By DAVE PRAAMSMA
Of all the tall tales I have told my children, the one I feel least guilty about is my claim to have an intuitive expertise in sunsets. (Other claims, like how drinking coffee underage will make you grow bushels of nose hairs, I now feel slightly bad about.) But a “sunsetologist,” in case you didn’t know, has divine powers to forecast those really spectacular sunsets. And the ability to force their kids to go on walks they are not all that interested in…to see sunsets they aren’t that excited about. Which in my book is thoroughly defensible behavior. (You parents without sin may cast the first stone.)
I won’t sugarcoat it: to be a really persuasive sunset authority will require a bit of theatrics. With utter conviction you’ll maybe need to wave the Old Farmers’ Almanac around. Maybe crane your face up at the sky and spout some completely unscientific nonsense like “Honey? Isn’t today supposed to be a double vernal equinox!” Or “Wait, wait…aren’t we due for an enlarged solar parabola mid-July?” You’re just not going to get whole families to trudge out to hilltops to see sunsets without embroidering the facts a little.
If you happen to be a sun gazer of any seriousness, however, I probably don’t need to tell you that dramatic sunsets are, by definition, slippery and unpredictable moments. An astonishingly beautiful explosion of purple or red is probably more likely to ambush you while at home doing the dishes than while on an anniversary sunset cruise you spent good money on. As wonderful as sunsets are, they just aren’t that cooperative.
Of course, it goes without saying that over the years I may have lost some credibility as a sunsetologist. (That this coincided with my children’s middle-school years probably needs no explanation.) I have soldiered on, however, with any excuse I could muster. “High Humidity” was one go-to predictor I have used quite frequently. (Complete baloney.) Or just that summer sunsets are more colorful in general. (More baloney) Actually, the clean air of late fall seems more favorable, if anything. But I think most Vermonters can agree that a mediocre summer sunset at 8:50 still trumps those unreasonably early 4:30 sunsets of late November. (The gloomy injustice of these abbreviated days totally cancels any light show Mother Nature might throw at you.)
But ask any diehard sunset chasers, and you’ll probably hear some ballyhoo about “the absolute best place to see a sunset.” Usually it comes down to someone’s opinion that certain locations are more favorable than others. Like they got the inside track on some new angle of the sun or whatever. Of course, a coldly analytical person (or a teenage son or daughter) might argue that basically we’re all seeing the same show. Is seeing Billy Joel perform in Madison Square any different than watching him at Carnegie Hall? (There is no effective rebuttal of teen logic.)
In this area I too, however, am unreasonably biased and unscientific. I am solidly convinced, for example, that the park near my home in Panton is the best place for viewing sunsets. If you’ve been to Button Bay State Park, you’ll know that it has this rocky prow that juts out into Lake Champlain – a natural balcony to the West. It’s here that I routinely tell my kids to that they have won the Sunset Location Lottery. On many fine summer weekends, you’ll find campers sitting there, reverentially waiting on a sunset. Like pious parishioners in a cathedral. And maybe this is the intoxicating sunsets talking, but every single person we’ve met there has been delightful, kind, and enchanting. (Another fine byproduct of sun-gazing most sunsetologists will tell you.)
But far too often, I must say, we find ourselves there alone after an impressive explosion of color with not a person in sight – the shoreline completely empty. After one particularly under-attended but amazing sunset, I wondered aloud to my wife why the shoreline wasn’t packed with applauding audiences. Like royalty given a private performance by world-class entertainers, I think some of us felt like our audience was almost insultingly undersized.
It wasn’t long after I learned that full-throttled applause is exactly the tradition on the whitewashed, terraced shores of Santorini, Greece. And cheers. (Here was a part of the world where manipulation of the children isn’t even necessary to attend a sunset.) Apparently, the good folks of Santorini have a daily tradition of congregating on the shores to usher out the day with nothing short of a standing ovation. Now it’s very possible that this is a culture that even claps when the city bus shows up on time, but you have to admire that kind of gratitude.
But if there exist any true sunset experts that deserve our attention, it is quite possibly the artists or poets or writers among us. Author Paulo Coelho probably wasn’t just speaking metaphorically when he said, “Sunsets need cloudy skies.” That those ocean-frontage Portuguese have some sense of the makings of a good sunset is not hard to imagine. John Muir, the naturalist and writer famous for climbing a 100-foot Douglas spruce just to experience a good windstorm firsthand, got it right when he mused about sunsets: “The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere…eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn as the round earth rolls.”
My kids are somewhat older now and we have graduated to the more adult term “opacarophile” (a lover of sunsets). Some time ago, my oldest suggested we try watching from a small rural cemetery on our dirt road. It sits on a hill sloping west and is populated with tipping tombstones of ancient New Englanders who had seen far too few sunsets. Time was short with my returning kids and college would be pulling them away again. And of course, the sun was down in about 3 minutes. But to my son’s credit, he suggested we wait a bit to see what kind of color might develop. Because, as every good sunsetologist knows, it often the after-show that really counts.
Happy sunset watching. (For the record, the sun sets tonight around 6:40.)
