The confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers occurs right at the Montana-North Dakota Border, southwest of Williston. From that point the river makes a gentle curve, flowing northeast and then turning the the southwest. The river is wide and slow flowing as it is part of Lake Sakakawea behind the Garrison Dam. Below the dam, the river wanders southward to flow between Mandan and Bismarck, just west of the center of the state and on south, past Fort Yates where it enters South Dakota widened behind another dam. If you look at a map of North Dakota, the arc of the river divides the state into a southwest quarter and the rest of the state. With a few local exceptions, the river is the demarkation line between Mountain Time in the west and Central Time in the east. But since the river makes that big curve, the line between the two time zones is the line between North Dakota and Montana in the north.

When we lived in North Dakota, our home was in Hettinger, nearly on the South Dakota line about 75 miles east of the Montana border. That meant that while we were in Mountain Time Zone, there were towns including Williston and Crosby that were east of our location and yet still on Central Time. For those new to the area it is confusing and it takes a time to adjust to how the time zone lies. It also meant that we were almost as far east as it is possible to go in Mountain Time.

From Hettinger, we moved to Boise, Idaho, which is also in Mountain Time, in a place where the demarkation between time zones takes a bulge to the west. The result of the wandering of the demarkation lines of time zones is that we moved almost as far east to west as it is possible while still staying in the same time zone. The difference in the location of the sun at noon in those two places is more than an hour. We noticed right away that the sun rose and set more than hour later in Boise than in Hettinger. It also meant that we were living in another state where the division between time zones divided the state between north and south, with North Idaho on Western Time, while south Idaho is on Mountain Time.

It continues to bring to mind the 1969 hit song by Chicago, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” Except for four years of graduate school in Chicago and the nearly 20 months we have lived in Washington, all of the rest of our lives were lived in the Mountain Time Zone. I’m not sure how important that is, but I used to brag to some of my colleagues in the Eastern part of the United States that I served as a minister of the United Church of Christ for 42 years without ever living in the same time zone as my Conference Office. The spaces are big in the west and we think about time differently than those back east. They complain about having to travel 45 minutes to a meeting, I ask how they’d feel about a three hour drive plus an hour time zone change meaning you have to leave 4 hours before the scheduled start of a meeting to be on time.

Then, all you have to do is to add in the factor of daylight savings time and the fact that Arizona and Hawaii do not observe daylight savings time. It can get confusing.

As a result, I am mildly interested that the US Senate has passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent. The bill has exceptions for Arizona and Hawaii, as well as American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. And the bill has not yet passed the House of Representatives. When that happens it will need the signature of the president to become law. If all goes as expected, we may be staying on Pacific daylight time from now on, which won’t be an inconvenience for me. After all, Pacific daylight time is the same as Mountain standard time, which is the zone in which I have spent most of my life anyway. It also would leave us in the same time zone as Arizona, which is quite a bit east of our location, providing yet another place where you cross time zone lines by traveling north and south instead of east and west.

I thought that I would stop paying attention to the clock when I retired. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. I still have multiple meetings each week. I’ve had at least two meetings each day this week and I have appointments on other days as well. I still have to be aware of what time it is. I still wear a watch. I don’t set an alarm as often as I did when I was working full time, but I haven’t weaned myself from it entirely, either. It reminds me of a patient who came into the health care center where I interned as a seminarian. He was experiencing very high levels of stress and cardiovascular disease. One of the recommendations of the care team was that he stop wearing a watch. He did and his symptoms improved. Within a few months, however, his wife came into the clinic with very similar symptoms as he had initially presented. She said the stress of having to keep him on time was more than she could bear.

I wear a watch to keep from making others worry about where I am and why I am not on time for appointments and meetings. After all we live in a society where a health care clinic can cancel an appointment if the patient is tardy, but the patient has no recourse if the doctor is tardy. I’ll keep the watch.

I’ll also pay attention to the permanent daylight savings time bill. I don’t really care about whether or not it passes, but I do need to know what time it is.