By Elizabeth Bishop Later | I am terrified of crabs. My crustacean doubt started early in life with a dream that my school had been overrun with thousands of blue crabs.
Only a few months after that I awoke one Saturday morning to an unusually high spring tide. The general fiddler crab population had retreated to our house, about 100 feet from the creek. For lack of a more eloquent way of describing it let me just say this:
They were everywhere.
On the porch. In the grass. And (horror of horrors) hanging on the side of the house.
My nightmare had come true.
But I know a little secret about fiddler crabs that inspires me to hold them in a higher esteem than just being my objet de la terreur. Let me share it with you.
While fiddler crabs live on the creek banks, they are not swimming crabs and, thus, drown in water. Every 12 hours and 25 minutes, they are threatened by the incoming tide. But they’ve got it all figured out.
You see, the fiddler crab has an internal clock that tells it when the tide is coming in. As the water advances, the crab retreats into its dark digs in the mud, and plugs the entrance with a little mud ball. And there it patiently waits, until the clock tells it that the tide is going out, and it’s safe to come out again to do what fiddler crabs do – mostly, that means eating a lot and looking for girlfriends.
Scientists have studied this outside the crab’s natural environment, and have found that no matter what they do to remove all the natural cues a crab might have to the tide coming in and going out, it still sticks to its internal clock that says it’s time to be still, and it’s time to be active.
While the schedule of the tide sets the rhythm (remember, there are fiddler crabs all over the world, and tides are different everywhere), the tide doesn’t cause the behavior.
The fiddler crab just knows.
I believe that perhaps the fiddler crab is more wise than I. It trusts its own judgment, and moves happily with the rhythms of life as they ebb and flow. There is no worry about what the incoming tide might bring, and no grief over what the outgoing tide takes away. There is only life and its important work and small joys, whatever they may be.
And that’s something I can admire. From a distance, of course.
Originally written by Elizabeth Bishop Later for A Place Called Home: A memoir of Beaufort and St. Helena Island, South Carolina. You can read more from the book and writings of Sonny Bishop and Elizabeth Bishop Later at BishopsBest.com
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