A Trip Down Memory Lane
Alone on the boat at Morris Island, I peered into the makeshift 5-gallon bucket aquarium. There I found a hermit crab, spilling out of its undersized mobile home, a moon snail shell. A month later, driving down I-95 to Aunt Aida’s surprise birthday party in Auburndale, Fla., I remember that hermit crab in the bucket.
It was 1967. My mother cobbled together a family summer trip from Fresno, Calif. to Greenwood, Fla., her childhood home. Five kids, age 3 to 13, and a single Mother, traveled by train across the country to New Orleans.
For three days, I lived in perpetual wonderment. I explored the entire train from one end to the other. I viewed mountains from the dome car, ate exotic train food in the diner car, and met all sorts of new people. On my 8th birthday, I looked out the window to see my name on the water tower as we passed through Anton, Texas. Mom rented a car in New Orleans and drove us to Mobile. There, Mom’s sister, Aida, met us and drove through the night the final four hours to the one-stoplight town of Greenwood, Fla.
Greenwood represents one of several small towns dotting the Florida panhandle. Two Egg lies two miles south, Marianna eight miles west, and Bascom and Malone five miles approximately east. From Aida’s car window, the sun cast its first light on this exotic new landscape. An unfamiliar musty dampness filled my nostrils. Unlike the dry San Joaquin Valley, lush greenery crowded both sides of the rural highway. We passed sinkholes, springs, and small swampy rivers.
At morning’s first light, Aunt Aida pulled into the driveway of my mother’s childhood home, a somewhat run-down two-story, anti-bellum tin-roof farmhouse. Uncle Charles, shirtless, met us from a back room as we entered through the screen door.
Thirty minutes later, I found myself on a side porch, shirtless, shelling field peas and butter beans with cousins I’d never met. Shirtless I remained the rest of the summer.
Later that summer, we visited Aunt Aida and Uncle Dean, and my cousins Jeff and Laurie in St Petersburg, Fla. While there, I learned about salty Gulf of Mexico water and hermit crabs. Hermit crabs don’t do well away from the ocean. My new pet crab made the trip back to Greenwood, but gave up the ghost a few days later.
Arriving back to the boat on Morris Island, my 6 and 8 year-old guests promptly checked on their hermit crab pet in the bucket. Remembering my childhood experience, I suggested we let it go, back into the salt marsh to rejoin friends. On the way to the marina, we made a special side trip into Mud Bar Creek and set the crab free. With any luck, our new pet has now up-sized to a whelk shell.
Captain Anton DuMars, a coastal geologist and long-time Folly Beach resident, still advocates for free-range hermit crabs. Contact Anton at sailspartina@gmail.com
