Another piece from Percy's workshop. Currently untitled, which I hate, so feel free to make a suggestions... Inspired by a story from Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.

Imagine that Greenwich Mean Time, the International Dateline moves each year, that the red line sweeps across the turning globe by small increments. Wands spinning around clock faces. A new calendar, where the sun rotates differently and the nights are never the same. Imagine the new order of continents. Imagine new time.

Imagine you could watch the sun set into the Pacific Ocean and be on Central Standard Time. Imagine watching the first sun rise over the rocky islands off the Maine harbor, the great flaming ball rising over puffin colonies. Imagine you could see it while waiting among the cornfields. Would Iowa have the best lobster? The sea lions would still swim in warm teal water but the state would be called something different. Would we need a new name for the place, or just the people? Would they still be called the Northern Lights, if that big clumsy star could bloom first in the Midwest?

Imagine November with long, sunny evenings, evenings that stretch into the next day like day-old shadows on a suburban sidewalk. The bare trees, their bark grey and cracking, would point their unburdened limbs into a summer sky, blue and bright. Could you feel a chill in the wind, would they still feel like change? The branches might look stagnant, instead of hopeful—sweaty instead of winter-knuckle chapped. The light of autumn might be less golden or summer shimmer-white. Imagine the days in July ended before five o’clock. Imagine a summer of dark purple night skies speckled with stars that you could see before dinner. Would children still play into the night, stay up late watching reruns of the Dick Van Dyke show, because they could, because there’s no school the next day? Families could sit outside in the warmth and watch the stars spinning fast and try to pinpoint the hour when the dateline passed overhead.

Imagine Montana had weather like California. Would they still love cattle and shotguns and open land? Would they be a blue state, their blood like melting mountain snow rivers? They could lay down their guns. We could all see the doctors we need. Electricity would run on the beating wings of birds, or the running of antelope hooves or the spinning of the new, fast globe. Would we still need Prozac? If Florida could endure the same climate as Vermont, would we even notice the blues and reds of the map? If the days got shorter, longer five six seven times a year, if time moved more rapidly, if the seasons cycled more frequently, would we all be the same?

Imagine the seasons didn’t last as long. Imagine you only had to bear the oppressive heat of August or the glacial frozen time of January for a month at a time. Would you move faster or slower? Would you try harder or stand still, the world revolving around your locked-in feet? Imagine the new days that could teach you to understand the other. Imagine the pace that would catch your heels and send you aloft, into orbit. Imagine an alarm sounding. Imagine waking up.

Something I wrote for my workshop with Ben Percy a few weeks ago, which he really liked. I worked with him to revise it slightly, and then got it put together for submission this week. Thought I'd share...

The Names of Things

I love the way he knows the names of things: he romanced me with words like gneiss, Helianthus, mollisol, and Vermivora chrysoptera. We explore the sun-streaked crevices of northern forest paths. He crouches to the dirt. Hands me smooth acorns with little caps. Holds up crisp yellow leaves. Shows me palms full of soil. Count the number of blades along the leaf, he says, are the edges serrated? A twitter and a rustle from above. He starts. Gropes for the binoculars hanging around his neck. Write this down: bright yellow belly. Necklace of black streaks. Uniform grey above. I think it’s a… We sit on the cool ground and I drink water slowly. He turns the pages of his field guide. Fingers scanning the index. Classifying by characteristics. Confirming the identity. It was a Canadian warbler.

For several years now, I have relied on him to be my scientific index, a walking list of categories carefully recorded, I wish I knew what that red tree was, what kind of bird makes this sound like “sur-ee-sur-ee-sur-eee? He was the map. He knew the lands. He had brought me there. In Montana, he taught me the type of rock that towers as cliffs along the Gallatin River. The colors of the soils. What a bear’s paw print looks like. How to interpret shit. In California, there were lessons in cacti. How to age a brown pelican chick from a mile away. What the dead body of a baby sea lion washed on the beach smells like. He had the facts. He beat me to them. When he didn’t know what kind of flower that was, blooming along the edge of a canyon waterfall, he would pick it. He would bring it to the encyclopedia. He would use the shade of blue, the number of petals, the root structure. He would unlock the codes of science to bring me the answer.

Neurobiologists say that as we age, our brain’s ability to store new information is altered; instead of forging new pathways, we understand by linking new wires to old telephone poles, to the information we already have built. Everything new must be related to something old. I remember the first week I was in California, getting lost intentionally, exploring my new home, driving to the Buenaventura Mission on the hills above Laurel Avenue. I performed a treacherous three-point turn and stopped the car, stunned by the sight of a wide expanse, green as eucalyptus, far below. Utterly mystified, I tried to determine what plant that would be, to cover such an enormous part of Southern California’s pasture. I had seen, in the days I had been there, wet lemon groves, fields of shimmering lettuce, rows of bright strawberries, trees that bore lumpy avocados, but nothing that looked like this. I stood, slowly, up out of the car. The narrow, winding road sloped sharply beneath my feet, and I leaned back against the car, the driver’s side door in front of me, staring, hoping no cars drove by to laugh my tourist gawking. Out on the street, with the haze of the windshield removed, I laughed at myself, at my newcomer’s mistake, at my unfamiliarity, at the way we learn our geography, realizing I was looking straight out over the Pacific Ocean.

When we came to Central Time zone, we were both meandering blindly in a new wilderness; I had brought him here. Neither of us knew how to be Midwestern. We needed to learn what to call this place, to embed words like prairie, like knob-and-kettle, like soybean yields into our heart’s vocabulary. One day, driving back from a state park, from collecting more data, he pointed to the purple-grey clouds of the Sunday twilight, how would you describe that in your writer-ly way, I don’t know what to call that color? Embarrassed, I hedged, it doesn’t work like that, I can’t just pull it out of thin air. But I remembered the black walnut tree he’d recognized in our backyard and how he’d smashed open one of the impossible green shells to show me the staining ink of the nut’s meat and so I gave in. There was a storm coming, I don’t know, I guess…bruised with rain.

He smiled, nodded, a gentle laugh under his breath, I like that, he said, I never would have thought of calling it that.