JUST WALKING

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

Chapter 19 – The View from Someone Else’s Walk

There is a photograph in the rotation of screen savers on my laptop of Robyn walking up one of the hills in Smiths Lake. Her head is down, her attention given to the climb, and there is very little about the picture that would encourage its use in an advertisement for the effortless pleasures of healthy living. It does, however, offer a reasonably accurate illustration of what happens when you buy a house near the top of a hill and then decide that walking is good for you.

We have an elevated view of the lake for which the town is named and the ocean beyond from home, which is a considerable inducement to living where we do. There is something rather satisfying about being able to look out from on high, taking in a distance that requires no effort at all from the person enjoying it. Getting back to the place from which you enjoy it is another matter. The view was included in the purchase, but so was the gradient, and the latter receives rather less attention until you start exploring the neighbourhood on foot.

The pundits tell us to walk for better health, and we do our best to oblige. I suspect some of them issue the advice from places where a circuit of the block offers a more forgiving proposition than ours, because Smiths Lake has little interest in allowing you to wander for very long without changing elevation. There are undulations within the undulations, stretches that seem quite reasonable from behind a steering wheel and become considerably more personal when you have to propel yourself along them. Whatever choices we make on the outward journey, the return has already been decided by the position of the house.

Leaving can therefore be deceptively encouraging. We set off downhill, contributing to our wellbeing with a degree of enthusiasm that the first part of the walk does little to discourage. The trouble is that every comfortable descent is also advance notice of something we will eventually have to recover. Home is up there somewhere, and it will still be up there when we have finished taking in the township.

In the photograph, Robyn is attending to that fact rather than admiring the wider possibilities. I recognise the effort because I share the walks, although the screen saver allows me to revisit this particular one from a chair. She remains on the hill while I enjoy the benefit of having completed it, which seems a somewhat uneven arrangement. Eventually another photograph takes her place and releases her from the climb, until the rotation brings her around again.

I like the picture because it belongs to us without needing an explanation about where we had travelled or what famous thing stood beyond the frame. This is our township, our ordinary effort and the life we have made here. There is affection in the sight of her getting on with it, even if she might reasonably question the merit of preserving the more strenuous part for repeated viewing. Not every worthwhile photograph requires its subject to be smiling at the camera.

Walking familiar streets gives the mind room to wander farther than the feet. A hill in Smiths Lake can take me back to a quite different walk in Halls Creek, where I had left Robyn working in the caravan and gone out to see what I could see. We had been in town considerably longer than intended, waiting for a part for Silver Leader’s Jeep. By then, almost a week into the enforced stop, our plans for moving on had become dependent on a parcel whose whereabouts seemed more difficult to establish than our own.

There were reasons to want the matter resolved. Broome was ahead, along with a booked trip to the Horizontal Falls, and the distance between us and the next commitment was not one to be dismissed with a casual promise to make up time. Nevertheless, on that morning there was nothing useful I could contribute by remaining beside the van. Robyn had client questions to research and her work spread around her, while I had a pair of legs and an opportunity to give them something to do.

Losing some weight had been one of the ambitions of the trip, although our extended acquaintance with the hotel had not necessarily advanced that cause. Good food and the drinks that accompanied it had made the delay more agreeable than it might otherwise have been, but they were unlikely to appear in any recommended programme for reducing the waistline. A walk seemed a sensible response. It also gave Robyn some space to concentrate without my providing whatever assistance I imagined my presence might offer.

I walked past the hotel without entering, an achievement worth recording under the circumstances, and continued towards the airfield. An Aviair aircraft was preparing for departure, so I stopped to watch the pre-flight activity and then the take-off. There was no particular need to move on until I was ready. That was one of the freedoms the breakdown had given us, although I doubt Silver Leader would have welcomed my presenting it as a benefit of his mechanical difficulties.

Farther around the walk I crossed a park with little vegetation and two concrete paths running through it. Broken glass among the litter drew my attention, particularly because I had noticed people walking barefoot around town. I would have been picking my way with considerable care, which made me conscious of how little I knew about the paths other people used or the things their feet were accustomed to. My own feet were hardly an authority on anyone else’s daily life.

Beyond the park was a residential area, and the walk continued through the ordinary business of people living in their neighbourhood. A dog barked, I said hello to residents and greetings came back, all of which could have happened on a walk in Smiths Lake. The surroundings differed, but a dog announcing that someone was passing its territory was familiar enough. It had apparently received no instruction that I was a visitor engaged in broadening his understanding.

We had heard plenty of unfavourable accounts of Halls Creek before arriving. Being delayed there had given us time to compare those accounts with the town we were actually experiencing, and they had not fitted together particularly well. We had wandered, looked around and gone about our days without encountering the trouble we had been led to expect. That did not make us authorities on the place, but it did give us some experiences of our own to place alongside the opinions we had brought with us.

In the residential streets I met an Aboriginal man wearing a hoodie. The morning was warming, and the clothing seemed a curious choice to someone who considered temperatures in the thirties sufficient reason to avoid any unnecessary layers. I asked whether he was hot in it. His explanation was straightforward: it was still early spring, and it was not hot yet.

There was very little I could sensibly argue with in that. I had been measuring his clothing against my response to the weather, whereas he was wearing it in relation to his own. Where I came from, early spring could still require something warm, and in a place accustomed to much greater heat, a morning in the thirties was evidently not the event I was making of it. We were standing in the same conditions with different experience behind us.

He was pleasant, and the exchange was an easy one. A woman farther down the street called to him in language, and we parted, each continuing with whatever had brought us that way. I had no grand revelation to announce and no lengthy conversation to record. I had asked about a hoodie and received an answer that made considerably more sense once I stopped assuming my own comfort was the measure of his.

It is the sort of encounter that could disappear among the larger events of a trip. There were gorges, long drives, sunsets and the considerable entertainment of travelling with friends, while this occupied only a small part of an ordinary morning. Yet I still remember it, perhaps because it required so little to expose something I had overlooked. Had I kept walking, I could have retained my puzzlement indefinitely, with the man himself having no opportunity to explain the matter.

Instead, he contributed the part I did not know. That seems such a small and obvious thing that it is almost embarrassing to find myself considering it years later, but we do not always allow people that opportunity. We see what they do, decide why they do it and carry the explanation away with us. Sometimes we even repeat it to someone else, adding another opinion to the supply without having troubled the person concerned for theirs.

I wonder how much of the distance between people begins in those little certainties. Race can give them a larger and uglier setting, but the habit itself is available to all of us: assuming that something unfamiliar must be unreasonable because it does not fit the experience we have brought to it. I have no wish to turn a pleasant conversation in Halls Creek into a grand argument about the nation. It is enough to acknowledge that I understood one man’s choice of clothing better after speaking to him than I had before.

He owed me no explanation, and a question is not automatically a passport to somebody else’s life. On that occasion, however, there was an answer freely given, and I was better off for having heard it. We did not have to reach a shared decision about what either of us should wear. I could continue finding the morning hot while accepting that, for him, the hot weather had yet to arrive.

The walk carried on past a street sign that caught my attention, then towards the highway and the arts centre. I took photographs of the artwork and made a point of photographing the accompanying plaques, wanting the artist’s explanation to remain attached to the image. Looking back, there is a certain consistency in that after the conversation about the hoodie. I could look at something and form an impression, but there was value in allowing the person responsible for it to contribute a little more.

There was art around the town as well as at the centre, including old car bonnets used as signs on the recreation centre fence. Football loyalties appeared there alongside a celebration of a Tidy Towns win, while a Thomas Warrigal work at the butcher’s depicted Halls Creek and surrounding communities linked through the red country. These were things I could have missed while driving through, attending to the next turn or the distance remaining. On foot, with nowhere urgent to be, I had time to notice and take a photograph.

Flowers were in bloom, and I photographed those too, thinking of a friend back in Sydney who painted them. By then the walk had accumulated a collection of things that would never have appeared on a list of reasons for stopping in Halls Creek: an aircraft taking off, a barking dog, a conversation, a street name, painted bonnets and flowers for someone else to enjoy. None had required the town to put on a performance for me. I had simply been there long enough to walk around it.

Robyn had also been remembering a roadhouse from an earlier trip through the region. I thought I had found the place she meant, the Poinciana Roadhouse, where the sign advertising the Greyhound terminal offered a possible connection to her recollection. Before I ventured inside, a text arrived asking where I was. My wandering had evidently occupied enough of the morning, and I headed back to the caravan, where the question of the missing Jeep part would soon reclaim its place in our day.

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.

Back home, the hills of Smiths Lake offer their own opportunities to think, although some sections demand rather more attention to the physical undertaking. We know these streets, but knowing where they lead does not use up everything a walk can offer. There is the company, the chance to let a thought develop and the satisfaction of arriving back at the house whose position seemed such a good idea when we were admiring the view. By then, the climb has made its contribution to the discussion.

When the photograph of Robyn appears again, she will still have her head down, working her way uphill. I know something of why she is there because I share those walks and the home waiting above them, but the picture cannot supply everything that was going through her mind. A man in Halls Creek once supplied a missing piece of his own morning when I asked him about it. I am glad I stopped long enough to hear him before continuing on my way.