Tico Time

Last night light it began to rain, lightly, steadily.  This morning the rain continues, diminishing to a light mist, increasing to steady rain, but never too heavy, not a thunderstorm nor tropical downpour.  Blue sky breaks through and the sky brightens, but to the north, to the mountains, all is cloud and mist.  Poplars sway broadly while their leaves tittle.  The new ducks enjoy the wet while the hens huddle inside on their roost.  Tomatoes in the greenhouse ripen and the maize maze is almost ready to deliver its load of corn.  Plants on the gourd house are now reaching towards birch-pole rafters, beckoning me to add more woven saplings for their tendrils to climb.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon looking for the spring and old reservoir up on the hill in back of Curious Gourds.  I found it, as well as the old iron pipe that once brought water to the farm.  Reviving this gravity-based water supply will help bring more water to the garden and to a small pond for the ducks — without using additional energy.  A small step towards a Hans Rey Energy Garden.  Our use of Our Town biodiesel in the tractor, and the solar powered electric fence, are two other examples of steps towards using local, sustainable energy.

Time is on my mind again as I see a red maple turning, a glimpse of vermilion in the otherwise deep green. I have been mostly residing in garden-time, which responds to the slow change of light and season.  With the forest all around my graceful clearing, and the Sandwich Range Wilderness just a mile through those woods, I have access to the even deeper mountain time.

Last week’s abstraction on the topology of what I playfully call time-space, gives way to more intimate reflection on the human relationship to time, a meeting of inner experience and the outside world.

The 2007 Summer/Fall issue of Appalachia featured three essays on time and the backcountry. The first, by Laura Waterman, Giving Ourselves Time to Track Time, states upfront, “The problem of time is not time itself, but how we fracture it and stuff it with distractions.” Putting aside the question of what “time itself” is for a moment, Laura’s view of “fracturing” and “stuffing with distractions” is the common experience of modern life. Laura describes how she and her husband Guy experienced time in their work lives in New York City:

In the office, you often just waited for time to pass.  The meeting drags on, the report you are working on is putting you to sleep, and you find you can’t keep your eyes off the clock whose hands haven’t appeared to budge in the last half-hour.  You wish time could just slip away… at the end of the day, you’re not sure where the time has gone, and you feel you haven’t accomplished anything… you’re plagued by a feeling that your whole life seems to be disintegrating in a way that’s tedious, unproductive, and, worst of all, totally unfulfilling.”

These were the days before the internet, cell phones and ipods.  This was just office time as it has been evolving for the last 300 hundred years.  While the above description may seem to be simply that of the wrong people in the wrong jobs, more fundamentally it represents a resistance to the appropriation, division and rationalization of time that occurs in the office, the factory and school (as well as other places).  Michel Foucault describes the emergence in the eighteenth century of

… a new technique for taking charge of time for individual existences; for regulating the relations of time, bodies and forces… for turning to ever increased profit….  How can one capitalize the time of individuals…? How can one organize profitable durations? (Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, page 157)

Ben Franklin provides a simpler way of saying it: “Time is money.”

But is time really so linear for us?  Christine concludes, “Constant change: that’s the reality of time, no matter how we measure it… In civilized life the theme of our days is constant order, schedules that don’t alter from day to day or week to week.”

However, if it were only constant change, then the world would be unintelligible and *chaotic, whereas what we experience are things repeating themselves: night becomes day and then night again; winter passes to spring, passes to summer, passes to fall, and back to winter.  Even in the tropics, where night and day show little change and we do not see the extremes of steamy hot summers and bitterly cold winters, there are rainy seasons and dry seasons; times of wind and times of calm.  In tropical dry forests the leaves fall off the trees each year just as they do in New England.  Reading the geological landscape we can see patterns of glaciations and warm periods, with smaller neoglaciations and hypsithermals in between.

We appear to move in circles, but with each recurrance comes difference, change. Not only do we as individuals grow older, but we have arrived at this point in time (if there is such a marker) through the wondrous process of change we call evolution. Yes, time is change… and recurrence.

Laura and Guy Waterman lived a double life for many years, as many of us do, enduring their work-weeks so that they could journey to their beloved mountains on weekends.  The comparison is stark:

…in the mountains, you feel the opposite about time.  You want it neither to slip away nor to speed up, and keeping track of it becomes vital in a very different way than in the office.  Here you are aware of where you are in the passage of the day by the way the light changes.  You’re attuned to your environment, to the woods, the wind, to where you are in space, and where your are in time too… Contrary to what you’d thought: that because your not in the office you could forget the time, you find that time has not become less important; if anything, it’s more important, but you don’t need a clock to track the time… In the mountains, the clock no longer rules as it did in the office… In the mountains, you understand what poets mean when they say time flows, that time is a river.  Here time no longer feels split, and your life has stopped feeling broken up into little bits.

Mountain time.

Laura and Guy eventually brought their divided lives together by moving to Vermont, homesteading and writing (their “cash crop”) about the things knew and loved: the mountains.  The winter trek to the Waterman’s own graceful clearing, which they named Barra after the Isle of Barra in Scotland,  was a mile snowshoe, which I recall well.  The summer route was a less demanding third of a mile, but still a long way to bring supplies. They hauled water, cut firewood for cooking and heating, and used candles and kerosene lamps for light.  Laura writes of this life:

When you live like that, when you’ve set your life so that you haul your wood and water, your notion of time changes. Especially, you’ve changed your relationship to time when you can’t drive to your own front door.  In fact, something you didn’t expect has happened.  Instead of having less time you feel you have more.  You’ve planned in that extra half hour of walking time it takes to reach the car, and all your doing now is walking.  And thinking and observing and listening: that scratching of the leaves to the right is a white-throated sparrow; the ferns are unfurling (note to self: Pick fiddleheads).  You feel relaxed and very rich in time.  And you feel a close connection to the land because you’re experiencing time in a way that tunes you into the land itself and wild nature.

This is the other side of my idea of time-space — the perceived expansion or contraction of space as one takes more or less time to cover a distance: you give more or less time to a place, and if you give more time to the land, time itself (whatever that is) seems to expand.  Not passing faster nor more slowly; time becomes more expansive, even when it seems to pass quickly.

We must be careful not to idealize the life where you must “haul your wood and water.” Many people in the world desperately want to live without these chores and without the hunger that can come with subsistence farming.  I have often said that the homesteading life that some of us who live in wealthy countries choose rather than are born into is a rare privilege.  The question here is how we approach time and space, our lives and land.

When I moved to Costa Rica I soon learned the expression “Tico time.” Tico is shorthand for Costa Rican, and Tico time refers to a different approach to a variety of things in life.  People rarely arrive when they say they will, and when I was running an office in Costa Rica I learned that this applied even to this formal environment.  People often came to scheduled meetings late, and when they did, instead skulking in under a supervisors scowl and ignored by co-workers (as would happen in the United States), meetings stopped while everyone happily greeted the latecomer. This sense of time becomes more pronounced as one moved further into rural areas.  A farmer’s sense of time is even less specific, and holding a meeting of farmers required a very coarse-grained precision: finding time (as though time somehow existed as an object hidden in the landscape) required allowing for many hours if not most of a day. Church Masses were somewhat immune to this laxity, though ringing bells obscured the existence of any clock.  Visiting was a great way to pass the time — share time with another — and one always gave and accepted this time graciously.  This is to say,  in addition to the individual experience of space and time expanding, one can also experience an expansion of social time, our time with others.

During my years in Costa Rica the community I lived in went from dairy and coffee farming,  field biology, and the hosting the occasional birder to becoming one of the largest “eco” tourist destinations in the country.  And with this change came the gradual erosion of Tico time.  The virtues of profit-making began to take over the values of friendship and community.  While the new economy was based on breathtaking biodiversity, it paradoxically consumed critical habitat with development and distanced people from the land as a dense townscape emerged.  Time is money, after all. Wage-earning in hotels and restaurants replaced farming, and with it came the demand for a new sense of time.  The increasing population enjoyed the many benefits of cash, but also increasingly conformed to the time of North American and European visitors and a globalized economy.  World and local events and the seasonality of tourism created gaps in employment, and with it food insecurity.  The maladies of stress and depression increased along with sexually transmitted diseases and drug and alcohol use.  Time(s) had changed.

Just as we must be careful not to idealize the simple life, we must equally take care not to overly demonize development that is lifting so many out of poverty. Again, I am primarily concerned with time here. Tico time was not and I think cannot be entirely erased from Costa Rica, and as you walk further from the centers that have adopted the new time, one can still have an unhurried cup of coffee and show up late for a meeting.

***

I have written the above over the course of the day.  And while it may seem continuous, I have stopped to watch the clouds hide and reveal the Acteon Ridge several times. I have opened doors for ducks and chickens, and closed them up again at the end of the day. Ducks are messy creatures who like fresh water not only to drink but to splash in a few times a day.  I was disappointed to find only one duck egg (there should have been three, though perhaps I am imposing my time on the fowl).  The light at the end of the day was lovely pastel: clouds white, gray and pink; pastures shimmering green; red stain on the barn trim, radiant.  Night comes, and sleep.  When I awake the sun burns through a shroud of mist rising from the Smarts Brook river valley.  The fields are heavy with glistening dew.  Which brings me to the last, luminous essay in that Fall/Summer 2007 Appalachia: Arctic Time by Jeff Fair.

If living close to the equator means that that light and dark approach a daily balance, living in the arctic circle provides a strangely parallel, but utterly different experience: on a yearly cycle we have a day that is a summer long, and a night that lasts the winter. Our circadian rhythm, a 25 hour inner, biological clock, bears no resemblance to this annual cycle.  In his journey to the top of the world, Jeff discovers “Arctic Time.”

“What does that mean,” he asks the trip leader, Dr. Joel Schmutz.

“It means you sleep in.” is the reply.

With only this to go on, Jeff looks to the internet for a more precise definition to no avail, and wonders that it does not appear in Barry Lopez’s, Arctic Dreams. He finds his answer by speaking to field biologists and arctic guides, where the term is common:

The phenomenon itself may be described as follows:  Take one flatlander (a good lower forty-eight term) out of Anchorage, Fairbanks, Seattle, Buzzards Bay, Winter Harbor, Peoria, etc., and place him or her into the Arctic summer of say, Alaska.  Immediately the traveler begins to lengthen her days, arising later, delaying his meal schedule walking or working well past quitting time, and crawling into a sleeping bag in the wee hours of the morning — if there were a morning up there in summer time.  Trouble is, there isn’t one — nor is there a night, afternoon, evening — except by the clock.  Those who struggle to follow their time pieces are fighting the allure of light and landscape in this part of the world.

It seems we now know where all that saved time goes: it accumulates in the Far North.

I struggle with the idea of time itself, an idea that treats time as though it were a thing dwelling outside of us. I have been speaking of inner and outer time, and this perpetuates the idea that there is such a hard and fast threshold and difference, a sort of Cartesian duality with time as the medium.  It doesn’t help that we have atomic clocks telling us the ‘real’ time up to the millisecond. Arctic Time, if its origin is outside of us in the circling sun, also penetrates our being, as well as other living things:

The constant sunlight during brief Arctic summers allows the cotton grass and sedges to grow 24 hours a day, and goslings that feed on it to fledge faster than their cousins to the south.  It also stimulates the human mind.

Arctic time gradually defragments our schedules, pushing us out of sink with the clock and in sink with the impossibility of an endless day.  We can imagine approaching the North Pole, seeking that that magical point where the sun stands still. Only it doesn’t.  The endless day of Arctic summer becomes the endless night of Arctic winter. Change.  As Christine tells us regarding daylight saving time, “We could turn the clocks ahead, or we could get up earlier, but neither one changes the fact that day’s sunlight is a little longer than the previous day’s, and the next day will be different, and the next.”

I take heart from Jeff Fair’s concluding remarks:

Up there in the silent Tundra, living under a freedom driven by the powerful light of latitude and granted by the landscape itself, where the real and natural world still has influence over our schedules and inspirations — even when you’re late, you’re right on time.

Arctic time is Tico time.

* I mean chaos in the classical sense rather than the modern reference to complex systems and sensitive dependency on initial conditions.