The Clock

The clock is one of the few things I have from my dad. He kept it on the workbench in the garage, and one day while we were out poking at one of the cars and both knew he wasn’t long for this world, feeling awkward I said, “Some day I’d like to have the clock.”

He picked it up, handed it to me and smiled. “Now it’s yours,” he said. My dad was a man of few words, unless he got telling one of his stories. He died a couple of months later, confused and frightened with not much left of him and tubes going in and out; somehow not a fitting end for a man who survived three wars and had flown aircraft to and landed on every continent of the globe (including Antarctica), and the Arctic ice cap.

The clock is a Wittnauer 8 day for aircraft use, made in Switzerland. My dad’s work was more or less equally divided between flying for the military and aircraft safety administration for the state of New Hampshire. In that capacity he investigated accidents and the clock came “from a wreck.” The circumstances of this wreck or how he got it I do not know, but he treasured it for years.

As a kid I often flew in small aircraft with my dad and would watch what he was doing from the co-pilot’s seat. (I also learned to fly instruments before visual, but that’s another story.) Before takeoff he would go through a preflight checklist; he would wind the airplane’s clock and check it against his watch, he might then adjust it and then set the red hands against the white to keep record of the time we started. He would also set the barometric altimeter according to what the tower told him, and go on checking all sorts of other things with the plane yearning to fly as the engine idled, fighting the pull of the propeller against the parking brake. Often he would tap the faces of instruments as the mechanisms might be sticking, and if he was happy with how they responded and everything else, off we’d go.

The clock is a quality piece of equipment. For its small size it has heft. The winder clicks precisely in and out of the setting position and the second hand sweeps around splitting each second into four tiny mechanical increments. Unlike a digital timepiece it is comforting to watch this clock work. Powered by the energy stored in a spring, the hands going around imply a continuity to things rather than the linear marching forward of numbers, in abstract and merciless lock step with the pulsations of a tiny crystal stimulated by an electrical current. There is hope in continuity and hope is something otherwise in short supply. I wind the clock once a week.

Gordon Bunker