Of shallow waters and our true natures

This is a linguist-in-chief Anne-Michelle Tessier guest post. Excitingly, there are other linguists in this one. Having only ever known one main linguist my entire life, if ever I encounter a new linguist in the wild, I ask them if they know AMT. I don’t know if she is famous or their leader or just a really social person, but a lot of them they do know her. Of course, a lot of people just hanging around Toronto know AMT too. Really, it’s a reasonable question to ask anyone you meet, if so inclined. In this post, the leader of the linguists is named Chris, who sounds like an interesting fellow. I guess the mantle can be shared.

A very low tide came to the waters of the Georgia Straits on May 1^st this year, reaching their zenith of 0.43m at 3:07pm PDT. I am slightly hazy on what that depth means, objectively… but what it meant practically is that where usually there are kilometers of Pacific water along Spanish Banks just north of campus, there were instead long, long stretches of dark squishy sand and exposed paddling pools, reaching seemingly all the way across to the North Shore mountains and up to the sky. Had you been there, you would have seen me and a handful of linguists, walking for nearly an hour out into the impossibly shallow waves, on and on like frustrated Ladies of Shallot (and Gentlemen too), carrying a rather implausible assortment of unromantic nets, folded wire contraptions and buckets. We had sunscreen, government licenses, chilled fish guts and a mission. We were hunting for crabs.

Indeed – we caught some! I had the luck to scoop one up that was big enough and male enough to be legally kept, and so it left my net and joined a bucket carried by Chris, a syntax professor and seasoned crabbing enthusiast. The crab slowly fussed with its claws, hopefully unaware of its eventual date with that night’s boiling dinner pot. When we finally reached the end of the shallows, and felt the ground dropping off steeply (into the trench through which shipping containers and city-sized cruise ships ultimately pass into the Port of Vancouver): we laid out the wire traps, about the size of a picnic basket, baited them with bits of last season’s salmon, took up their long nylon strings, and waited for instruction. Chris narrated his demonstration of the technique: “You walk out until you are too afraid, you make sure you’re holding one end with no tangles, and then”—here he swung up the trap above his head, lassoed it around in a few vigorous circles, and threw it out into the deeps. We followed suit, to varying degree of success, and then stood around knee deep trying not to sink into the sand, watching seals bob up and down in the waves, holding tight to our little strings.

A couple minutes into the waiting we saw movement behind us, and Chris suddenly ran back to our pile of equipment on the nearest sandbank. While a student hurried to pick up his trapline, I saw his reason for bolting: a couple bouncy black labs, out for a rollick on the suddenly oversized beach, had sniffed out our stash of salmon bait. Happily the cooler had stayed closed, and all that was lost were some doggy dreams of luxurious fish snacks. Both the dogs and their owners seemed quite pleased with the detour when they caught up with us. “What are you catching? … Crabs, really??” They seemed as impressed as we ourselves were with this endeavour.

Over the course of the afternoon our group caught seven keep-able crabs (two with nets and five with traps), and the joint lab members had a terrific dinner. But: I did not follow the group indoors, for the scrubbing and cleaning and boiling and picking. I do really love the taste of fresh crab and I can only imagine these were fantastic. I have not become anything like a vegetarian, yet; I would eat crab at a restaurant without qualms. And yet—I felt that I did not want to be an active part of the boiling and eating of the crabs we caught.

To some people this is especially hypocritical—that I will enjoy the fruits of other people’s killing but not want to be involved myself—and while I know my own rationale, I won’t digress into that justification here. But I do find myself thinking back at the happy, happy dogs and the salmon guts, and thinking about how close to or far from nature we all of us are.  Something about a dog bounding along a beach, wet fur spraying and ear flaps flying, seems so pure, so innocent and joyful. But those same dogs (I can assert with extensive experience) would love nothing more than to bound into a pile of decaying corpses, roll directly into the muck of dead and rotting flesh, and leap up again to lick your face covered in ocean filth of the most putrescent description. I cannot even describe to you the anatomical detritus from former raccoons and rats that Bagel has urgently, passionately ground into her neck floof before I could stop her… And she still to me is the purest, most precious soul. I kind of wish I could have fed her and Howard that crab I caught, actually.

Low tide will be back in a couple weeks, though not quite as extreme. I hope to take the dogs out at an hour when it’s quiet, to rampage along the shore and out towards the sea. I hope they manage to not find anything dead. I hope nature keeps coming back to me, in whatever capacity I am ready for it.

Possibly I’ll buy crab cakes for dinner.