There is a waving senatorial candidate with false teeth and hair implants in X, flooding in B, a famine in K, a civil war in R, the first democratic elections being held in S, an oil war raging in D, an actor as president presiding in Z, a nation splitting apart in T, a museum being constructed in L, a snowstorm devastating in U. And there is solar time, nautical time, inconsequential time, the time of memory, Greenwich Mean Time, geologic time, the drift of snow and sand and people, the cycle of whale sharks and spotted nutcrackers always returning home, their sense of time more instinctual than clocks or chronometers, and more exact.