Living so close to the bay, crabs were a big part of the local culture, and many of our larger family gatherings involved a crab feast. Tables covered in newspaper and steamed crabs seasoned in Old Bay piled high, we’d whittle away at the reddish heaps, talking and cracking legs with wooden mallets, prying open abdominal flaps with butter knives. If you were lucky, a larger female would have ovaries or roe inside. Either way, you could always get a good scoop of mustard out of the shell.

While we occassionally purchased crabs for such get-togethers, family outings were also made of catching our own in the nearby Chesapeake. My uncle led these crabbing expeditions, and the day before heading out, my sisters and I would help him bait the trotline. He’d sit on a metal fold-up chair outside the barn and cut sections of eel while acrid smoke wafted up from the Marlborro Reds cradled between his bony, salt-covered fingers. As we baited the line, he laid it around the inside periphery of a 5-gallon bucket until we were finished. Then it was loaded into the boat. 

Crabbing trips started early, when it was still dark outside. By the time the sun was spilling out over the bay, we’d be on the water, having already thrown the line. Sunken to the murky seabottom, the scent of dead eel attracted unsuspecting crabs, and they’d scuttle over and clamp onto the bait with no intention of letting go. The stubborn bastards could then be pulled up over the boat’s running arm, carried from the agitated silt into the glittering light of shallower depths. There, they were easy picking with a fishing net and thrown into bushel baskets.

Sometimes after crab feasts we’d save shells we liked---big ones with nice shapes---and set them out in the sun by the old rooster pens. Ants cleaned the shell interiors and the sun bleached them white. It could take a few weeks before the shells were ready to hang on the wall, so we’d go back and check on them now and again. On one such trip, I found three or four dead eels, fully intact and laying on the ground next to an empty cage. I got the idea to cut them in half with a shovel from the barn. Bringing it over to the eels, I positioned the shovel high above their slimy green carcasses and brought it down hard. The eels’ muscular bodies were tougher than I expected. I was unable to cut them. However, I was able to wake them up.

The eels were still alive. The pain I had inflicted jarred them from whatever liminal state they were lying dormant in; and as soon as I struck them with the shovel’s blade, they started writhing and slapping back and forth on the ground, their maimed bodies now bent and discolored at the point of injury. I felt terrible. But I couldn’t bring myself to try and put them out of their misery---to potentially fail in strength again and again and again. Instead, I went back to the barn and got the bucket, filled it with water, and scooped them into that.

Down the hill, maybe half a mile, was a creek. I carried the bucket with both hands to the main road. Water sloshed and spilled on the gravel drive, the eels suspended in stormy seas. I had to set the bucket down once or twice, but eventually arrived at the creek. I walked down to the bank and dumped the bucket into the flowing water. The eels, crooked and wriggling, were carried away in the current. Of course I left them for dead, but it felt better to end things this way. I don’t know what else to say about that.

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