The Gifts

Unwrapping a few of the gifts from a year aboard the "Little Dipper."

The stockings are unstuffed. The packages unpacked. But, it isn’t all ribbons and bows. Some of life’s greatest gifts defy the limitations of wrapping paper and string. Some are tied up with wisps of fog, held together with just the scotch-tape of memory. You can’t stuff them in any stockings hung by the chimney with care or otherwise. They won’t fit neatly under any tree, unless it is a white pine perched precariously on a cliff edge or a stack of ice against the setting sun.

This year, some of the greatest gifts have been moments aboard the Little Dipper.

THE GIFT OF TIME

I don’t keep a trip log. Perhaps I should but boating isn’t baseball where every pitch and swing of the bat is pursed, recorded, and endlessly analyzed. Some memories are meant to have the edges blurred a bit, like dog-eared pages in your soul. So, I don’t know the exact number of mornings I cleared the break wall at the Apostle Islands marina or what my average departure time was or how many knots per hour the boat makes.

I remember most the mornings of sipping my coffee waiting for sunrise as the Little Dipper does its slow dance with the waves. No other boats in sight, the islands just charcoal gray streaks in the half-light, the slow flight of gulls like feathered commas in the morning sky slowing the long sentence of sunrise.

Such mornings bend the meaning of time, stretching the hours like a long wave on the open waters of the day ahead. In our fast-forward world where touch-of-a-button everything and 5G connections have us addicted to life at the speed of now, it is a gift to count the cadence of an hour in waves against a nameless beach or the tick of pine needles against the hood of your rain jacket. Such moments slow the world to a more understandable and sustainable pace, at least long enough to catch your breath. One more sip of coffee. One more glance at the way the clouds reflect in the still water. One… more… breath of it all.

THE GIFT OF POWER

Then there are those moments where time seems to stop altogether and the light of the world shines on a single second, that second your quiet picnic on an Oak Island beach becomes a scramble for safety. One moment there are only quiet waves, a picnic basket, soft sands.

The next moment there is a black bear standing in your footprints, the very footprints you and your family made in the sand just moments ago scrambling into the Little Dipper to shove it off the sandbar into deeper water, while the bear’s eyes sear the distance between you with a look that will become a family story told years after the footprints have faded from the beach but not your soul.

THE GIFT OF AWE

Solar maximum, the space scientists call it, a time when the earth is perfectly aligned with the active portions of the sun flashing with the kind of solar flares that create northern lights. There are Kp values to consider and BZ trends, whole websites full of data and charts and numbers.

But with your head tilted back in a posture the opposite of prayer, eyes to the sky as the heavens dance, none of those numbers matter. The northern lights are out and you are there to see it.

THE GIFT OF CONNECTION

More than just a personal tool, I’ve always wanted the Little Dipper to connect not just the islands but the people who love them. This year, the passenger list included artists, writers, photographers, friends, family, and at least one dog. (“Sit Finch. Stay. Good dog.”)

Here’s to the good conversations, the sipped coffee, the quiet moments of beauty, the footprints in the sand and the shared sunrises. And to my other boating friends who raft up for a few minutes at a dock or a beach or just bob along next to me for a bit after a chance meeting in the North Channel. Your presence is always a shared gift.

A GIFT FROM THE SKY

Once, drifting alone off the north end of Basswood Island sipping my coffee, I watched a bald eagle watching me from an old lightning-struck snag along the shore. Unhurried. Its head turning to follow me as slowly as a cloud shadow. When it finally broke the spell, lifting off from its perch, the eagle flew directly over the Little Dipper, flapped its wings, and a primary feather drifted down like a dark snowflake, nearly landing right in the boat. It was close enough that without even moving the boat I could lean over the gunnel and watch as the feather spiraled in the liquid air of the lake glinting in the early sunlight, and then finally disappeared. It seemed, at that moment anyway, like a gift. Not a gift to possess. Not all gifts are about possession. But the gift of a shared moment on a morning stirred only by wings.

Who can say what gifts the coming year may bring? None of us know, and that is exactly the way it should be.

May your new year be a gift to you and those around you.

— Jeff Rennicke

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