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The Sun Drift

The General Conference on Weights and Measures opens on Tuesday, October 13. The setting is the Palais des Congrès de Versailles, a short walk from the palace that Louis XIV built under the emblem of the sun. Delegates from the states party to the Metre Convention will spend three days on the business of measurement. Near the close of the meeting, at the twenty-fifth item of the agenda, they will vote on a paper called Draft Resolution C. The paper proposes that on May 20, 2027, the world’s civil clock stop answering to the sky. Resolutions reach this conference after years of committee negotiation, and they are usually adopted as drafted. If this one carries, a deference that began on June 30, 1972, with the first leap second, comes to an end.

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Landlocked on Purpose

In the fall of 1922, Aldo Leopold and his brother Carl paddled a canoe into the delta of the Colorado River and found a wilderness of green lagoons, a hundred channels braiding through two million acres of cottonwood and willow, egrets standing in the shallows, deer in the cane, and somewhere beyond the firelight the jaguar they never saw and never stopped feeling. Leopold wrote about that trip a quarter century later and confessed that he never went back. He preferred the delta as memory held it, because he understood what was coming for it. He was right to stay away. In November of that same year, in a lodge outside Santa Fe, commissioners from seven states signed the Colorado River Compact and divided the river on paper. The canoe and the signature belong in the same paragraph because one of them canceled the other.

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