Remembering What's Important

As I’m writing this, it’s the Sunday evening before Labor Day.  We sailed from Charleston yesterday to St. Pierre Creek just inland from Edisto Beach.  This morning was absolutely gorgeous, offering a tantalizing taste of the change of season that we know is just around the corner.  After breakfast, John and I packed all kinds of equipment, drinks and snacks into our dinghy.  We motored to a split with St. Pierre following along Peters Point until the creek forked again, then again.  John was arduously searching for a place where I could crab.  He was going to do some seining and fishing while I dropped my one line of chicken leg onto the murky bottom.

We came upon a place that proved to be truly remarkable in terms of catching crabs.  It was just at slack tide and, shortly after we set the anchor, the tide started going out.  We were situated right at the mouth of a tiny creek filtering into a larger flow that ultimately found its way to St. Pierre.  With the first toss of the crab line, it was obvious that we were sitting on top of a “honey hole.”  Every time I pulled in the line, it felt like a tug of war.  Most of the time, my battle was with one monstrous blue crab.  Sometimes, it was a struggle with multiple pinchers yanking at the slimy chicken leg like it was filet mignon.

Most of the time, I pulled the line in slowly as I was taught to do by my mother.  But, a couple of times, my cast from the dinghy went woefully off course and I’d haul the line in merely to capture a better throw.  Lo and behold, crabs clung to that old chicken leg as if to say “Take me, take me.”

Sitting on the bow of the dinghy, an intense wave of nostalgia came over me.  The mere act of crabbing brought back vivid memories of my youth and the most wonderful times I spent with my family. 

Every summer, we went for a week to Ocean Drive Beach, SC, just south of Little River and the North Carolina border.  We always stayed in a house called Albejosie.  It was owned by Bette and Ed Potter from Greenville and its moniker was some combination of the names in their family spelled out in the middle of a large wooden ship’s wheel at the base of the front steps.  At one time, Albejosie was on the beachfront, but in the fifties, Hurricane Hazel displaced it to the third row. 

There were several rituals when coming to Ocean Drive.  First of all, each one of us kids (three – my older brother, Bryant, me and my younger brother, Gene) could bring one friend.  As we grew older, Bryant would bring his girlfriend, Leigh Dunson.  I brought her younger sister, Anna.  Gene usually invited Harry Stephenson, our across the street neighbor in Greenville.  Once we arrived at Albejosie, mother doled out the responsibilities.  After unpacking the car, everybody had to make up their beds – except Dad.  He was always dispatched by mother to go to the Red & White Grocery Store to purchase the things she needed for her week-long stint in the kitchen. 

This grocery list contained many mundane things like bacon, eggs, milk, bread, peanut butter and cereal.  But, it also included the magical ingredients for her favorite culinary pursuits – crab gumbo, deviled crab, crab cakes and crab cocktail.  You can readily see that mother’s prized secret recipes rested heavily on one specific ingredient - crab.  At least three of the seven vacation days at Albejosie were spent crabbing.  Sometimes it was everybody, sometimes it was just a couple of us.  Nonetheless, we religiously gathered the crab nets and wooden buckets from Albejosie’s storage room and piled them in the trunk of the car.  After about a twenty minute drive, we stopped at a fish house on the banks of the Little River to buy fish heads and beg permission to crab from their dock. 

I’ll never forget sitting on that dock, feet dangling over the side, slowly pulling up my line.  Many times, I’d think I had a crab and would prematurely yell out “Net Man!! Net Man!!”  My dad would come running down the dock only to find that I didn’t really have anything. 

“Now, Bethie, don’t call me until you can see your bait,” he’d always say.

Or, if I had a little bitty crab clinging to the bait, he would scoop it up in the net, point his fingers at it and say, “Go back and tell your granddaddy to come over here!”  Then, “PLOP”, back into the brink went the little one.

One summer when my brother Gene was maybe five years old, we were crabbing just as I’ve described.  That would make me almost thirteen and Bryant fifteen.  Whereas we two older siblings were well schooled in the “pull the line up inch by inch slowly” method, Gene didn’t quite grasp that technique.  He pulled his line up with broad sweeps.  My mother would anxiously instruct him “Gene, you can’t bring your line up so fast.”

To this, Gene would answer, “But, you see, it only takes a minute.”

All the while, crabs would be hanging on to Gene’s bait as if they had pushed a button on an elevator and were delighted to be heading up at such a fast pace.

Today, as I caught crabs the likes of which I haven’t seen since those days at Albejosie, I had an overwhelming urge to go back to the boat and call my baby brother.  He is, after all, the only surviving member of my immediate family.  It was imperative that I share this flashback with him because if I didn’t, I would waste an opportunity to let him know how much I love him. 

In one massive stroke, Katrina broke apart thousands of families.  They all had mothers with special recipes and fathers who would bring the net.  They had big brothers with girlfriends and little brothers who showed a new way of doing things.  My heart weeps heavily for them.  I want to personally help, something beyond a written check or a donation of blood.  Maybe we’ll just pack up the car and go to Mississippi or Louisiana.  I don’t know.  But, until then, I pray that families everywhere will focus on each other and the memories that they share.  It is, after all, the only thing that matters.