Watch-ing The Sunrise

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 27, 2009

My guess is that the watch had something to do with it.

That is, I just purchased this new Casio watch and it has functions that my Uncle Harry Redborg, whose Elgin watch I was given as my first wristband timepiece, could not have imagined if he had lived to be 150 years old. The watch not only tells the time and date, but also has a picture of the phase of the moon, presumably for werewolf protection. It has a component wherein I can tell the best time of day to hunt or fish for any particular date between now and, well, eternity for as much as I can figure out. And more.

It has a stopwatch and an alarm, and graphically tells me how much daylight is available. It has four buttons that do things I have not figured out, and a way of lighting itself if I turn my wrist just so. I believe it also predicts tomorrow's Dow Jones Industrial Average, albeit not as accurately as you might like if you were thinking of sinking your life savings into Tastykake stock.

But the function I spend the most time fiddling with is the screen that tells me the time of the day's sunrise and sunset. And this is what I was getting at earlier: being able to see just when the sun was expected to rise and/or set has got me thinking about those daily occurrences, and how much people enjoy them.

I remember once walking home from the Daily Local News and turning around to see the sun setting over Sam's Pizza on Hannum Avenue. The shades and the clouds and the sunrays were so dazzling, I picked up a pay phone and called back to the office to tell anyone who was there to step out the back door and enjoy. Which they did. That's the way it is with sunrises and sunsets; you see a really great one, want to share it with people. So I asked some former Daily Local colleagues if they could recommend really good places to enjoy the sunrise, since I figured my watch would give me the opportunity to plan ahead on when to go if only I knew where.

I had an idea that the best places would be near water. I remember once seeing the sunrise over the Octorara Reservoir down around Nottingham, by Camp Tweedale. It was picture perfect, and the reflections of the reddish yellow clouds on the surface of the calm water made it doubly enjoyable. But Octoraro is a 25-minute drive from my house, longer if I don't avoid the state police speed trap on Route 1, so I was hoping for a place a little closer to home.

Kyle suggested Valley Forge National Park, which he said offered an overlook of the upper stretches of the Schuylkill and had the enjoyable ambiance of the rolling hills that make up the start of the Great Valley. But Kyle pointed out that much of the panorama is made up of Route 422 and the nearby malls, and by the time he had finished enumerating the defects of the view he had pretty much talked himself out of the whole thing and gone back to bed.

Melissa weighed in by suggesting that the Stroud Preserve in East Bradford provides a particularly good viewpoint over the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek, which happens to be my personal favorite of the two branches. I have spent a good enough amount of time wandering the stretches of the former Georgia Farm there to know that it would offer some particularly pleasant vistas. But it also offers a significant amount of Canada goose guano, and that is something I try hard to avoid in the near darkness of early morning.

Christine offered visual aids in her advice that a stretch of the Route 30 Bypass near the Chester County Airport gave her the most memorable sunrise in her recent memory. According to Christine, she was on her way to work in the early morning from her home in Sadsburyville when the sun rose spectacularly over the flat road where the airport stretched out ahead of her. The picture she shot of it from her camera phone was impressive, I admit, but I have a hard time accepting that anything good can come of something if the word "Sadsburyville" is attached to it.

The watch on my wrist Saturday morning said sunrise came at 6:50 a.m., and so I dutifully rolled out of bed a half an hour beforehand to go sunrise hunting. But rather than drive for miles in my quest, I climbed instead to the top of the Chester County Justice Center Parking Garage, conveniently located behind my apartment.

And as I watched the clouds brighten and the shadows disappear and the color come back into the red brick sidewalks of my beloved hometown below me, it occurred to me that any sunrise you live to watch is the best one. Even from a parking structure.