Time and Space

Back at Curious Gourds. I awake to a damp, cool morning. I can see the Acteon Ridge though mist and haze rising from Smarts Brook, above the green foreground trees. Mist billows up from the Smarts Brook river valley, pouring into the Mad River where it billows even higher. The mist rises as I write, beginning to hide the lower slope of Acteon, making for a tricolored series: green forest, white mist, cobalt blue mountain (lightened by haze), white sky. The mist is now sinking, revealing more gauzy cobalt, but leaving a fin shaped wisp. Do phantom dolphins swim in a ghostly sea above Smarts Brook? The mist settles, rises again. I can’t keep up and must let my attempt at picturing this moment go.

Yesterday I arrived at Curious Gourds after being away a few days.  A trick of fate has made bicycle riding one of the exercises I can do without too much pain, so I have found myself revisiting the scene and circumstances of my accident. My challenge yesterday was to make the trip I had once intended to cycle twice a week (before my disastrous flight over the handlebars) between my home in Tamworth Village and the Curious Gourds Studio and Gardens at the Sandwich Mountain Farm. The trip is about twenty-two miles, but the last seven across the Sandwich Notch Road is a challenge, climbing 1000 feet in five miles.

I made it, a four-hour trip marked by stages: a quick stop at the Community School after 3 miles to get a sip of water; sitting under a tree on the side of the road in North Sandwich to answer a phone call (yes, I had my cell phone); a stop at Mocha Rizing Café in Center Sandwich for an energizing fruit smoothie; a water break at the intersection of the Beebe River Road and the Sandwich Notch Road; refilling my water bottle at the spring by the the old Mosses Hall House; and finally, after climbing the last hill, I coasted two miles very, very slowly down to the Farm and Curious Gourds.

If I had driven, the trip would have taken me an hour, walking, most of an entire day. With fewer stops and in better physical condition, perhaps I could have done the trip in under three hours, but not much less. (I’m sure there are are many who could do it much faster). Each mode of transportation effectively compresses or expands space and time. Without even considering the complexities of Einstein’s theory of relativity, we can easily see that time and space dilation is an everyday experience.

When I drive and look at the scenery, I notice many things, especially those faraway: I recognize the profile of a mountain range that shifts before my eyes almost film-like, the face shifting and transforming in minutes. I may see a beautiful house, admire a village that I drive through, or note that so-and-so has mowed their pasture. The same trip by bicycle not only triples the time it takes, but allows me to pay more attention to the landscape. Mountain ranges still change their appearance, but we have lost the effect of a time lapse animation. I can glimpse roadside wildflowers, a curiously shaped piece of granite in a stone wall, that lilac bush that I never saw before. Walking is yet another expansion of time and space, with its own set of changes. What was a quick trip is now an all-day journey. I am also free of the roads, and take to the woods occasionally on and off trail. I am increasing space in the time over distance formula and my ability to take in the details of the geography around me has improved considerably, and I can more easily interact with the landscape: no need to pull over the car or stop the bicycle. I pause, look around, bend down and pick up the gnawed bone from a moose leg, imagining a natural history story that features a weakened calf and entrepreneurial coyote. Details of wildflowers budding, blooming, and fruiting are there before me and waiting for me to scribble a note. I am more inclined to stop, freezing myself within a horizon of space, and perhaps even stopping time itself… almost.

I have been speaking of time and space as it relates to movement, a measurable geographic and time experience. We can calculate this just as we do with velocity by reversing the formula: Time/distance = a temporal-spatial experience.

Walking: 12 hours/22mile = .54 hours per mile

Biking: 4 hours/22 miles = .18 hours per mile

Driving: 1 hour/22miles = .05 hours per mile

The faster we go, the more territory we cover, which effectively shrinks the world for us. We have all heard the expression that the world is smaller now, and in terms of time over distance it really is. One could even map this, distorting space, making areas larger or smaller depending if they are traversed by foot, bicycle or car.

Perhaps you recall the 1976 “View of the World” New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg that presents a New Yorker’s view of the world: a cityscape of buildings and streets centered on 10th Avenue dominates the foreground, bounded by the Hudson River and tiny strip of Jersey;  a band of middle-ground stretches beyond the city to the West Coast with a few cities named; the Pacific Ocean continues beyond the coast and appears smaller than both New York City itself and all that is between the coasts; at the horizon tiny mounds represent China, Japan and Russia; Canada and Mexico are given some due as the right and left boundaries of the drawing; the Atlantic and all of Europe is absent, as is Africa, reflecting the perspectival orientation of the map, looking east to west.

While this map largely represents a subjective mapping, it also contains an element  of the sort of time-space distortion described above: the walking city of New York is larger in size than the rest of the country that one can traverses by car, train, or plane.

While much of our landscape provides us with a choice — walk, bicycle, drive, fly, or use some other means of transportation — some doesn’t. The land between roads can be seen as disproportionally large in comparison to the land directly adjacent to the roads themselves — can you visualize an inverted bubble where the edge represents the smallest area and the center the largest? This seeming paradox is what we have when two very different transportation options are adjacent. In National Wilderness Areas, such as the Sandwich Range Wilderness that I can view from the window of the Studo, human movement is restricted to walking, snowshoeing and skiing, and this spatial-temporal bubble is very deliberately managed and maintained by the United States Forest Service. Since skiing is faster that walking or snowshoeing, winter effectively shrinks wilderness for the season.

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What I have discussed above looks at time over distance as a way of understanding how transportation affects our experience of space in a very measurable way, shrinking or enlarging our experience of the landscape. Of course, what is most significant is how this contributes to our inner experience. I’ll save more of that for next week.