At one of the creek bends, I climbed the steep, pocked mud bank up onto the salt marsh. Several yards from the edge was a small, cleared depression, one of the so-called “salt pans” where hundreds of fiddler crabs were gathered. I have always thought of fiddlers as homebodies, sticking near their burrows on the banks or on the mud flats, but here there were no holes visible, and, sensing me, they began to disperse with a kind of desperate confusion.
This week Bob concludes his two-part account of “Metamorphoses in a Tidal Creek." You can hear Part One here.
I picked up one, large colorful male, grabbing his enlarged right “fiddling” claw (as one would grab a snake by the throat or a bull by the horns). I pinched him gently, and he pinched back with surprising force for a one-inch-long creature. We stood there, shaking hands, or claws, as it were, while I observed him. He was a handsome little creature with yellow claws and a bright blue shell. His face had a mean, down-turned appearance and eyes that seemed to glare from the tops of their short stalks. Then he began to emit a frothy mass of tiny reddish bubbles from his mouth – a common crab behavior that is possibly a scare tactic. It was not his fierce appearance, however, but several fierce biting greenhead flies that finally made me drop him and take refuge by diving back into the creek.
I swam on, diving and surfacing like a dolphin or a seal, and thinking that a seal probably feels as comfortable as this in January, when the creek is glazed over with cracked, sunken ice. At times I walked on the bottom, pushing up stream, like a moose, keeping just my eyes and nose above the water to avoid the flies.
In this way I evolved up the creek as far as the wooden foot bridge, surrounded by peaty ledges and crisp green walls of cord grass, seeing no one at all except two girls on the bank at one of the bends who either did not recognize me as human or deliberately ignored my strange apparition in the water.
At the bridge, I saw by the water stains on its pilings that it was nearly high tide, I climbed out and ran back across the width of the sand spit and leaped into the heaving bay waters, expecting to cool off. Instead, the waves were jarringly hot! Carried in over the long, shallow flats, the water must have been close to 100 degrees or more. I felt like an egg thrown into simmering water, surrounded by mounds of liquid heat breaking viscously along the glassy shore.
I thrashed my way through the submerged carpets of marsh grass, whose thin, protruding stalks tops were adorned with numerous marsh snails that had climbed them to escape the hot, rising waters. I finally gained the creek mouth again, where the waters cooled substantially. I had not realized that such dramatic temperature gradients existed over the fiats in summer and wondered what effects this has on aquatic life.
I had come full circle in my afternoon’s explorations and I walked up out of the creek onto the sand mound where I had left my clothes. As I put them back on, I looked across the waters and mused on the metamorphoses encountered on a swim up a tidal creek.
This is the 2nd part of a two-part essay. You can hear Part One here.
