BY HARRY WEEKES
One summer, I took a “Botany and Creative Writing” class in Maine. One of our field trips was to a bog, for a day of plant identification and creative inspiration. The group piled out of our rented minivan looking like we were going to be gone for weeks. I think we went precisely 32 feet from the car. All day. Such is the life of a botanist.
When I stepped onto the beach over Thanksgiving, I had aspirations. I had my binoculars. I had a hat. I had sunglasses. I had something like 400 miles of white sand in front of me, and had only one question to answer: Do I start left and head toward Guatemala, keeping the great expanse of the Pacific on my right, or do I turn right and head toward California? I chose Guatemala.
The sun was just coming up as I cruised through the intertidal zone. The waves hustled up the shore on the end of each crash and whispered away, invariably leaving behind a variety of beasts, scurrying, digging, scuttling or bubbling their way back into the ocean or the sand. Suddenly, there was a shrimp in front of me.
My knowledge of the ocean is about as developed as my knowledge of a Maine bog. I looked down and thought, “shrimp.” At which point a distant phylogenetic cousin of said shrimp shot down the incline of the beach, even more interested than I was in the shrimp. “Crab.” Only in hindsight would I modify those names, simply adding what I thought they looked like, or where they were physically: glass shrimp and sand crab. I honestly have no idea if that is what either of them is called.
And while the number of crabs zipping around the beach was around a jillion, up until that point I never had any luck catching one. In regards to this, it is probably because I never tried that hard. To me, sand crabs cross some speed threshold with which I am not totally comfortable. I’ll pick up a big mantis, mostly because they are slow. But a sand crab darts, kind of like the fast zombies of the arthropods. This one, though, converged on me (another zombie technique). Or rather, converged on food temporarily washed to land that was next to me.
So I watched.
The scuttling marauder, eyestalks out, came right up and grabbed the shrimp. The shrimp snapped hard once, literally flipping the crab up the beach. The crab shot back as the next wave crashed and immediately the two crustaceans were in water. When the wave came, it brought with it swirling and pelting sand, not to mention a heavy mixture of froth, turbulence, and pure force. I imagined an analogous scene at my scale. It would look like me running down the beach to grab a seal. Then having a 30-foot wave, mixed with a sandstorm, crash over me as I moved from running and breathing on land to swimming and fighting in water.
The wave disappeared. The crab shot back up the shore and into the lip of a hole it had dug, its periscopic eyes surveying the beach.
I looked up. I had walked a total of about 40 yards.
The world unfolds in fantastic moments of wonder and awe. The rest of my “walk” was spent marveling at the edge of the sea, in a world of unknown and even unfathomable biology, physics, chemistry, and geology. When I returned, Simon was awake. “Do you want to go bodysurfing?” he asked.
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 48th year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and two of their three baby adults—Penelope and Simon. The other member of the flock, Georgia, is currently fledging at Davidson College in North Carolina.