Catch of the Day

Our Family would often go to the tide pools after church on Sunday afternoons. We wore our beat-up old tennis shoes and carried buckets in hopes of bringing them back brimming with treasures. The rocky ponds were filled with creepy gooey sea life, an occasional sea slug, but mostly anemones. Our local variety was a dull grey green in color and had hundreds of wriggling tendrils. When we dropped a pebble in them they would close up around it trying to swallow it - which naturally led us to try larger stones on bigger anemones, leaving them struggling under way more than a mouthful - ah the cruelty of youth. Sea urchins were everywhere, a deep purply-red in color, their mostly empty shells eaten out from the underside. We'd sometimes take them home and boil them in bleachy water to kill the remaining smelly innards, leaving us with a nice shell for our collections. Our buckets would fill up with all manner of creatures picked up with the scientific zeal of 10yr olds. Once home we would lay out our display of prizes on the sidewalk to admire. We would play for the rest of the day with any live crabs we managed to smuggle home. Building walls with blocks to form a racecourse, we'd goad them on cheering and screaming and poking them with sticks. We regarded them with fascination and fear, never daring to pick them up with our bare hands. Getting them to grab onto a stick was our technique for moving them around and threatening younger sisters by waving the scary sea spiders in their faces. If they let go and got loose, we all scrambled to safety, rescuing out bare toes from those treacherous pinchers. During the week they would mysteriously disappear from their corrals in the yard - usually right after trash day - by then we had usually lost interest anyway. At that time I was in my Marine Biologist phase, obsessed with the sea and all of it's strange inhabitants. I remember coming up with the idea of splitting anemones for a science project in Jr.High. My premise was that they might be able to regenerate from pieces - like starfish are able to re-grow a lost leg. With the feverish perseverance of a 12yr old, I cut them apart by endlessly sawing back and forth with one of our hopelessly dull kitchen knives. They lay in pieces, limp and suffering at the bottom of the tank. They sat for weeks in a salt water aquarium with the filter bubbling, ugly and smelly and doing nothing. Creepy and repulsive as they were, I still have pangs of remorse about what I did to them in the name of 'science'. I watched and waited, taking daily notes, eventually concluding that they did not possess the same capabilities as starfish and at long last they were joyously disposed of by my Mother. How she put up with my research I cannot imagine. It didn't end there - years later my youngest sister boiled down a horse leg in the kitchen to study the bones for a class. The tradition continued when my own daughter dissected a road-kill possum for a college course. We cooked the skinned carcass down in a canning pot on a Coleman stove OUTSIDE on our deck. I was not going to do it in our kitchen - Mom's spirit guiding me against going down that road.