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[JohnHuth]

Sometimes the most modest trips can be the best.

The run up to X-mas was horrendous - broken cars, losing my kitchen to a remodeling, an uptick in chores, grumpy co-workers, the decreasing light level as we approach the winter solstice.

I drove down to the Cape like a maniac to get the house ready for x-mas and found myself with a few free hours to spare.

Beautiful weather - the sun was out, 45 degrees, little wind.

On comes the dry-suit and pretty soon I'm out on Nantucket Sound. No boats, no jetskis, all the floating docks were taken up, only a distant buoy bleating away and gentle swells.

I turned up the Herring River and paddled up into the bird sanctuary. I passed a male and two female swans, and all manner of ducks.

At a certain moment, I reached my "halfway" point, and knew that dinner preparations, more present wrapping and general hullaballo waited back at the house. Beyond that, after the holidays, back to the grind. I vowed to take five minutes and just drift and watch and listen.

There was a sun-dog indicating bad weather as dusk approached. As ice falls in the sky, the ice crystals tend to have their flat surface parallel to the ground, and you get two horizontal patches of red-green-blue about 22 degrees on either side of the sun.

I could barely hear an occasional car in the distance - the dominant sounds were birds - ducks taking off from the water, quacking, a modest breeze in the trees - nothing else. Carlos Casteneda once called this kind of moment "the gap between worlds".

My five minutes were up, and I knew that I had to push it on back against the rising tide in order to beat the sunset home. When I pulled up on the beach, the sky was filled with red and angry grey streaks. My breath began condensing, and I knew I'd wake up to fog. It was hard to drag myself inside and start peeling potatoes, but even a quiet two hours on the water can be so restorative.