour

The oddest thing happened last night: An hour disappeared from our lives.

If like most others across Iowa this morning, you're groggily trying to rectify why the VCR clock and your wristwatch say 9 a.m. even though the sun is higher in the sky than it should be at that time of the day.

Don't worry. After a couple of months, you'll adjust.

Or if you're like Chuck and Irwin, two bachelor farmer brothers who lived up the road from where I grew up, you just ignore the whole ordeal. From their point of view, the cows didn't practice daylight-saving time, so why should they?

• • •

Once a week, Chuck and Irwin would go into town. They'd sit on a bench in front of the café, a half a foot apart, Chuck wearing a beaten seed cap, Irwin a new one, both of them dressed in denim, work boots and gray hair. Though breathing in heavily punctuated wheezes, they smelled surprisingly clean in their button shirts, pen and notepad sticking from front breast pockets, as if they'd dressed up for the occasion. Still, their eyes always struck me as sullen, as if wondering what kind of cruel joke life had played on them.

They talked of people leaving town, of corn prices, of girls they knew long ago, of the general doom befalling our small town and the Midwest. Sometimes, one would rise and buy the other a soda; typically they took turns doing so, but neither spoke of any formal arrangements toward this end. Should one fall behind a week, though, it was sure to cause the slighted party to privately complain about the other being cheap.

For them, time didn't mean too much, unless it cost money or honor.

• • •

Daylight-saving time is a very old idea, so that Chuck and Irwin didn't follow it always struck me as curious.

The notion of skipping an hour began in the United States during World War I, mainly to save fuel by reducing the hours we'd need to use artificial light. Some states and communities observed daylight-saving time between the wars, but most dropped it like a jug of wood alcohol in a Prohibition police raid. Of course, during World War II rationing occurred once more, and so it was reinstituted nationally.

Chuck and Irwin grew up during World War II, so I figured daylight-saving time would be ingrained in them, just as my great aunt, raised in the Depression, always patched clothes even though her husband had a high-paying job as an electrician.

As the cliché goes, old habits are hard to break.

• • •

Apparently, Chuck and Irwin had decided daylight-saving time was a bad habit that they'd resolved to quit.

It just didn't match the rhythms of their lives.

Unlike city life, which re-volves around the artificiality of the clock, farm life - for a couple of bachelor brothers, anyway - followed the seasons. The increasing daylight of spring meant planting. The warm, long hours of summer were for cultivating and repairing. The weakening sunlight of fall meant harvesting. And the cold, dark hours of winter were for catching up on one's rest.

Perhaps that was why Chuck and Irwin never complained about Leap Year: It made sense to them.

But ask them about daylight-saving time, and they'd tell you it was worse than those crooked politicians sitting at the statehouse because of bought-off votes.

In fact, they added, the Russians practiced daylight-saving time. Khrushchev needed to improve productivity one year, they said, so he adopted daylight-saving time and moved the clock back an hour - at 5 p.m. when workers' shifts would have ended.

And true to their Amer-ican spirit, if you looked at a clock in Chuck and Irwin's house from April through October, it was an hour be-hind.

• • •

But old Chuck and Irwin may have been on to something.

A University of British Columbia study done about a decade ago found that traffic accidents rise by 8 percent the Monday after clocks spring ahead. That lost hour of sleep makes a difference.

Though it's only anecdotal evidence, during my first years as a reporter on the police beat, the number of traffic accidents I wrote about the week after we changed our clocks in April did indeed increase.

And I'd thought my editor was nuts when he first told me to come in a half-hour early the Monday after we sprang forward.

• • •

These days, Chuck and Irwin no longer farm. Chuck sits in a nursing home, and Irwin passed away a couple of winters back.

Myself, I haven't been back to the farm in a few seasons, but this Easter plan to return. I'm hoping the weather will be warm, so I can take my four-year-old nephew for a walk, show him all the trees I used to climb, give him some tips on how best to see the pheasants that nest at a sparse end of the woodlot.

I'd also like to pause for a minute in the cornfield's stubble, gaze off at the horizon where Chuck and Irwin used to live, and imagine their cows still grazing in the pasture even though every other farmer on the hill already had herded theirs into the barn for milking.

And I'll also take a second to ponder how it is that the years so easily disappear from our lives.

(originally published April 5, 2003)