Did the explorers ever hit the snooze button?

Published 4:00 pm Wednesday, March 23, 2005

An anachronism, as Bruce Berney defines it, is “something placed out of true time sequence.” The retired Astoria librarian and history buff freely juxtaposes time periods in his whimsical book of verse, “Lewis & Clark’s Digital Clock,” published locally by Selbeck House Press.

The introductory poem depicts Capt. Meriwether Lewis purchasing supplies for the expedition at a general store in St. Louis and finding a digital clock on sale. On each set of pages that follow, readers find excerpts from the journals of Lewis and William Clark and an original verse by Berney set off by simple graphics of a digital clock readout above the poem, and the same readout underneath … flipped upside down, revealing letters that form the last word of the rhyme.

It’s a novel gimmick, though sometimes difficult to interpret (is the numeral “1” meant to be a capital “I” or a lower-case “L”?) and the verses often stray far from the topic just to satisfy the rhymes. But Berney does stay meticulously true to the meter, which he based on a 19th century American folk tune.

Anyone who’s used a calculator knows how to make it read “hello” (07734) or “boo” (009), but Berney has found more than 200 “clock words” by visually scanning foreign language dictionaries, the world atlas index and various phone directories. “Looking for them will surely enrich your life,” he asserts.

Berney dedicated the book to Frederik L. Schodt, biographer of Ranald MacDonald, who was born at Fort Astoria in 1824 and was the first English teacher in Japan. The digital clock display on the cover, when turned upside down, reads “EIGO,” which is Japanese for “English,” the official language of the Corps of Discovery.