I spent this holiday season in Naples, Florida, where my wife and I bought a home in 2009 to escape the bitter Chicago winters.
On Christmas morning this year, I slipped my kayak into the water by the Jolley Bridge at Marco Island and paddled the Big Marco River westward toward the Gulf of Mexico, tugged by the falling tide. The wind was northerly — neither help nor hindrance just yet.
It was not my usual Christmas morning, which has always been spent at home with my wife. This would have been my 50th Christmas spent with Gail, had she not passed away from a massive stroke on Valentine’s Day ten months ago. And so this Christmas was, for me, just one more chance to figure out how to set a new course once fate decides that your life’s winds and tides have changed.
For the first mile or so, a dolphin escorted me about 30 yards away on my right side. He may have been curious to check out a fellow old loner, because it’s been a tough year for dolphins, too. Red tide has killed hundreds of them, washed up on Southwest Florida beaches throughout the summer and fall. I could only wonder how many lost loved ones this lone dolphin might have grieved over the past several months.
I smiled at him, and I think he smiled back. But then, he’s a dolphin, and dolphins always seem to be smiling no matter what.
In anticipation of the Christmas season, good friends who have lost loved ones advised me to spend holidays surrounded by people, lots of people. I thanked them for their advice, but for some reason I wanted to be alone with my thoughts and memories, at least for this first Christmas alone.
Once the kids had grown up and left the nest, Gail and I never made a big deal about Christmas. It was always just a quiet dinner and a few presents under the tree to open, and maybe a surprise or two in the stockings. Because our Christmas was always so low-key, I didn’t think it would hit me like a gut-punch once she was gone.
I was wrong.
It may have been our simple, intimate observance of the holiday that hurt the most, because silence can be wonderful if you have a hand to hold. But alone, the silence can be deafening.
And so I decided if I was going to spend this Christmas morning alone, I would go where singularity makes sense, where aloneness doesn’t have to mean loneliness — in a one-person kayak.
When I hit the Gulf I paused to take a sip of water. Long ago on a fishing charter, I remember Captain Bill Walsh telling me about an island in that area that had washed away once its stand of non-native trees had been removed by an environmental group. I checked the map, where the smaller print at that area said, “Note: This area subject to continual change.”
Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.
I turned north along the coast and pushed on, battling the wind up to the southern tip of Keewaydin Island, five or six miles from my starting point.
I pulled my kayak up onto a low-tide sand flat littered with shells, starfish and sand dollars — some of them dead and empty, and some of them simply stranded and waiting for the waters to rise. Pelicans swooped and dove into the shallow waters nearby, ospreys soared overhead, cormorants swam just past the breakers, terns poked their beaks in the sand.
And all of them — all of the birds, fish and mollusks, countless thousands of them stretching for as far as the eye could see or the mind could imagine — doing their best to get through this day to the next, doing it as they have done day after day for countless thousands of years past and for countless thousands of years more.
The tide had turned. I headed back with the surge at my tail, but the shifting wind now in my face.
A new year is upon us. There will be tides and there will be winds, sometimes at our back and sometimes in our face.
And we will push on.
Because that that is the way it is — the way it was meant to be.
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
