JUST WALKING

The Places We Found and the Things We Never Went Looking For

Chapter 15 – The Other Side of Sunset

Having our eyes open does not necessarily mean we are seeing much. We can look straight at a place, recognise what we expect to find and move on quite satisfied that we have taken it in, while missing something worth staying for. I suspect we do it more often than we realise, particularly when we arrive with an idea of what we have come to see. A sunset, for example, comes with fairly well-established instructions about which way to face, and most of us are unlikely to question them.

Shaun’s urgings were very much about seeing. He knew the country around El Questro well enough to appreciate what we might overlook, and he was eager to share it, even if that meant taking us to a quarry and directing our attention away from the setting sun. A pile of gravel and the hole it had come from would hardly have persuaded us to stop of our own accord. Fortunately, he had seen rather more in the place than its usefulness as a source of road material.

That was how Robyn and I came to be sitting with Shaun, Silver Leader and Rose, with a folding table, chairs, drinks, chips and dips, watching the evening unfold across the Cockburn Ranges and their escarpments. The sun was behind us, carrying on with its familiar departure, while its waning light changed the country in front of us. We had come to watch a sunset, but Shaun was showing us how much of one we might miss by looking only towards the sun.

We had met Shaun on our previous visit to El Questro and kept in touch. By the time we returned, catching up with him was part of the attraction of coming back, although the demands on his time made that rather more complicated than simply arranging to meet for a beer. He was working as a ranger, and our arrival found him pulling a double shift in a place where visitors were plentiful and staff considerably harder to come by.

There is a particular generosity in someone who spends a working day helping people experience a place and then wants to share more of it when the shift finishes. Shaun was tired, which was plain enough, but his interest in the country around him had survived the demands of showing it to everyone else. He wanted us to experience what was there, and there was rather more of it than we were likely to fit into our stay.

Fishing had been on the agenda. The stories he had been telling us before we arrived had done their job, and I was well and truly interested, but a change in the weather and the reports coming back from the water made the proposed outing less promising. We were happy for him to rest rather than feel obliged to produce a fishing expedition for our benefit, particularly when he looked as though a proper day off might be useful.

His substitute was to take us to his favourite sunset spot. He would pick us up at five, and we would go somewhere away from the usual visitor circuit, which was an invitation requiring very little discussion on our part. There are plenty of things you can book at a place like El Questro, but a friend offering to show you where he goes to be at peace has a different appeal.

We had already demonstrated that day that accepting Shaun’s invitations and making full use of them were not necessarily the same thing. He had opened the gates at Zebedee Springs at a quarter past five in the morning so we could enjoy an early swim before the normal opening time. It was a lovely gesture, requiring only that we get ourselves organised and arrive while the opportunity remained exclusive.

We arrived at half past eight. There had been the matter of getting everyone ready, with Rose’s preparations occupying rather more of the morning than the early start allowed, so our private swim had become a public one before we reached the water. We still found a pool for ourselves and enjoyed the warm springs, although a persistent small leech had its own ideas about sharing the experience.

By the time we left, children were splashing past and people were fitting themselves into whatever space they could find. The car park was overflowing, and I could appreciate how good Shaun’s original offer had been, even if our execution had left something to be desired. He had tried to give us a quieter experience of a popular place, and the place had obligingly demonstrated the difference once the crowds arrived.

For the evening, at least, five o’clock was a time we could manage. Shaun arrived in his own vehicle, I travelled with him, and Robyn went with Silver Leader and Rose in their Cruiser. We were off to a quarry, apparently, although that description told us very little about why anyone would particularly want to be there.

It is an unpromising word, quarry. It suggests that somebody has taken something away, usually with machinery, and left a hole where it used to be. As an account of an industrial process that may be adequate, but as a description of somewhere to spend an evening it is hardly likely to have people clamouring for a reservation.

Shaun knew what the word left out. He also knew the turnoff, which was fortunate because I doubt we would have recognised it as one, although knowing where it was did not prevent him from missing it on this occasion. The road had been graded that day, and the material scraped to the side had made an already inconspicuous entrance even less obvious.

This was not a route that advertised itself to passing tourists. Without someone who knew the country, the track could easily have remained just another part of the roadside, passed without a thought on the way to somewhere with a sign. Our evening depended on knowledge that would never have occurred to us to acquire, because we would not have known there was anything there to ask about.

Shaun’s Toyota was also contributing to the journey. The corrugated roads it travelled in his commute from Wyndham had given it a roughness beyond mere appearance, and there was an electrical problem involving battery terminals which had become so loose they could no longer be tightened properly. At one point the vehicle stopped, bringing the practical consequences of this arrangement to our attention.

Shaun got out and wiggled the connections. The Toyota thundered back into life, and we continued, the sunset apparently still within reach despite the interruption. There is something reassuring about being with someone who understands what his vehicle is doing, although I would have preferred the battery to maintain its interest in the outing without encouragement.

Our destination seemed, on arrival, to be in the middle of nowhere. There was gravel in a pile and a hole from which it had come, so the quarry description was technically sound, but it was hardly the great excavation the word might have suggested. More to the point, neither the gravel nor the hole was what we had come to look at.

Out came the table and chairs, along with the drinks, chips and dips, and the quarry began to acquire the familiar comforts of an evening beside the vans. There was nothing elaborate about the arrangement, nor did there need to be. We had somewhere to sit, something to nibble and good company, with Shaun having taken care of the one detail we would have been least qualified to organise for ourselves: which way the chairs should face.

To the uninitiated, there was a fairly obvious flaw in the seating plan. We had come out to watch the sunset, yet our attention was being directed towards the Cockburn Ranges and their escarpments, leaving the sun to get on with its departure behind us. If we had been arranging the furniture ourselves, I suspect we would have turned the whole operation around and congratulated ourselves on securing a better view. We might even have thought we were helping.

Therein lay the value of having Shaun with us. He knew why this seemingly unremarkable patch of ground was worth coming to, and his choice of direction was as deliberate as his choice of destination. The quarry gave us somewhere to settle ourselves, but the reason for being there lay across the country beyond it, where the last of the sunlight was doing things we might otherwise have had our backs to.

Normally, if someone suggests watching a sunset, you look towards the sun, which seems an entirely reasonable interpretation of the instructions. We have watched enough of them to appreciate the attraction, following that bright descent towards the horizon as the light loses its insistence and begins to reveal colours we could scarcely have looked at while it was higher in the sky. What had been too bright to hold our gaze becomes the very thing we cannot stop watching. The day seems to soften around it, giving us time to appreciate its departure.

There is a progression to it, although no two evenings deliver quite the same performance. The brightness gives way to gold, the gold deepens towards amber, and the ochres gather through the remaining light, carrying something of the colours of the earth into the sky. Where clouds catch it, the colour can seem to linger, while elsewhere the fading is already under way. We watch for the changes, sometimes thinking the best of it has passed only to find another shade emerging as the sun slips further from view.

Then comes that final disappearance, the last bright portion surrendering to the horizon while the sky holds on to what it has left behind. For a while there is still enough light to distinguish the country around us, although its detail is gradually being gathered into shapes and outlines. The colours lose their warmth, the distinctions become less certain, and darkness takes over without there being a single moment at which we could confidently say the whole business was finished. Often the sun has gone well before we are ready to stop looking.

It is hardly surprising that, in most cases, we face our chairs towards all of that. There is pleasure in watching something so familiar unfold differently, and a certain satisfaction in having stopped long enough to see the day out. Yet the expectation can become so firmly established that we arrange ourselves around it without considering where else that same light might be falling. We know what a sunset is supposed to look like, and we put our chairs where we expect to find it, leaving whatever is happening behind us to carry on unobserved.

But observe it we did. Shaun had placed ours where we could see what the sunset was doing. Across the ranges, the waning light and the valleys receiving less of it gave us something that continued to change while we sat there with our drinks and nibbles. The sun itself was only part of what was happening, although it usually received most of the attention. Here we were watching its reach across the landscape, following the effects of its departure rather than the departure alone.

It is a small thing, turning a chair around, but it can make a considerable difference to the evening you have. Had we faced the way habit suggested, we would probably have enjoyed ourselves and gone home believing we had seen what we came for. We would never have known what had been happening behind us, which is perhaps the more interesting part of it. There need be no sense of having missed something when you have never thought to look, and it sometimes takes a person like Shaun to show you why the furniture belongs the other way around.

Here, the waning light was working across the ranges and escarpments. The valleys received less direct sunlight, and as the light withdrew, the country before us changed with it. There was no need for the landscape itself to move; the changing illumination was enough to make it worth continuing to watch.

I took photographs, as I tend to do when something catches my eye. Yet the interest lay partly in the change between one view and the next, something a single image could preserve only in pieces. Sitting there with Robyn and our friends, we had time to follow it rather than arrive at a lookout, secure the necessary evidence and move on.

A couple of brolgas flew across the sky, heading towards their roost for the night. They were part of the evening going about its business, with no particular interest in our table or our appreciation of the view. Their passage belonged to the same settling of the day we had stopped to watch, although I doubt they would have understood our need to make an excursion of it.

Shaun talked about another trek he was planning into the Kimberley with friends. They hoped to reach places the general public would scarcely think of going, looking for evidence of the first people’s presence as well as the country itself. There was preparation involved, including the permissions he spoke about during our stay, but the enthusiasm was unmistakable.

That was part of what made being with him interesting. His working life put him among these landscapes, yet familiarity had not exhausted his curiosity, and a day off could still mean going further into them. He had his own places to seek out, his own reasons to stop, and an eagerness to share something he valued without requiring it to become a grand production.

I find myself thinking about that when I consider what we regard as normal. There is nothing particularly strange about taking a few chairs and some food out to watch the light change, but I suspect many of us would regard a quarry picnic facing away from the sunset as an unusual evening. Staying beside the van, attending to a few jobs and allowing the day to finish without much inspection might attract no comment at all.

I was certainly capable of filling the available hours. Even at El Questro there were emails to check and work to attend to, with the reception area providing the internet access I could not reliably obtain at the van. There was always another practical matter waiting, and practical matters have a way of presenting themselves as a more sensible use of time than sitting in a folding chair looking at rocks.

The trouble is that sensible can become habitual without much examination. A day can be quite full, with everything attended to, and still have passed without our having taken much of it in. I do not think Shaun needed to formulate an argument about any of this; he simply had a place he liked and thought we would like it too, which proved considerably more persuasive than a lecture.

Nor did he have to persuade us that the usual sunset was somehow inadequate. The sun could go down perfectly well behind us while we watched its effects on the country ahead. What interested me was how readily I might have looked in the expected direction and missed what had made this particular place worth the drive.

Eventually the light went, and it was time to pack up. The table and chairs were put away, and we left footprints and tyre tracks where we had spent the evening. Shaun changed his UHF to channel eighteen, the channel we used on the road, so he could speak to Silver Leader as the two vehicles headed back.

It was fortunate that he did, because the following Cruiser soon had something to report. There was a flat tyre, and by then it was dark, which meant our evening of appreciating the light would finish with us trying to arrange enough of it to see what we were doing. The lights of both vehicles became considerably more useful than any remaining glow in the sky.

Changing a wheel is one of those jobs whose description leaves out most of the entertainment. Jack the vehicle up, take the flat off, put the spare on and lower it again sounds straightforward enough, particularly when delivered from a comfortable chair. Out on the dirt, finding the right place for the jack and getting everything to cooperate gave the procedure considerably more substance.

I scrambled underneath, trying to position it. A couple of attempts achieved frustration, and when we finally found the right point, we discovered we could not lift the vehicle high enough to remove the tyre. By then the dirt had attached itself to me with an enthusiasm which suggested I had become part of the road-maintenance programme.

I emerged in a cloud of it. Earlier I had been studying what the fading sunlight did to the landscape; now I had brought a fair sample of the landscape back out from under the Cruiser. It was a less restful way of becoming acquainted with the place, but certainly thorough.

Shaun supplied his jack, which improved our prospects. While we worked on getting the flat wheel off, Silver Leader wrestled with the spare, whose removal involved negotiating the towing arrangement. The two operations came together at much the same time, although a little more height was still needed before the replacement could go on.

Fortunately Shaun’s jack had enough left to give. We fitted the wheel, tightened it, put the damaged one on top of his rig and prepared to continue. He would drop it at the workshop in the morning and have it sorted, which was another advantage of having gone out with someone whose knowledge extended beyond the view.

The Jeep jokes were inevitable. Silver Leader’s two breakdowns on our previous lap of the country had provided material which was not going to be discarded merely because he was now driving a Toyota. A flat tyre was a modest problem compared with those earlier delays, but it had happened to the right person to ensure the old stories received another airing.

The following morning brought the final detail. The workshop had repaired the tyre for two beers, much as Shaun had suggested they would, and Silver Leader was extremely pleased with the arrangement. In a place where the cost of tours had risen noticeably since our previous visit, this particular service seemed to have retained a very agreeable pricing structure.

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.

Yet the inconvenience had an end. The spare went on, the damaged wheel went onto Shaun’s rig, and we were able to continue, leaving the frustration behind more readily than the dust. We had helped each other get moving again, and the pleasure of the quarry outing remained intact. By the following morning, with the repair arranged for two beers, the incident had acquired the sort of conclusion that makes a story considerably more enjoyable to tell than the event had been to undertake.