I would say that the folks who live on Highview Road in Tredyffrin are perhaps the luckiest folks who live in Chester County. But then if I were to say that then I would also have to say that the Boy Scouts who visit Camp Horse Shoe, near Goat Hill in West Nottingham, are also perhaps the luckiest folks who live in Chester County, only in a completely different way.
You could look it up. Highview Road is the easternmost point in Chester County, sort of the Campobello Island, Maine, of our fair county. You can find it right there at 75 degrees, 21 minutes and 29.71 seconds longitude, if you care to.
Being such, it is the exact place where sunrise first touches Chester County, the place where the dawn greets us and beckons with the promise of a new day, a fresh start, and perhaps the chance that those annoying “bucket bridges” at busy intersections, with their fresh-faced college students wandering in and out of traffic begging for money to either cure cancer or fund a night of drop-dead partying, whichever comes first, will disappear from the face of the Earth once and forever.
Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts at Camp Horse Shoe find it their lucky happenstance to be the folks who see the last rays of the sun sinking below the horizon over the Octoraro Creek. Located smack dab at 76 degrees, eight minutes and 10.49 seconds longitude, the campsite is the westernmost point in the county. And a fine place to crank out the S’mores, I’m told.
If you think that everyone in Chester County gets the sunrise and sunset at the same time, you’d be wrong. I know, because I checked. Specifically with Professor Marc Gagne, head of the department of Geology and Astronomy at West Chester University and as friendly a man who teaches a course called “Remote Sensing” that you’d ever want to meet.
Professor Gagne told me that the one degree of longitude that separates Highview Road from Camp Horse Shoe would mean a difference in the sunrise and sunset times of about two minutes or so. Theoretically, he said, someone could pick up the phone at a house on Highview Road and call the camp headquarters at Horse Shoe to report that the sun had just risen, and the camp counselor would not know what in the world the person on the other end of the line was talking about because the sun was still not up down there.
Why anyone would ever want to do that escapes me, but there you are.
The business of sunrise and sunset is preoccupying my time these days, pardon the pun, because that old devil Daylight Savings Time, is creeping up on us once again. You might remember that a few years ago President Bush, acting apparently on a whim, decided to play with our clocks. He moved the start of DST up to March 9 this year, and moved the return to Eastern Standard Time to sometime in late September. Or October. I forget.
Anyway, now the sun is going to rise an hour later than normal, and set an hour later, and completely throw off whatever physiological rhythm my body has grown accustomed to over the last six months.
I’m not sure I like it, but there’s nothing I can do about it, except complain. Sort of like “bucket brigades.”
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