Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [35]
Maybe it was the age at which I encountered it—twelve going on thirteen, a time not just when a boy begins to stir sexually, but also when he begins to engage the world with an intellectual and moral consciousness—that caused this briny landscape to leave such a deep impression on me. At that age, we are trying out ideas, observing the ways in which the big world works in the little worlds we inhabit and evaluating concepts of right and wrong. All this was happening in me as I walked through marshes, watched sunrises, swam in the brackish bay and netted crabs on sandbars.
Of course, I did not encounter this landscape in its original and pristine form. (The unspoiled Mid-Atlantic coast, in the time of the Lenni-Lenape, its bays, tidal rivers, broad marshes and the blue sea breaking on its barrier beaches, is an idea almost too beautiful to grasp.) By the time I arrived, it already was under siege, and had been for a very long time. My family was in fact part of the beginning of the final assault. Our home (“Waterfront Living, No Money Down”) was in a development of modest homes going up in the piney woods and filled-in marshes as a result of the opening of the Garden State Parkway, which drew working people from the state’s industrial north to its rural south. The air was cleaner, the housing cheaper.
As a boy, I saw the marshes teeming with ducks and muskrats, as well as the red surveyor flags that marked house lots and future roads. The conflict was clear. I had already developed a melancholic side, and I felt nostalgic for the natural world that preceded my birth. The sense of something being lost was already strong in me and no doubt put a darker turn on my consciousness.
I knew the men who drove the bulldozers, built the houses and sank the pilings for the docks—working-class men, many of them hard-luck cases living from paycheck to paycheck—and I was aware that they were only trying to earn a living and caught up in the machinery of something much bigger than themselves. I did not have enough experience in the world to trace back to its maleficent source the money and the mechanisms that made all this destruction possible, but I sensed that the forces that were slicing, dredging and filling the marshes were powerful, distant and not at all concerned with the fate of alligator snapper turtles, sandpipers or blue-claw crabs.
The eventual outcome was clear. It was only a matter of time. There was nothing for me to do except to spend as much time in the marshes, woods and water as possible and to acquaint myself with as much of it as I could before it was gone. And that is what I did.
When I was thirteen, fourteen and fifteen years old, I walked the curving sand and spartina of my piece of the Barnegat Bay in the early summer with a crab net, which was a five-foot broom handle at the end of which was a loop of wire and mesh net. I also carried a metal bucket that I strapped to my waist. My prey was the blue-claw crab and especially the shedder crab. The blue-claw crab increases its size by shedding its hard shell, green as rusted copper, and growing into a new and soggy parchmentlike shell. The softshell crab is a delicacy, of course. In my youth, you could buy them at bars and roadside restaurants where they were breaded and fried whole in flour and egg and served between pieces of white bread. There was a good market for softshell crabs—I could get a dollar a crab. So in June I would walk barefoot down to the bay, wearing only a pair of cutoff jeans, and wade into the water, slowly making my way through the shallows, looking on the sandy bottom or the edges of docks and bulkheads in search of the dark spots that were crabs. Catching crabs with a net took stealth and speed. At the slightest sign of danger, they skittered and swam like rockets in their sideways propulsion, or they simply dropped like stones from pilings into deep, dark water. Often at the end of a morning, though, I would