Our first night in Rehoboth, it was grey and cloudy, though still warm. We went down to the beach together, Guy and Eric and I, with the kids, who were eight and five. They had never seen an ocean.
It was August of 2020, the pandemic year. We wore shorts and t-shirts, and masks, and Eric wore a windbreaker. Between the weather and the pandemic, the beach was nearly empty of humans that evening. Behind us, there were a few lighted windows in the tower of Eric’s parents’ condo building, and maybe a person or two on the balcony, shadowy, half-glimpsed, unimportant. There was an empty sidewalk, swept with sand, and lonely grasses waving in the wind. In the distance, only a few tourists stood in clumps along the boardwalk or went in and out of stores.
But at the edge of the Atlantic, there was life. I peered down at palm-sized jellyfish, transparent and otherworldly, washed up on the shore. The kids scampered after shells and picked up interesting bits of seaweed, and tossed them at each other. We saw bubbles in the sand where small crabs were hiding, and occasionally one would poke itself out of the sand and then scurry back into its hole, like a seaside squirrel. Gulls called raucously to one another.
Suddenly, we came upon something gorgeous and alien, something I’d never seen before. “Is that a horseshoe crab exoskeleton?” I asked with wonder.
“It is,” said Eric. “There’s a lot of them around here. We might see some live ones tomorrow.”
The skeleton was on its back, four insectoid legs sticking up in the air. It had been picked clean of flesh by the gulls; what remained was a firm, leathery carapace.
“I’m taking it home,” I told Guy instantly.
“You’re not bringing that thing in the house,” he said.
“Fine, then I’ll keep her in the garden.”
I already felt a mysterious connection to this dead animal as I lifted her discarded body from the ground. Something about her called to me. I didn’t know much about horseshoe crabs, but she felt mysterious, primaeval, visceral. I was already thinking of her as a her, as a female-identifying entity, though I have no idea how one determines the sex of a horseshoe crab.
I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, but I do know a few more things about horseshoe crabs now: how they are some of the oldest creatures in existence, barely changing form since before most of the dinosaurs were alive. Their blood, which is blue, has important medical properties, and were hunted nearly to extinction because of it, but now are protected, and the blood is harvested sustainably, with the crabs released back into the ocean after being drained. When I think about horseshoe crab blood donation, I imagine myself back at the plasma donation centre on Lewis Avenue in Toledo, a needle nestled in the crook of my left arm, pumping my fist and reading an ebook on my phone, listening to “Havana” or “Rockabye” on their strangely soothing playlist. I’ve been there, horseshoe crab, my friend.
We collected the children and their shells, eventually, and headed back into the condo building to get ready for dinner. As we looked up menus on our phones, and talked about what sort of seafood we should order, and whether lobster rolls were better with butter or mayonnaise, and who had the best clam chowder in town, I persuaded Eric to call Sara, his wife, a pagan and professional artist, who had a very witchy collection of animal skulls, and ask her how best to clean and preserve the horseshoe crab.
Sara wasn’t entirely sure, as she’d never cleaned one before, but suggested either salt or baking soda. I cleaned the carapace with both, gently, tenderly, in the sink, as one does with an infant. Eric’s parents wouldn’t have wanted her sitting on their kitchen counter, we figured, so I set her carefully on paper towels on the concrete balcony.
“She reminds me of the lobstrosities in Stephen King’s Dark Tower Series,” I told the men. Guy knew what I was talking about, because I had forced him to listen to The Gunslinger and nearly half of The Drawing of the Three before we decided that Stephen King wasn’t very soothing bedtime reading.
“I haven’t read that yet. What are they?” asked Eric, sipping his whiskey.
“They’re these mutant lobster-crab creatures that try to eat the humans – in fact, they do eat a few bits off the main character – and they make these noises like, ‘did a chick, dum a chum,’” I said, “and they look really scary. But Loretta’s not really scary; she just looks scary.”
“You named a dead crab Loretta?” asked Guy, shaking his head.
“Yes. Loretta the Lobstrosity.”
“Shit. You really are planning to take her home, aren’t you?”
“Yup. She’s going in to the garden.”
Loretta really did look scary. She looked like a big bug. She looked like a giant trilobite, like a roly-poly magnified several thousand times. She looked just plain weird.
But that wasn’t the vibe I got from her at all. She was strange, yeah, but I felt the kind of kinship, looking at the husk of her mortal body, that I felt running into another parent in the wild. This was someone who I could understand, who could understand me.
The last several months had been hard. The last time I worked was March 13th. I remembered, with some distress, how one of the students had come to school with a mask on, and I had teasingly referred to him as “Dr Killian,” all day, because in my mind, the only people who wore surgical masks were, well, surgeons, and maybe my dentist.
I’m one of those people who need to spend time with other people in order to thrive. We struggled to find ways in 2020 to make connections with other people. One of my good friends would schedule hangouts over Zoom, and we would sit in our respective living rooms with our cameras on, pretending that she wasn’t in Maryland and I wasn’t in Michigan. I had met Eric through a Facebook group prior to the pandemic, and we also would do lengthy video calls. I had a few local friends and family members who were in our bubble. We spent time with them outdoors – we did a lot of picnics and hikes.
I suppose it’s not all that strange, considering my relative isolation that year, that I felt a connection to a horseshoe crab.
The trip to Rehoboth had been Eric’s idea, and it was a good one. We spent all of our time either in his parents’ apartment or on the beach or the boardwalk outside, six feet away from any other humans.
The second day, there were more people on the beach, as the weather was sunny, but not so many that it was hard to keep our distance. We had our own little island of towels, under a rented umbrella. We bought the children a long-handled purple shovel, and Eric and I taught them to jump waves. Guy was recovering from surgery and couldn’t submerge himself in the water, so he sat on the beach and took pictures.
Eric was right about another thing: the horseshoe crabs were abundant in the water that morning. I noticed them first as we were wave-jumping; one’s tail, long and hard but not sharp, brushed against my thigh. I gasped in astonishment.
Looking around me, I could see more of them. Some were riding the waves, just like us. Some were washing up onto the shore. A fit older man with grey hair had a purple shovel like my kids’; when they reached the shore, he would run to them, scoop them up on the shovel, and take them back out to sea. There were a few dead ones, like Loretta, being picked at by seagulls. I mourned their loss.
I felt even more of a connection to the live horseshoe crabs than I did to Loretta. These prehistoric parents, these relatable creatures. I, too, know what it is like to be soft and meaty on the inside, easy to pick apart, easy to devour. I, too, know the joy of riding the waves and the frustration of being stranded on my back in the sand.
Loretta’s shell remained on the balcony as we swept sand out of the bathtub, as we walked on the boardwalk, and a seagull snatched a fry from my daughter’s basket, as we played skee ball in the arcade with our masks on our faces, as I sat on the balcony with Eric staring at the moon. A golden pathway stretched between the moon and us, making it look like a round, open door. It felt like I could float off the balcony and walk to it, skipping across the waves like a well-thrown rock. The world seemed so small and so large at the same time, so lonely and yet so connected. I felt as ancient as a horseshoe crab, and as young as a child.
On our last day, I wrapped Loretta’s shell in paper towels and plastic shopping bags and placed her delicately in the trunk. She rode with us all the long miles from Delaware back to Michigan, and then I found her a place in my garden, just as I said I would. I sent Eric a horseshoe crab t-shirt from Etsy for Christmas and read all the layperson’s articles about horseshoe crabs on the internet.
She was an interesting conversation piece when my friends were finally able to come to my house again. “Is that a horseshoe crab skeleton? Wow!” At times, we hid our extra key underneath her, lifting the top of her shell like a lid. At other times, she sheltered field mice.
We moved in 2023, and she moved with us. This past winter, almost five years after we brought her home, the last fragments of her shell were absorbed into my current garden.
She’s part of my mycelium now, the fungal network that connects all things through the earth. I know it’s highly unlikely that any of her former molecules are able to reach the ocean, but I’d like to think that she can at least reach the river, a mile away, or Lake Erie, a bit farther than that. At any rate, her molecules are in my soil, feeding my cosmos and my zinnias, which in turn are feeding the bees. I like to think that someday, when all that’s left of my mortal body is a shell, I too can go back to the earth like Loretta, while my immortal soul skips down the golden path to the door of the moon.
