The Wild Man At The Center Of The World

That spring, as the 1884 presidential campaign was heating up, Miller felt pulled from poetry to punditry. More people were visiting the cabin, including congressmen coming to see the internationally famous poet. Some callers came bearing gifts of food; others brought jugs of whiskey. Miller groused about curiosity seekers, but he still met them, dressed in his boots and sombrero, sometimes with a bearskin slung over his shoulder. It was the very same skin, he said, that Prince Albert and other nobles had touched during Miller's tour of Britain. When one caller offered to buy the bearskin, Miller managed to part with it. He sold eight other "authentic" bearskin souvenirs of his European conquest the same way.

One day that spring, Miller ventured down to Capitol Hill to record his impressions of the Senate, a "five-minute photograph in ink" published in The Post. He described the Senate Gallery as a "big corral" that could hold about 200 "fat and full-grown steers." He depicted scurrying pages and a senator on the floor, waving his fists and vigorously addressing a speech to constituents 1,000 miles away, while the only audience in earshot -- other senators -- either slept or wandered away. Under his dateline, "The Cabin," Miller skewered the House of Representatives the same way.

In May, he devoted a column to sizing up the presidential candidates, confessing at the end, "I know as little about who will be the Republican nominee . . . as I did in the beginning." He made another stab in June, this time assessing the Democratic challengers, and got no closer. His reports never mentioned the eventual winner, Grover Cleveland. Miller was out of his element, but at the cabin he made the case that it was politicians who were out of touch.

AS THE INTERNATIONAL MERIDIAN CONFERENCE PREPARED TO CONVENE AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT, newspapers proclaimed its importance for world commerce. The New York Times urged a consensus on some meridian, whether Greenwich or another, but pooh-poohed Washington's claim. While some maps reckoned longitude from Washington, the Times editorial said, "in practice not one man in a thousand would think of the longitude of New York or any other city of the Union in its relation to the national capital."

When the officials convened at noon on October 1, they took only a day to declare jointly that a common prime meridian was desirable. But before getting more specific, they had to pass resolutions on how to arrange their chairs (alphabetically by country). Then, according to the Times, a discussion of which meridian to adopt immediately brought "an angry and at times heated debate."

By late October, the conference had resolved that the universal day would be 24 hours and start "for all the world at the moment of mean midnight of the initial meridian coinciding with the beginning of the civil day and date of that meridian." It would take decades for others to decipher that and make it work.

Even after everyone generally agreed to the Greenwich meridian, implementation was slow. The French balked until the sinking of the Titanic, in 1912. A French ocean liner had signaled the locations of ice fields in the Titanic's path, using time determined by the Paris meridian. Any navigator on the Titanic would have known how to convert that, the Naval Observatory's Chester says, but "it's a pain" and takes time. Conceding that, the French accepted the Greenwich meridian to prevent further loss of life.

"WHAT I FIND FASCINATING," SAYS CHESTER, "is that in this country there was no definition of standard time zones until 1918."

Time passed anyway. After Cleveland was elected, Miller offered his name as ambassador to Japan. His language skills were rusty, he admitted, but his poetry was popular in Japan. He didn't get that post and reportedly turned down the job of superintendent of Indian Affairs. Instead, he returned to his beloved West, where he built another cabin on the heights above Oakland, Calif.

Miller's Washington area cabin stood empty. According to Adrienne Coleman, Park Service superintendent for Rock Creek Park and Meridian Hill, it was sold to a man named Henry White. By June 1887, Assistant Secretary of State Alvey Adee was living there. Then in 1912, the California State Association moved it to Rock Creek Park and grandly presented it to the nation. Miller died a year later in Oakland.

On summer evenings, the Miller cabin draws poets to Rock Creek. Karren Alenier says that when the cabin was condemned years ago, the poets began meeting outside. One performance involved people dressing up in Robin Hood-like outfits with stockings over their heads. The Park Police got calls about marauders and investigated. "They were taken aback by the performance aspect of what we were doing," says Alenier. The police demanded to see the poets' license to use the site.

Helen Sitar, 18, discovered the cabin at age 11 when her father took her to one of the readings. "It's not what you expect to find in Rock Creek Park," she says. She won Word Works' Young Poets contest in 2006 and, as part of her prize, was to read her poems at the cabin that August. But weather intervened, in the shape of a thunderstorm -- "flooding," says Sitar, "downed branches, that sort of thing" -- forcing Alenier to cancel the event. But Sitar never got that e-mail. She had invited family and friends, and they showed up at the rain location in a church near the park's edge. They went ahead with the reading on their own. Alenier eventually dropped by and applauded.

Sitar finally got her time at the cabin last summer, a fine evening when fireflies glimmered in the grasses. The readings' organizers like to bill the events as "poetry under the stars," Sitar says, "but the readings are usually over before the sun goes down. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to read." Still, it's a nice contrast to the typical poetry reading in a cramped corner of a bookstore, Sitar says, where "you're forced to read the titles of the books on the shelves, or look at the poet, or at the other people there." At the cabin, you have an airy expanse, the creek and the woods. A timeless piece of the frontier, transplanted from Meridian Hill.

David Taylor is the author of Ginseng, the Divine Root, and is working on a documentary about the Federal Writers' Project. He can be reached at dataylor22314@gmail.com.