Ben Franklin Was Right

Shrek is dead.

We killed him, but we didn’t mean to.  We just didn’t know how to take care of him. And chances are pretty good he wasn’t doing too well before we even knew of his existence. We don’t even know if he was a he, and none of us were getting close enough to find out. Not to mention, he smelled really bad, even before he died.

Shrek was the name we gave the accidental hermit crab we brought home from the beach. I guess he was kind of like that kid who stowed away on a flight to Hawaii, only I don’t live in Hawaii, and I am pretty sure that hermit crab had no desire to leave the comfort and relative safety of his own spot on the beach. Which is to say, it was nothing like that stowaway kid in Hawaii.

Anyway, enough about Hawaii and Shrek for now. Here’s the part where I tell you how we had the opportunity to kill him, unintentionally of course. What kind of monsters do you think we are?

My family went to the beach for the first week of summer break, a week often referred to around these parts, cleverly, as “First Week.  After several days of beautiful weather, we decided to do something a little different to break the monotony that is a relaxing beach vacation. My husband found a shelling and lighthouse cruise in nearby Georgetown, South Carolina, which involved an hour ride to a deserted island, an hour romping around, and an hour ride back.  We packed a cooler with drinks and sandwiches, put on some old sneakers and a generous slather of sunscreen, and drove down to the marina where the cruise launched.

The boat could hold thirty uncomfortably, but luckily we had less than that on our voyage. We got settled for the ten mile ride out of the harbor, a surprisingly slow trip with lots more wave and splash that we had expected. Our boat had a captain and a naturalist who sat on some steps near the front and shared all sorts of fascinating historical tidbits and shelling advice to entertain and enlighten us. We headed for North Island, a federally protected island that houses a solar powered lighthouse and some old ruins from better times. We were not going to have enough time to explore the island proper, but with the fifty some odd minutes, we should have been able to find a pretty shell or two, which was the whole idea.

We finally got to the island and disembarked using a rickety plastic staircase that was chucked on the beach. I followed the naturalist’s advice and headed towards the jetty around the side of the island, passing fellow tourists who stopped to pick up every ugly oyster shell along the way, because, as one rather obese mother put it, “Them rocks is too far for Mama to walk.”

Just as the naturalist had said, all sorts of things could be found near the jetty. I saw an old whelk shell and dipped my hand into the water to grab it, only to find a rather large spotted crab taking refuge there. My younger daughter still delights in the memory of my shrieking and jumping. I’m not scared of crabs, but that doesn’t mean I like them skittering across my hand.

 Along another tide pool, I found what looked to be a leg bone. I showed it to the naturalist, who told me it was a deer femur, but I am still not convinced it wasn’t the remains of a medium sized child. I found another whelk and a couple of moon snail shells, also called shark’s eyes, which I put in the bag along with the bone.  

My younger daughter and I joined my husband and older daughter along a sand bar, where my husband was doing this little shuffle dance in his all-terrain Keens. He might have looked silly, but he found an intact sand dollar and another large whelk to add to the bag. After almost stepping on a skate, which is kind of like a sting ray without the sting, followed by another scream, I traipsed behind my family back to the boat.  We boarded and rinsed our hands with bottled water before settling onto our plastic benches to eat our sandwiches and drink our real sugar Mexican Cokes.

After returning to Georgetown, we went back to our condo and tossed the bag of shells we had collected on the table, whereupon we proceeded to ignore it for the rest of the weekend before we packed it, along with the rest of our crap, for the drive home.    

After an uneventful five hour drive, we pulled into the driveway and unloaded all of the crap, along with the bag of shells. We each unpacked our suitcases, and as I started a load of laundry, my husband decided to look through the bag of shells and clean them. He put a dish towel on the counter, filled the sink with some warm water, and rinsed them each by swishing them around to get the sand off of them.  When he had finished cleaning one, he  would set it on the dish towel to drain before getting another shell out of the grocery bag and rinsing it.

By the time he reached the bottom of the sack to get out the bone, he noticed that one of the shells was walking along the counter. It was one of the small moon snail shells. Despite our best efforts to make sure all the shells were uninhabited, a small hermit crab had slipped by unnoticed and hitched a ride some two hundred and fifty miles from the coast. He had not only gone undetected, but he also had been surviving on air in a plastic grocery bag for three days.  You can’t even imagine the guilt.

My husband, being the caring sucker he is, set up this whole elaborate terrarium environment for him. He used playground sand from an old bag in the garage. He made a salt water solution using the finest of organic sea salts. My  younger daughter helped out by researching what hermit crabs eat on the computer. She opted for organic green grapes, diced finely and set inside a cockle shell for a food dish. You know, his normal diet.

The hermit crab, which my fourteen year old daughter named Shrek, seemed shy at first. After a day in his new home, however, it became pretty obvious that he was not going to be with us for a long time. He ate all the grapes and excreted something unusual in his water, but then he stopped doing much of anything. We put him in the water, but nothing. I suggested mouth to mouth, but no one could tell where his mouth was, plus he stank. He stank of sorrow and death and low tide.

It was up to him whether he lived or died. It was out of our hands.

The next morning, his shell had moved, but no one took credit for it. We decided he preferred the privacy that nighttime afforded him, and perhaps he would live to see another day. About an hour later, he left the safety of his moon shell, which I learned about through frantic texts I received from that teenager of mine. They were full of hyperbole and exclamation points.

Have you ever seen a hermit crab out of the shell? I am pretty sure that was what the alien from the movie “Aliens” is based on, not the full sized one, but the one that pops out of the guy’s stomach.  It was just nasty, with its curled up body that just kind of ends, a disgusting living comma. If it were on the floor, I would have stepped on it with no hesitation or guilt.

 

But it wasn’t on my floor; it was on my kitchen counter. Stinking. Dunking what I think was its head in the water bowl. No one wanted to put it out of its misery, but no one wanted to do anything to save it, which seriously, wasn’t even a possibility. Shrek didn’t even attempt to go back in his shell, opting instead for the comfort of the sand. He couldn’t bear the weight of it anymore. Shrek was just so tired, so tired.

And then, the next morning, it happened. Shrek had passed in the night. I couldn’t find a black cloth to drape over the cloche of the terrarium, so I just avoided the kitchen, hoping my husband had the time to dispose of his remains. The teen said Kaddish for the crab, which might be considered good practice, because you just never know when you might need to say Kaddish. 

Around dinner, I noticed my husband had very kindly taken care of the situation on the counter. My younger daughter commented that Shrek had gone on to a better place.  “Yeah, the trash can,” I smirked. 

I can promise you one thing. Never again will I hold a shell to my head to hear the ocean.