The Gregorian Calendar and Us

By M. John Fayhee

First week of May, my buddy Mark drove down from the High Country town where I long lived and where he lives still to visit me in Gila Country. Before I get any further, let me reiterate (and stress): First week of MAY … a solid six weeks AFTER the calendar tells all of us, throughout the entirety of the Northern Hemisphere, that spring has sprung.

You know what I’m going to say here: Mark had to dig his truck out before leaving on this trip to the Casa de Fayhee. Two feet of snow had fallen the night before.

“Spring, my ass,” Mark said when he arrived sporting the whitest legs this side of the Orkneys, which in and of themselves made one thing perfectly clear: The fundamental methodology by which we measure the passage of time in Western Culture — the Gregorian Calendar — is so frigging flawed as to be almost useless in Mountain Country — a reality that is especially poignant in Spring. Every year, mountain-dwelling people longingly eyeball their calendars, fantasizing during the deep freeze of January, about the approach of this day marked upon their “Nymphettes of the Sluice Box Bar” calendar as “first day of spring,” like some sort of magical climatic transformation will instantaneously transpire at the exact stroke of midnight, and, every year, mountain-dwelling people — a basically optimistic lot with failing long-term memories (blame that last point on the altitude) — look out their windows on that special day and notice that — YET AGAIN!!! — the goddamned calendar has lied through its teeth, insofar as March 21 looks a hell of a lot like March 20. Forecast: Snow, and cold, with a side order of some more snow and cold. Truly, were it not for the interesting art work that often adorns calendars, I would argue that their best use is as fire starters.

It’s clearly time that the dwellers of Mountain Country toss their naked-woman-adorned Gregorian Calendars into the trash (you can cut out the pictures of the naked women for future use). It’s high time that we claimed our own, well, you know, time. I have visited two places that sort of lend credence to the concept of rewriting the Mountain Country calendar in our local image. First was the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum outside of Tucson — one of the truly cool places in the West. From the museum’s interpretive display about the Sonoran Desert, I learned that southern Arizona actually has five very distinct seasons that are plugged into the Gregorian Calendar in only the most artificial and inaccurate manner. I don’t remember them all exactly, but they are something like this: Not-entirely-summer, fore-summer, summer-summer, summer rainy season and Indian summer. (Heavy on the summer, you’ll notice.) Thing is, these climatic “seasons” are not of equal length; they are based upon local reality, rather than the passing of celestial events that may capture the attention of cosmologists and calendar-makers, but have little or nothing to do with folks living in the Sonoran Desert.

Then, I was at the Denver Zoo. There was a display about the Inuit culture, and part of that display focused on how the world’s most-northerly dwelling people subjectively measure their year. Their “calendar” sports little in the way of “Decembers” and “Marches.” Their “months” have locally relevant names/concepts like “the time of year when our infant-mortality rate drops to a mere 80-percent because the polar bears are hibernating” and “the really dark and cold month when the only thing we’ve eaten lately is even-more-rancid-than-usual seal blubber.”

Point being that every people in every place had its own way of looking at the seasons and even what we now call “months.” Then, in 1582, comes, by way of a frigging papal edict, the institutionalized inaccuracy-on-all-levels known as the Gregorian Calendar.

I was once hobnobbing about this subject with a cultural anthropologist (read: bartender) amigo. We agreed after beaucoup shots of something purple that, by god, if culturally and geographically specific calendars are practicable for people crazy enough to live near the North Pole, then they ought to be practicable for people crazy enough to live near Vail. So, we decided it’s high time to re-design the calendar so it fits with Mountain Country chronological and social reality.

At the time we were having this admittedly very slurred conversation, it was late-April, which forevermore needs to be known as the “month where the land is covered as far as the eye can see with an entire winter’s worth of recently exposed dog shit.” 

This is a perfect example of indigenous time-measuring. Someone from, say, Arkansas, might wonder why the land is more covered with dog shit in the month previously known as “April” than it is in, say, the month previously known as “November,” which by way of the Arkansas-specific calendar, is “the month of even more cousin snuggling.” This mythical Arkansonian would not know that, for the previous six months in Mountain Country, uncountable metric tons of dog shit have been accumulating in the winter snow, and, when that snow starts melting, half-a-year’s-worth of dog logs are suddenly exposed to the world, making it seem that the entire planet ought to be renamed from “Earth” to “Planetary-Scale Dog Toilet.”

Here are the suggestions my cultural-anthropologist buddy and I came up with for Mountain Country-specific names for the rest of the months:

January: The month when people realize they ought to have started conceiving and executing their snow-removal strategies three months ago because, now, they can’t get from their front door to their car, which they can’t find anyhow, because it’s buried.

February: The month when people start horking firewood from neighboring mostly unoccupied second homes.

March: The month when some nutso people pull their bikes out because they believe two consecutive sunny, warm days means winter is over. (Ha ha.)

April: We’ve covered this one, though an alternate name, in keeping with our dog theme, could be “the month when muddy dog paw prints adorn everything from carpeting to car seats.”

May: The month when everyone wonders what happened to all that money they made last winter.

June: The month when the local chambers-of-commerce pretend that summer is here, so they host things like outside art shows and concerts that always take place forlornly in the snow.

July: The month when local officials worry about whether their town’s fireworks are going to be the ones that ignite the devastating wildfires that everyone knows will one day consume the beetle-kill, burn-ready High Country forests.

August: The month when the mountains are alive with corpulent Texans driving through fields of wildflowers in their rented jeeps.

September: The month when a new batch of dreadlocked newbies descend upon Mountain Country, acting as though they’ve lived here forever and that everyone ought to bend over backwards to extend them credit and give them a place to live, even though they only have $7 to their name.

October: The month when the hills come alive with the sound of bullets.

November: The month when the term “man-made powder” starts getting used with a straight face by ski-area marketing people.

December: The month when locals can’t celebrate the holidays because they are working 100 hours a week because there aren’t enough employees to fill all the lucrative and satisfying service-industry jobs that every year remain largely unfilled at least partially because of the high cost of Mountain-Country housing.

Then, it starts all over again, which is the good, bad and ugly about calendars. MG