Seeking sunset

Hot on the heels of a post that including musing about my apparent fondness of hokey conclusions, here I am, tapping out a story about a sunset on my keyboard.  It’s either an alarm that Miles and Laurel is about to degrade into a long series of posts about parades and people hugging at airports and television commercials that make the author tear up, or to frame it positively, a heads-up that I probably just have a healthy affinity for life’s hokey things.
 

But check this out: because this sunset was a true highlight of our time on Orcas Island, I’m going to give it a go.

For the first two days that we were in northern Washington’s San Juan Islands, it was cloudy.  It was definitely short of dreary, because the clouds gave this wonderful extra layer between the piles of mountains and water where you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.  But it didn’t quite have the ring of a sunny summer vacation (see right).

On our last afternoon in Orcas, the sun started to pop out in a big way on the western horizon. We visited a neighboring island, and by the time we rode the ferry back to Orcas, the water and sky looked like this:

Better, right?

I considered this to be a prime sunset-viewing opportunity.

We canvassed the western half of the island in search of the right spot.  We started down Deer Harbor Road, a solid bet that showcased the island’s character perfectly but cut to the south before it crossed over a ridge that would’ve provided a great sunset. Cormorant Bay Road turned out to be the answer: a tiny, weaving, narrow, isolated forest path meandering toward the island's western coast.  I wondered for a fleeting second whether this was potentially a terrible idea but dashed it in fear of sounding, even in my head, like a major stick-in-the-mud.  We drove slowly down it, intersecting with private road after private road and accidentally turning up a very steep private road (sorry, owners!).  Then we found a barely visible public road that drifted two hundred yards into a gravel turnaround: next to the coastline, next to crashing ocean waves, next to the setting sun.

It was a pretty good adventure.