In the zone

Time zones are a gigantic pain in the butt.

They’re necessary. Without them, there would be one slim strip of Earth that experienced normal, sensible times -- a sunny midday noontime, pitch-black midnight, evening sunsets -- and everywhere else would be a tangle of disorientation. Ethiopians would go to bed at 10 in the morning, the Chinese would eat breakfast at three in the afternoon, and students in France would see the sun rise about midway through algebra class, assuming they’re not nodding off over their cheese-and-baguette lunches. C’est dommage!

We need time zones to make sense of it all, to ensure most people have a shot at getting into the flow of a normal day. That doesn’t mean I have to like them. I’m generally not affected by time zones, but every once a while you travel somewhere and have to engage in an activity so unpleasant it should be banned by law: mental math.

Ugh.

Time zone mental math goes something like this. Say you’re traveling from Portland, Maine to Las Vegas, Nevada, and you’ve got a layover in Chicago. Portland to Chicago takes about three hours in the air, but by the time you land, only two hours have passed, because you’ve crossed from the Eastern to the Central Time Zone. The layover lasts about an hour, and then the final leg from Chicago to Vegas is about four hours. That’s five hours total, but as you enter Nevada airspace and look out the airplane window onto the neon-colored strip below, you realize the past five hours have gone by in three, an eight-hour day has gone by in five, and it feels like midnight even though it’s 9:30.

If you can read the preceding paragraph without getting a major headache, I will personally mail you a cookie.

Technically this constitutes time travel, but time travel is supposed to be way more fun. You’re supposed to see dinosaurs or laser-swords or something, and have a bunch of wacky adventures, altering history so now your dad is rich and has a mustache. Instead, you’re sitting at an airport bar holding a cocktail to your forehead, wrestling with the conflicting urges to either go to bed or stay up five more hours playing Blackjack. Not once in my many viewings of the “Back to the Future” movies did I ever see Marty McFly with jetlag.

Logistics get more complicated the farther from home you venture. I went on a trip to Australia when I was 15, and during that time, if anyone from the family wanted to chat they had to catch me in a hotel room at about six in the morning, Aussie time. Back in Maine, my parents just wrapped up that conversation about a week and a half ago.

For a world that’s so small, it sure seems big sometimes.

Maybe that thought crossed the minds of the old 19th century railroaders, who were largely responsible for establishing the early time zones used in adolescent America. A handful of semi-local time zones were in use before then -- like in southwest England, where it’s extremely important to know when to sip your daily tea -- but in the States, it was rail transport that changed everything. It’s important to keep strict and accurate time when you’re transporting dehydrated pig eyeballs from Baltimore to Los Angeles. If you’re a railroad company going by everyone’s wildly varying local times, you can’t exactly keep track of scheduling. It’s surprising more trains weren’t booked on the same rail heading in opposite directions. Can you imagine two trains colliding head-on, one carrying hog meat, the other toting scraps of iron? The whole scene would smell like burning motor oil and dead animals. At least you could use the track fire to cook the meat.

These “railfolk,” as I’ll affectionately call them, have been dealing with time zones for a long time. Being a jet-setting, transcontinental traveler is a newer beast, and it amplifies the whole effect just due to the sheer speed in which a person can zip from one coast to the other. Long-range ravel used to require months crammed into a stagecoach, and by the time you got to your destination, four family members and a pet dog had died and you were traveling with your aunt Evelyn and a crate of preserved beans. Plenty of time to get used to the whole sunrise/sunset dynamic. Now the same trip is a day’s travel, and it’s an unspeakable inconvenience not to have a pillow and an in-flight viewing of “The Peanuts Movie.” You simply step off a plane and the time, climate and culture are all radically different. It’s a special kind of whiplash brought on by physics and the trappings of advanced civilization.

Which brings us to this moment. I’m sitting in a conference room in Nevada at what’s supposed to be 9:15 in the morning, but my body knows the lie. With breakfast still gurgling in my belly, it’s saying, “Hey, isn’t time for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple? Get your act together, fool!” Not that my body can always be trusted; it also seems to think that blueberry muffins and milkshakes constitute proper nutrition, and that beer is one of the major food groups. I take what my body says with a grain of salt. Which is another thing it likes.

I know what’ll quash its protestations, though: good ol’ Eastern Standard Time. It’s been said that home is not a location but a state of mind, and that’s mostly true, but my state of mind wants a siesta and a midday Facebook break. Travel is wonderful, and an experience necessary to a fully-rounded life. Yet what greater relief is there than stepping off that plane and feeling familiar ground beneath your feet?

Dorothy was right, man. There’s no place like home.