Wild Things - The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House - page 199

The more time we spent working in our Vieques garden, the more we realized just how
bound together land and sea can be on a Caribbean island.
One particularly hot afternoon I was unspooling the hose, to water the plants at the far
end of the terrace, when I spotted an unfamiliar sight—a large shell stuck to the exterior wall
of the house.
Who put it there , I wondered, and how did they attach it?
Idly I reached over to pull it off but it wouldn't budge. Then, very slowly, it began to
move.
Which got my attention.
As I watched its glacial progress up the wall it dawned on me that I was looking at a
hermit crab and that, unbelievable as this fact might seem, it was actually trying to “flee the
scene.” Its presence on our porch, a couple of miles from the ocean, boggled my mind.
But what to do about it? I certainly didn't want to hurt or upset it in any way, but at the
same time I didn't want it crawling through the window and attaching itself to my face, Ali-
en -style, at two in the morning.
So I pried it very carefully from the wall and, after taking an admiring look at its bright
red body and the way it had arranged itself so snugly in its stolen home, I ambled downstairs
and laid it in the thick grass in our side garden, crab-side down.
The fact that it didn't immediately scuttle away didn't worry me—as I had already seen,
it was incapable of anything remotely resembling scuttling.
But when it was still loitering in the same spot an hour later I became moderately con-
cerned. And when it was still there at dusk I became downright distraught.
Had I committed crabicide?
Racked with guilt all evening, I decided not to tell Michael what I'd done. I felt sure he'd
call the humane society and have me hauled away in cuffs. I was just glad he didn't suggest
shellfish for dinner.
And when I rushed to the balcony the next morning I was hugely relieved to see that
my crab friend had disappeared. Clearly it had found its bearings and discovered some new
surface to cling to.
With a contented sigh, I stumbled back inside to pour my first cup of coffee. All was
right in the crab world.
But after a few sips an even more ominous thought occurred to me. What if a dog had
eaten it?
Or an iguana?
And although I couldn't actually imagine such a hard and intractable creature making
much of a meal, one never knew. Lobsters, for example, don't look all that enticing at first
glance either.