Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [92]
Wet kelp hid crabs of all sizes, which scurried from the light. There were hermit crabs toting snail shells on their backs and a horse crab, which was covered in bristles. I picked it up between my thumb and forefinger, holding it at the back so that its pincers couldn’t reach my skin. Its legs paddled uselessly in the air. A purple sea urchin sat on cobbles beneath the kelp. Eventually, when it died, its spines would break off and the animal would rot away, leaving the graceful ringed skeleton you could find bleached white at the top of the beach. Then an oddly shaped crab appeared, with a shell much bigger than its body—an umbrella crab, with wings of shell that stretched beyond its body. I’d never seen a crab like this before—didn’t even know these creatures existed. I wanted to share this amazing find with someone. I called over to Sharon, but the sound of my voice was lost into the distance.
A little way up the beach, I lifted a rock to reveal a society beneath. Half a dozen chitons—small, tanklike mollusks with eight-plated shells that clutched tightly to rocks—were clinging to the underside of the rock. There were half a dozen kinds of chitons along this shore; these were in clownish colors: The plates of shell were finely and colorfully striped in pink and white, and the hem of shell around the edge was spotted green, blue, and orange. A sea sponge, which looked like a layer of thick paint, encrusted part of the rock in pink. A delicate starfish with a body no bigger than a dime and arms as fine as dental floss also clung to the underside of the rock. Another starfish—this one with only four legs and the nub of a fifth growing back—made its home beneath this rock as well.
In the wet puddle beneath where the rock had been, an eel-like gunnel fish the length of my index finger flopped around in its quickly drying world. I picked it up and its slick body flailed against the inside of my closed hand. At the bottom of the palm-sized puddle, pale gray threads radiated from a central point: It was the top of a worm that had built a hard shell in the sand below and extended its tentacles in search of prey. Shrimplike amphipods hopped about in the dampness beneath the rock, and a thimble-sized crab crawled away from the light. Once I had turned over this rock and seen the riot of life beneath it, I wanted to see more. I looked up to see a perfectly clear tidepool just up ahead; I put the rock lid back down on this miniature world and moved on.
I squatted at the edge of a pool as wide as my arms and looked into its surface. Quickly, my reflection disappeared, revealing the world in this remnant the sea had left behind. Dozens of hermit crabs sped across the floor of the pool. Another crab appeared in the pool—this one wearing algae along its back, a decorator crab dressed in seaweed for camouflage. Then a black leather chiton with a thick black fleshy rim that felt like wet suede around the edge. These were a favorite subsistence food among Alaska Natives of the region, who called them bidarki and ate them boiled. I remembered when John had cut one out of its shell with a pocketknife and we’d eaten it raw while wading in the tidepools. It tasted only of the sea.
I scanned the pool from end to end. Stock-still at one end, where I’d overlooked it before, a tidepool sculpin seemed to hang in the water. This thumb-sized fish had a large mouth and oversized pectoral fins that waved like hands on either side of its head. Small carnivores, they ate barnacles, limpets, copepods, worms, and sometimes each other. My index