High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [1]
I’m grateful to friends and family members who tolerated or even encouraged my use of our common experience here, to my own ends. I don’t think I’ve let out any secrets (in some cases I’ve changed names and events just a little, to make sure), but I know it can be jarring to find a piece of yourself stitched into someone else’s tale. I cherish the patches contributed by my loved ones, while recognizing they all have their own quilts, too, quite different from mine. I especially thank my lucky stars for Camille Kingsolver, who at this moment is still delighted to see herself drawn in her mother’s hand; I apologize now, Camille, for the day you’ll feel differently—you have my permission to tell your friends I’m a lunatic and made up every word. And last, and first, eternal thanks to Steven Hopp, my keenest critic and purest enthusiast. Maybe I could have done it alone. But I sure wouldn’t want to.
HIGH TIDE IN TUCSON
A hermit crab lives in my house. Here in the desert he’s hiding out from local animal ordinances, at minimum, and maybe even the international laws of native-species transport. For sure, he’s an outlaw against nature. So be it.
He arrived as a stowaway two Octobers ago. I had spent a week in the Bahamas, and while I was there, wishing my daughter could see those sparkling blue bays and sandy coves, I did exactly what she would have done: I collected shells. Spiky murexes, smooth purple moon shells, ancient-looking whelks sand-blasted by the tide—I tucked them in the pockets of my shirt and shorts until my lumpy, suspect hemlines gave me away, like a refugee smuggling the family fortune. When it was time to go home, I rinsed my loot in the sink and packed it carefully into a plastic carton, then nested it deep in my suitcase for the journey to Arizona.
I got home in the middle of the night, but couldn’t wait till morning to show my hand. I set the carton on the coffee table for my daughter to open. In the dark living room her face glowed, in the way of antique stories about children and treasure. With perfect delicacy she laid the shells out on the table, counting, sorting, designating scientific categories like yellow-striped pinky, Barnacle Bill’s pocketbook…Yeek! She let loose a sudden yelp, dropped her booty, and ran to the far end of the room. The largest, knottiest whelk had begun to move around. First it extended one long red talon of a leg, tap-tap-tapping like a blind man’s cane. Then came half a dozen more red legs, plus a pair of eyes on stalks, and a purple claw that snapped open and shut in a way that could not mean We Come in Friendship.
Who could blame this creature? It had fallen asleep to the sound of the Caribbean tide and awakened on a coffee table in Tucson, Arizona, where the nearest standing water source of any real account was the municipal sewage-treatment plant.
With red stiletto legs splayed in all directions, it lunged and jerked its huge shell this way and that, reminding me of the scene I make whenever I’m moved to rearrange the living-room sofa by myself. Then, while we watched in stunned reverence, the strange beast found its bearings and began to reveal a determined, crabby grace. It felt its way to the edge of the table and eased itself over, not falling bang to the floor but hanging suspended underneath within the long grasp of its ice-tong legs, lifting any two or three at a time while many others still held in place. In this remarkable fashion it scrambled around the underside of the table’s rim, swift and sure and fearless like a rock climber’s dream.
If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.
The business of naming involved a grasp of hermit-crab gender that was way out of our league. But our household had a deficit of males, so my daughter and I chose Buster, for balance. We gave him a terrarium with clean gravel and a small cactus plant dug out of the yard and a big cockleshell full of tap water. All this seemed to suit him fine. To my