Just Walking

That morning we had needed somewhere to shop and someone to give us an injection. By late afternoon I had wanted the doors of a museum to remain open longer. The pies could take as long as they liked, apparently, but at the place I had scarcely intended to enter, I had run out of time.

Perhaps that is why I remember the preliminary journey with some affection. On paper, it accomplished very little beyond confirming a route. In practice, it gave Robyn and me time to meet that part of Brisbane before we began moving through it to a timetable. We had seen the journey at walking pace while there was still room to get it wrong.

I would happily return to Ubirr and spend longer with the paintings and the view. I suspect I would take more photographs, discover the same limitations in them and eventually be persuaded down by the prospect of something cold to drink. At Cahills Crossing I would watch the water with the benefit of having read my own account again, particularly the moment when the crocodile disappeared and another fisherman stepped forward. The picture I carry of Kakadu has room for all of it, although occasionally I need the words written at the time to show me what has slipped beyond the edge.

The flat had not spoiled the evening. It had given us something else to remember about it, complete with the awkwardness, the dirt and the renewed opportunity to remind Silver Leader of mechanical events he might reasonably have preferred to forget. At the time, getting the Cruiser high enough to change the wheel had occupied rather more of our attention than any thought about the quality of the memory we were creating. I doubt anyone scrambling about beneath a vehicle in the dark is consciously grateful for the extra material, particularly when a fair proportion of that material is finding its way into his clothes.

It also placed our recent concerns in an interesting setting. There were no applications involved in the storm’s progress across the ranges, although I doubted that observation would have helped at a border checkpoint. For the moment, the forms were dealt with and the van was parked. We could watch the rain without working out what it meant for the next hundred kilometres.

That later visit gave me more time with a place I had continued to carry in my thoughts. It also brought me back to the difference between sharing an experience and knowing exactly what it has meant to someone else. I had walked through Kata Tjuta with my daughter, but the journey that followed belonged to her.

There had been people moving through this country long before our route could be traced on a road map. I cannot supply the stories of particular footsteps through the places we visited, but I can recognise how briefly ours entered the picture. Our walking was fitted between camps and the next stage of a holiday. For those whose families belonged here, movement through country was part of a continuing life which our arrival neither began nor explained.

That walk had begun partly as an attempt to do something about the effects of too much sitting and too much hospitality. It had delivered a little more than exercise, without my setting out to find a lesson in the streets. I had watched, greeted, asked and listened, with a town I might otherwise have passed through becoming somewhere occupied by particular people and particular moments. The hoodie remained among them, as ordinary to its wearer as it had initially seemed extraordinary to me.