Elegy for a whim

Lovers of the eccentric, the exceptional and the obstinate, mourn with me. At 2 a.m. in Indiana last Sunday morning, an era quietly ended with the change of a clock's hands. For those of you from Massachusetts, the adoption of daylight-saving time by a single vote in the Indiana state legislature may seem as trivial as the state itself. And yet from Chicago to Cincinnati, Indiana's horological peculiarities have endeared the otherwise uninspiring, and frankly, unpleasant state to generations of Midwesterners. This is a tragedy. So you can know precisely how exciting traveling in Indiana is, I trace a hypothetical journey from Cincinnati to Chicago during daylight-saving time.

You set out heading west from Cincinnati and shortly pass through the state line into casino country: Ohio and Dearborn counties. Sensibly enough for a region economically dependent on Cincinnati, the two counties follow daylight-saving time and are in the Eastern time zone. These are small counties, and leaving them to the Northwest, the clock moves back an hour. Not content with only one idiosyncrasy, the Eastern time zone makes a large square foray into Central time zone territory in the middle of the state. After setting your clock another hour back in Central (you are now two hours behind Cincinnati, an hour's drive away), you almost immediately have to set it forward again as you drive into Indianapolis, in Eastern. Northwest of the capital, the adventure continues, as you set your clock back once more to Central. Not free yet, as you enter the counties that pay tribute to Chicago and daylight-saving time, you must set your clock forward once more, despite traveling west. Drawing a line along this highly plausible route, the time in each zone when it is noon in Cincinnati is as follows: 12 p.m., 11 a.m., 10 a.m., 11 a.m., 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.. That's five timezone changes in as many hours as it takes to drive the route. As of Sunday, that number is reduced to one. The complex map of Indiana, the websites dedicated to sorting out Indiana's hours for confused visitors and county autonomy are all gone.

Of course, the history of how the state got that way is almost as colorful as its map. For a brief while in the '40s, the entire state was in Central, but Indianapolis alone observed daylight-saving time. In 1966, Congress passed the U.S. Uniform Time Act, placing the entire state unambiguously in Eastern. In bold defiance of federal tyranny, the U.S. Department of Transportation forgot about enforcing the law, which most state legislatures complied with of their own accord. Indiana alone, proud bastion of independent minds, decided to ignore the act's provisions and declared their state split down the middle, with the aforementioned foray by Eastern into Central. By washing their hands of that liberal, morally questionable daylight-saving time business, they prompted TV broadcasters in New York to sue the secretary of transportation over the inconvenience they suffered by being unable to communicate program times effectively in Indiana. A handful of disloyal counties, thumbing their noses at Indianapolis, Washington and New York, declared themselves partisans of daylight saving and illegally participated in the national clock-shuffling each fall and spring. Until last week, Indianapolis refused to recognize the legitimacy of daylight-saving time anywhere in the state, triggering a "cold war" that remained a source of enmity between the capital and the peripheral counties until Sunday, when both sides decided to bury the hatchet.

My question for the state of Indiana — for the slimmest of majorities in the state legislature that voted to strip Indianans of their only interesting characteristic — is "Et tu, Brute?" Then perish whimsy! David Schaengold is a philosophy major from Cincinnati, Ohio. He can be reached at dschaeng@princeton.edu.