Without the Time of Day

“Jonathan, did you ever live without a clock, whole days, I mean, days and days

“When I was a boy most of the time, I suppose. But the family didn’t like it.”

“Of course. But did you like it?”

“Yes, I liked it all. I seem to remember getting pretty hungry sometimes, but it’s all rather good as I look back on it.”

“Let’s do it!”

“Now?”

“No. Society is an enlarged family, and wouldn’t like it. But this summer, when we camp.”

“How do you know we’re going to camp?”

“The things we know best we don’t always know how we know.”

Well, then, if we camp

“When we camp let’s live without a watch.”

“You’d need one to get there.”

“Take one, and let it run down.”

As it turned out, my “when” was truer than Jonathan’s “if.” We did camp. We did, however, use watches to get there: when we expressed our baggage, when we sent our canoe, when we took the trolley car and the train; and the watch was still going as our laden craft nosed gently against the bank of the river-island that was to be our home for two weeks. It was late afternoon, and the shadows of the steep woods on the western bank had already turned the rocks in midstream from silver to gray, and dimmed the brightness of the swift water, almost to the eastern shore.

“Will there be time to get settled before dark?” I asked, as we stepped out into the shallow water and drew up the canoe to unload.

“Shall I look at my watch to see?” asked Jonathan, with a note of amiable derision in his voice.

“Well, I should rather like to know what time it is. We won’t begin till to-morrow.”

“You mean, we won’t begin to stop watching. All right. It’s just seventeen and a half minutes after five. I’ll give you the seconds if you like.”

“Minutes will do nicely, thank you.”

“Lots of time. You collect firewood while I get the tent ready. Then it’ll need us both to set it up.”

We worked busily, happily. Ah! The joyous elation of the first night in camp! Is there anything like it? With days and days ahead, and not even one counted off the shining number! All the good things of childhood and maturity seem pressed into one mood of flawless, abounding happiness.

By dark the tent was up, the baggage stowed, the canoe secured, the fire glowing in a bed of embers, and we sat beside it, looking out past the glooms of the hemlocks across the moonlit river, sat and ate city-cooked chicken and sandwiches and drank thermos-bottled tea.

“To-morrow we’ll cook,” I said. “To-night it’s rather nice not to have to. Look at the moonlight on that rock! How black it makes the eddy below!”

“Good bass under there,” said Jonathan. “We’ll get some to-morrow.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, of course, it’s always maybe, with bass. Well I’m done and it’s quarter to ten late! Oh! Excuse me! Maybe you’d rather I hadn’t told you. By the way, do I wind my watch to-night or not?”

“Not.”

“Not it is, then. Sure you wouldn’t rather have it wound, though? We can leave it hanging in the tent. It won’t break loose and bite you.”

“Yes, it would. There would be a something a taint

“Oh, all right!”

We slept with the murmur of the river running through our dreams, a murmur of many voices: deep voices, high voices, grumbling voices as the stones go grinding and rolling along the ever-changing bottom, and only half roused when the dawn chorus of the birds filled the air. That dawn chorus was something we should have been loath to miss. Through the first gray of the morning there comes a stir in the woods, an expectant tremor; a bird peeps softly and is still; then another, and another, “softly conferring together.” As the light grows warmer, comes a clearer note from some leader, then a full, complete song; another, and the woods are awake, flinging out their wonderful song-greeting to the morning. There is in it a prodigality of swift-changing beauty like ocean surf: a continuous and intricate interweaving of rhythms, pulses and ebbings of clear tone, beautiful phrases rising antiphonal, showerings of bright notes, moments of subsidence, almost of pause. As the light grows and sharpens, the music reaches a crescendo of exuberance, and at last dies down as real day comes, bringing with it the day’s work. On our island the leader of the chorus was almost always a song sparrow, though once or twice a wood thrush came over from the shore woods and filled the hemlock shadows with the limpid splendors of his song.

Hearing the chorus through our dreams, we slept again, and when I really waked the sun was high, flecking the eastern V of our tent with dazzling patches. I heard Jonathan moving about outside, and the crackling of a new-made fire. I went to the front of the tent and looked out. Yes, there they were, the fire and Jonathan, in a quiet space of shade where the early coolness still hung. Beyond them, half shut out from view by the low-spreading hemlock boughs, was the open river such gayety of swift water! Such dazzle of midsummer morning! I drew back, eager to be out in it.

“Bacon and eggs, is it?” called Jonathan, “or shall I run down and try for a bass?”

“Don’t!” I called. I knew that if he once got out after bass he was lost to me for the day. And now we had cut loose from even the mild tyranny of his watch. As I thought of this I went over to the many-forked tree, whose close-trimmed branches served our tent as hat-rack, clothes-rack, everything-that-can-hang-or-perch-rack, and opened Jonathan’s watch.

“Well, what time is it?” Jonathan was peering in between the tent-flaps.

“Twenty-two minutes before five.”

“A.M., I judge. Sorry you didn’t let me wind it?”

“Not a bit. I was just curious to see when it stopped, that was all.”

“Well, now you know. Hereafter the official time for the camp is 4:38 A.M. or P.M., according to taste. Come along. The bacon’s done, and I’m blest if I want to drop in the eggs.”

Dropping an egg will never, I fear, be one of Jonathan’s most finished performances. He watched me do it with generous admiration. “If you could just get over being scared of them,” I suggested, as the last one plumped into the pan and set up its gentle sizzle.

“No use. I am scared of the things. I tap and tap, and nothing happens, and then I get mad and tap hard, and they’re all over the place.”

By the time breakfast was over, even the coolness under the hemlocks was beginning to grow warm and aromatic. The birds in the shore woods were quieter, though out at the sunny end of our island, where the hemlocks gave place to low scrub growth, the song sparrow sang gayly now and then.

“Now,” said Jonathan, “what about fishing?”

“Well let’s fish!”

“One up stream and one down, or keep together?”

“Together,” I decided. “If we go two ways there’s no telling when I’ll ever see you again.”

“Yes, there is: when I’m hungry.”

“No; some time after you’ve noticed you’re hungry.”

“Now, if we had watches it would be so much simpler: we could meet here at, say, one o’clock.”

“Simple, indeed! When did you ever look at a watch when you were fishing, unless I made you? No, my way is simple, but we stay together.”

Of course, in river fishing, “together” means simply not absolutely out of sight of each other. Jonathan may be up to his arm-pits in mid-current, or marooned on a rock above a swirling eddy, while I am in a similar situation beyond calling distance, but so long as a bend in the river does not cut us off, we are “together,” and very companionable togetherness it is, too. When I see Jonathan wildly waving to attract my attention, I know he has either just caught a big bass or else just lost one, and this gives me something to smile over as I wonder which it is. After a time, if I am catching shiners and no bass, and Jonathan doesn’t seem to be moving, I infer that his luck is better than mine, and drift along toward him. Or it may be the other way around, and he comes to look me up. Bass are the most uncertain of fish, and no one can predict when they will elect to bite, or where. Sometimes they are in the still water, deep or shallow according to their caprice; sometimes they hang on the edges of the rapids; sometimes they are in the dark, smooth eddies below the great boulders; sometimes in the clear depths around the rocks near shore. Each day afresh, indeed, each morning and each afternoon, the fisherman must try, and try, and try, until he discovers what their choice has been for that special time. Yet no fisherman who has once drawn out a good bass from a certain bit of water can help feeling, next time, that there is another waiting for him there. That is one of the reasons why he is always hopeful, and so always happy. The fish he has caught, at this well-remembered spot and that, rise up out of the past and flick their tails at him; and all the stretches between stretches of water that have never for him held anything but shiners, stretches of time diversified by not even a nibble sink into pleasant insignificance.

We banked our fire, stowed everything in the tent that a thunderstorm would hurt, and splashed out into the river. There it lay in all its bright, swift beauty, and we stood a moment, looking, feeling the push of the water about our knees and the warmth of the sun on our shoulders.

“It makes a difference, sleeping out in it all,” I said. “You feel as if it belonged to you so much more. I quite own the river this morning, don’t you?”

“Quite. But not the bass in it. Bet you don’t catch one!”

“Bet I beat you!”

“Bass, mind you. Sunfish don’t count. You’re always catching sunfish.”

“They count in the pan. But I’ll beat you on bass. I know some places

“Who doesn’t? All right, go ahead!”

We were off; Jonathan, as usual, wading up to his chest or perched on a bit of boulder above some dark, slick rapid; I preferring water not more than waist-deep, and not too far from shore to miss the responses of the wood-folk to my passing: soft flurries of wings; shy, half-suppressed peepings; quick warning notes; light footfalls, hopping or running or galloping; the snapping of twigs and the crushing of leaves. Some sounds tell me who the creature is, the warning of the blue jay, the whirr of the big ruffed grouse, the thud of the bounding rabbit, but many others leave me guessing, which is almost better. When a very big stick snaps, I always feel sure a deer is stealing away, though Jonathan assures me that a chewink can break twigs and “kick up a row generally,” so that you’d swear it was nothing smaller than a wild bull.

So we fished that day. When I caught a bass, which was seldom, I whooped and waved it at Jonathan, and when I caught a shiner, which was rather often, I waved it too, just to keep his mind occupied. Hours passed, and we met at a bend in the river where the deep water glides close to shore.

“Hungry?” I asked.

“Now you speak of it, yes.”

“Shall we go back?”

“How can I tell? Now, if we only had that watch we’d know whether we ought to be hungry or not.”

“What does that matter, if we are hungry? Besides, if you’d had a watch, you’d have had to carry it in your teeth. You know perfectly well you wouldn’t have brought it, anyway.”

“Well then, at least when we got back, we should have known whether we ought to have been hungry or not. Now we shall never know.”

“Never! Oh! Look there, Jonathan! We’re going to catch it!” A sense of growing shadow in the air had made me look up, and there, back of the steep-rising woods, hung a blue-black cloud, with ragged edges crawling out into the brightness of the sky.

“Sure enough! The bass’ll bite now, if it really comes. Wait till the first drops, and see what you see.”

We had not long to wait. There came that sudden expectancy in the air and the trees, the strange pallor in the light, the chill sweep of wind gusts with warm pauses between. Then a few big drops splashed on the dusty, sun-baked stones about us.

“Now! Wade right out there, to the edge of that ledge don’t slip over, it’s deep. I’ll go down a little way.”

I waded out carefully, and cast, in the smooth, dark water already beginning to be rain-pocked. It was surprisingly shivery, that storm wind! I glanced toward shore to look for shelter I remembered an overhanging ledge of rock then my line went taut! I forgot about shelter, forgot about being chilly; I knew it was a good bass.

I got him in too big to go through the hole in my creel cast for another and another and yet another. The rain began to fall in sheets, and the wind nearly blew me over, but who could run away from such fishing? The surface of the river, deep blue-gray, seemed rising everywhere in little jets to meet the rain. Rapids, eddies, still waters, weedy edges, all looked alike; there were neither waves nor swirls nor glassy slicks, but all were roughly furry under the multitudinous assaults of the fierce rain-drops. The sky was mottled lead-color, the wind blew less strongly, but cold cold. And under that water the bass were biting, my rod was bending double, my reel softly screaming as I gave line, and one after another I drew the fish alongside and dipped them out with my landing net.

Then, as suddenly as they had begun, they stopped biting. I waited long minutes; nothing happened, and all at once I realized that I was very wet and very cold. Wading ashore, I saw Jonathan shivering along up the narrow beach toward me, his shoulders drawn in to half their natural spread, neck tucked in between his collar-bones, knees slightly bent.

“You can’t be cold?” I questioned as soon as he was near enough to hear me through the slash of the rain and wind.

“No, of course not; are you?”

We didn’t discuss it, but ran up the bank to the rock-ledge and crouched under it, our teeth literally chattering.

“Did you ever see such fishing?” I managed to stammer.

“Great! But oh, why didn’t I bring the whiskey bottle?”

“Let’s run for camp! We can’t be wetter.”

We crawled out into the rain again, and first sprinted and then dog-trotted along the river edge. No bird notes now in the woods beside us, no whirring of wings; only the rain sounds: soft swishings and drippings and gusty showerings, very different from the flat, flicking sounds when rain first starts in dry woods.

Camp looked a little cheerless, but a blazing fire, started with dry stuff we had stowed inside the tent, changed things, and dry clothes changed them still more, and we sat within the tent flaps and ate ginger-snaps in great contentment of spirit while we waited for the rain to stop.

It did stop, and very soon the fish were sizzling in the pan.

“Of course, if we had a watch, now ” suggested Jonathan, as he carefully tucked under the pan little sticks of just the right length.

“What should we know more than we do now that we’re hungry?” I asked.

“Well, for one thing, we’d know what time it is,” replied Jonathan tranquilly.

“And for another we’d know whether it’s dinner or supper I’m cooking,” I supplemented. “But does it matter? You won’t get anything different, no matter which it is just fish is what you’ll get. And pretty soon the sun will be out, and you can set up a stick and watch the shadow and make a sundial for yourself.”

“Oh, I don’t really care which it is.”

“Do you suppose I don’t know that! And meanwhile, you might cut the bread and make some toast, there are some good embers on your side under the pan, and I’ll get the butter, and there we’ll be.”

By the time the toast was made and the fish curling brownly away from the pan, the sun had indeed come out, at first pale and watery, then clear, and still high enough in the heavens to set the soaked earth steaming fragrantly with its heat. Odors of hemlock and wet earth mingled with odors of toast and fried fish.

“Um-m! Smell it all!” I said. “What a lot we should miss if we didn’t eat in the kitchen!”

“Or cook in the dining-room which?”

“And hear that song sparrow! Doesn’t it sound as if the rain had washed his song a little cleaner and clearer?”

There followed the wonderful afterlight that a short, drenching rain leaves behind it a hush of light, deeply pervasive and friendly. The sunshine slanted across the gleaming wet rocks in the river, lit up the rain-darkened trunks of the hemlocks, glinted on the low-hanging leaves, and flashed through the dripping edges of sagging fern fronds. As twilight came on, we canoed across to the side of the river where the road lay the other side was steep and pathless woods and walked down to the nearest farmhouse to buy eggs for the morning. Back again by the light of a low-hung moon, and across the dim water to our own island and the embers of our fire.

“Oh, Jonathan! We never asked them what time it was!” I said. “I meant to for your sake I thought you’d sleep better if you knew.”

“Too bad! Probably I should have. I thought of it, of course, but was afraid that if I asked it would spoil your day.”

“It would take something pretty bad to spoil a day like this one,” I said.

Two days later the weather turned still and warm, the bass refused to bite, and even the sunfish lay, shy or wary or indifferent, in their shallow, sunny pools, so we resolved to walk down the river to the post-office, four miles away, for possible mail. As we sat on the steps of the little store, looking it over, “Here’s news,” said Jonathan; “Jack and Molly say they’ll run up if we want them, day after to-morrow up on the morning train, and back on the evening.”

“Good! Tell them to come along.”

“No it’s to-morrow letter’s been here since yesterday. I’ll telegraph.”

As we tramped home we planned the day. “We’ll meet them and all walk up together,” said Jonathan.

“We’d better catch some bass and leave them all hooked in a pool, ready for them to pull out,” I added; “otherwise they may not catch any. And maybe you’d better meet them and I’ll have dinner ready when you get back.”

“Nonsense! You come, and we’ll all get dinner when we get back. That’s what they’re coming for to see the whole thing.”

“But if it’s late they’ve got to get back for that down train.”

“Well time enough.”

“Oh, Jonathan! What about catching that train?”

“They’ll have watches watches that go.”

“But what about our meeting them? The train arrives at 10:15, they said. What does 10:15 look like in the sky, I wonder!”

“Or rather, what does 8.45 look like? It takes an hour and a half to get there, counting crossing the river.”

“Yes dear me! Well, Jonathan, we’ll just have to get up early and go, and then wait.”

“Or else take our watch to the farmhouse and set it.”

“Jonathan, I will not! I’d rather start at daylight.”

Which was very nearly what we did. The morning opened with a sun obscured, and I felt sure it was stealing a march on us and would suddenly burst out upon us from a noonday sky. We breakfasted hastily, ferried across to shore, and set a swinging pace down the road. As we walked, the sun burned through the mist, and our shadows came out, dim, long things, striding with the exaggerated gait that shadows have, over the grassy banks to our right.

“I think,” said Jonathan, “it may be as late as seven o’clock, but perhaps it’s only six.”

When we reached the station, the official clock registered 8.30. We strolled over to the store-and-post-office and got more letters one from Molly and Jack saying thank you they’d come. “They don’t entirely understand our mail system up here,” said Jonathan. We got some ginger-cookies and some milk and had a second breakfast, and finally wandered back to the station to wait for the train. It came, bearing the expected two, and much friendliness. “Get our letter? There, Jack! He said you wouldn’t, but I said you would. I made him send it ... four miles to walk? What fun!”

It was fun, indeed, and all went well until after dinner, when Jack saying, “Well, maybe we’d better be starting back for that train” drew out his watch. He opened it, muttered something, put it to his ear, then began to wind it rapidly. He wound and wound. We all laughed.

“Looks as if you hadn’t remembered to wind it last night,” said Jonathan, glancing at me.

“I haven’t done that in months, hang it! Give me the time, will you, Jonathan?” said Jack.

“Sorry!” Jonathan was smiling genially. “Mine’s run down too. It stopped at twenty-two minutes before five A. M., I think.”

“What luck! And Molly didn’t bring hers.”

“You told me not to,” Molly flicked in.

“So here we are,” said Jonathan, “entirely without the time of day.”

“But plenty of real time all round us,” I said. “Let’s use it, and start.” I avoided Jonathan’s eye.

We reached the station with an hour and ten minutes to spare bought more ginger-cookies and more milk. As we sat eating them in the midst of the preternatural calm that marks a country railroad station outside of train times, Molly remarked brightly,

“Well, I don’t see but we got on just as well without a watch, didn’t we, Jack? Why do we need watches, anyway? Do you see?” she turned to us. “Jack does everything by his watch eats and breathes and sleeps by it

Jack returned, watch in hand he had been getting railroad time from the telegraph operator. “Want to set yours while you think of it?” he asked Jonathan.

“Sorry thank you didn’t bring it,” said Jonathan.

“By George, man, what’ll you do?” Real consternation sounded in Jack’s tones.

“Oh, we’ll get along somehow,” said Jonathan. “You see, we don’t have many engagements, except with the bass, and they never meet theirs, anyhow.”

When the train had gone, I said, “Jonathan, why didn’t you tell them it was my whim?”

“Oh, I just didn’t,” said Jonathan.

As Jonathan had predicted, we did get along somehow got along rather well, on the whole. There are, of course, some drawbacks to an unwatched life. You never want to start the next meal till you are hungry, and after that it takes one or two or three hours, as the case may be, to go back to camp and get the meal ready, and by that time you are almost hungrier than you like being. But except for this, and the little matter of meeting trains, it is rather pleasant to break away from the habit of watching the watch, and it was with real regret that, on the last night of our camp, we took our watch to the farmhouse to set it.

“Run down, did it? Guess you forgot to wind it. Well we do forget things sometimes, all of us do,” the farmer’s wife said comfortingly as she went to look at the clock. “Twenty minutes to seven, our clock says. It’s apt to be fast, so I guess you won’t miss any trains. Father he says he’d rather have a clock fast than slow any day, but it don’t often get more than ten minutes wrong either way.”

And to us, after our two weeks of camp, ten minutes’ error in a clock seemed indeed slight.

“Jonathan,” I said, as we walked back along the road, “I hate to go back to clock time. I like real time better.”

“You couldn’t do so many things in a day,” said Jonathan.

“No maybe not.”

“But maybe that wouldn’t matter.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t,” I said.