In Needles, It’s Spring Ahead, Fall Apart

It’s wild time, Needles time, that long dark season when nothing’s quite the same anymore. After Daylight Saving (no s, please) Time clicks off at 2 a.m. Sunday, the annual weirdness begins out here on the edge of California.

When Donna Hart makes the 20-minute drive home from work, an hour will disappear from her day. The six o’clock television news won’t be on at six any more. Chances are you won’t catch your plane, make it to church, meet your curfew or arrive at school before the bell.

But there’s an hour more to drink, if you’re willing to drive a bit. And if you wait a few months, you’ll get the chance to celebrate New Year’s twice in the same evening, to make those resolutions to clean up your act, break them with impunity and make them again an hour later.

The return to Pacific Standard Time creates a time warp along the arid banks of the Colorado River, where California, Nevada and Arizona meet and timeliness is as endangered as the desert tortoise. California and Nevada are in the Pacific Time Zone and observe Daylight Saving Time. Not only is Arizona in the Mountain Time Zone (an hour later), but it doesn’t believe in springing ahead, so it never has to fall back.

As a result, the three states operate on the same schedule from early April to late October, lulling the locals into a false sense of comfort with the clock. But when Daylight Saving Time ends, the tri-state world goes out of sync, especially in Needles, where the residents depend on Arizona for television, air service and myriad necessities from teeth cleaning to manicures.

The clocks at Hart’s home across the river in Mohave Valley are set to Arizona time. Her wristwatch is on Needles time, to match her office. But the scheme isn’t right for everyone. Linda Yost-Best used to keep her bedroom on Arizona time and her kitchen in sync with California, but friends kept “fixing” her clocks. “It would make me late to work,” the waitress said.

“People who work in Arizona across the river, or live there, and work in California or in Nevada at the casinos have a real problem with it during the winter time,” said Janice Baker, who works at Cablevision of Needles.

Television viewers here are special victims of the geographic vagaries. ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS are beamed from Phoenix. Independent stations come from Las Vegas and Los Angeles. If you don’t know where your shows are coming from, chances are you may not see them again until spring.

On the plus side: “If you’re a real drinker and like to hit the bars, you can go to one in Arizona (closing time 1 a.m.) and close the puppy down and then go to California (closing time 2 a.m.) and close that one down,” Baker said. “You’ve got really two hours of extra drinking. In summer, it’s only one hour.”

The usual circuit, according to one band of experts--the pool playing regulars at the El Rio in Mohave Valley, Ariz.--is to start at Yoney’s Tavern, a family-oriented Needles joint where the action dies early. The next stop is the El Rio for three hours of brews and billiards. Then it’s back across the bridge to Needles’ own Hungry Bear Restaurant and Lounge.

“It’s good for business,” said April Roach, bartender at the Hungry Bear. “Ten people on average come back over here. . . . The whole bar gets full, and all the tables get full.” Roach has one caveat: “Needles is a DUI trap.” In fact, seven of the 20 Hungry Bear workers--including Roach--have been nabbed. “You figure that most of the people driving between midnight and 2 a.m. have been drinking,” she said.

Then there are those poor souls partying down in the casinos of Laughlin, Nev., 40 miles north. They can look out the windows of their hotel rooms and see the tiny regional airport. When the clock says 4 p.m., there’s more than enough time to drive the 1,000 or so feet across the Colorado River to Bullhead City and make a 5 p.m. plane, right?

Wrong. Because, if it’s 4 p.m. in Laughlin, it’s 5 p.m. in Bullhead City, and the ride home is winging its way toward Los Angeles International Airport. Tourists don’t have a chance, especially if they believe (reasonably enough) that Laughlin/Bullhead City Airport is in Laughlin.

“Most of our customers come from Laughlin, and they can’t understand how they can go across the river and lose an hour,” said Al Collar, station manager for Mesa Airlines. “The customers get very, very irritated. They say it’s our fault.”

Every year, desert dwellers struggle to maintain some semblance of normalcy. At the airport, Morris Air commits a little logistic legerdemain by pretending that its terminal is in Nevada, not Arizona, publishing its flight times in what chairman Rick Friend calls Laughlin Time.

As a result, Bullhead City residents who use the small airline end up cooling their heels for an hour, waiting for a flight that is both late and on time at the same time.

The airport itself has well-labeled clocks, one for Arizona and one for Nevada, in an effort to alleviate confusion. Norm Hicks, the airport’s executive director for the past three years, used to wear a watch that, with the press of a button, could tell the time in whichever state he happened to be.

“I can take you to a place where you can put one foot in one time zone and one in another,” he boasts. It’s right outside his office, a painted stripe on the Laughlin Bridge dead center over the Colorado River, a popular spot for picture taking.

Like many of his neighbors in the tri-state area, Jim Treas, who lives in Mohave Valley, has created his own little oasis of California time just across the Colorado River from Needles. As an employee of the Needles Unified School District, Treas is a slave to Pacific time; all of his clocks reflect that fact.

And so do the custody documents stemming from his divorce.

“If I’m more than an hour late picking my kids up from school, I lose my visitation for that weekend,” Treas said. “They’re out of school at 2:30, Arizona time. I’m out of work at 2:30 California time--which makes me automatically one hour late.”

The solution: His visitation schedule, inscribed by the courts, is based on California time.

Sometimes, however, people go a little too far when they’re bending over backward to live under Needles time. Isadora Bricker’s boyfriend works at the smoke shop on the Ft. Mojave Indian Reservation. Although the reservation spans all three states and its headquarters is in Needles, it operates on Arizona time. And so does Bricker, even though she lives in Needles and her children attend school here.

“It got so confusing that I told my kids that the time changed yesterday,” she said Monday.. “And they went to school at 9 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. They were an hour late. My son came home and said: ‘Thanks, Mom. Now I got detention.’ ”

Timely Matters

Time is of the essence where California, Nevada and Arizona come together--particularly when Standard Time returns. California and Nevada are in the Pacific Time Zone and observe Daylight Saving Time; Arizona is in the Mountain Time Zone and does not.