The Scotch broom between my house and the bike path is growing in thick. Amanda gave me an old Hobie cat sail and a pair of clothesline posts somebody else was throwing away. They survived a few weekends of high wind, so I guess I dug the post holes deep enough. If I hang bed sheets and towels and the sail just so, my little backyard is shielded from the bike path. I’ll find a more permanent fix. Eventually.
In the meantime, these temporary structures will just have to do. Isn’t everything we make temporary in the grand scheme of things? My day to day work is to promote historic preservation on Nantucket. We talk about preserving things in perpetuity. But on an eroding pile of sand, perpetuity is a relative term.
I think perpetuity is why I am so taken by horseshoe crabs. (They say salt is a great preservative.) The June full moon brings them out. I have been watching these strange prehistoric creatures mate for nearly forty summers. Maybe I like horseshoe crabs for the same reason I like old houses. I may be getting older, but I will never be as ancient as the horseshoe crabs.
This summer, my friend Emma and I volunteered to count mating horseshoe crabs for the Nantucket Conservation Foundation. I am trying to be in the world more now. Surfers say you have to get out there to get in there. They are talking about the waves, but this advice applies to nearly everything. It is terrifying, sometimes, to get out there, to be in the world.
Our shift as citizen scientists started at 11:30 PM last Monday night. We didn’t know how we’d possibly stay awake that late. Nantucket in early June on a Monday is still a little sleepy. We drifted from the grocery store to the pizza place to the Broad Street strip, seeing who else might be around. At an open mic at a bar downtown, I observed the mating rituals of the summer crowd. College boys and girls, in their preppy plumage.
Out at Warren’s Landing in Madaket, Jim and Pat met us in their stickered-up pickup truck. The four of us took turns holding the ends of two plastic poles with a piece of yellow rope between them to mark off a five-meter grid in which to count the crabs. It was slow going at first—zero, zero, zero crabs. Then the action picked up. We’d found the horseshoe crab hot spot, where clusters of six or more horseshoe crabs were mating. Constellations of crabs formed and broke off and reformed. Bait fish glittered under the beams of our headlamps like fallen stars.
The horseshoe crabs were almost oblivious to the observers around them. I thought of the people gathered at the bar downtown, the boisterous drunks, the wallflowers afraid to approach anybody. The horseshoe crabs do not know what social anxiety is. Maybe that is why they have survived every major extinction event.
I wore waders — there is a part of me that still fears being around that many arthropods — and a few satellite males tried to mate with my feet. Even through the rubber boots, I could feel their little feet as they scuttled over mine. It was a sensation I think I will remember the rest of my life. Well, as long as I can remember, however long that might be. How long can a horseshoe crab remember?
In the end, we counted 176 horseshoe crabs. Jim and Pat said there were nights they’d seen three and four times that many.
Driving home, half asleep in the middle of the night, the waxing moon was engulfed in a fog that only rarely lifts in early summer. There were a few lights left on in the windows along Surfside Road. Almost nobody hangs curtains in this town.
