On the Hermit Crab / Theodore Engelhardt

All along this Pacific strand of Costa Rica, there are great multitudes of hermit crabs. I often see them swarming an old sandy mango the tide carried in, or under the almond trees, crowding the rotting almond-fruits, or going singly across relatively colossal expanses, seeking who knows what, or battling over shells—just a few days ago, I found a great host of hermit crabs waiting in impatient disorder around a large hermit crab closely inspecting an unoccupied shell. Some 3 minutes after I’d begun to observe this festival, that large hermit crab made so swiftly the daring swap—lifted his soft anterior from one shell & immediately set it inside the other. It was only a glimpse that I was afforded.
I get much enjoyment, as I walk along the beach, stretching or restricting my stride, so that with my big toe I press their shells into the sand. They can sense me coming, and just as I arrive, they retract into their shells, with a quick movement, such as the many surfers make, to roll under their boards and avoid being crushed by a breaking wave. The trouble with this hiding is that one is never sure when to come back out; surfers (and bathers also) may often rise from the still-troubled surface to meet instantly with another wave. So too do the hermit crabs often resume their scuttling too soon, & I press them again gently into the sand.
Recently a local boy taught me the technique of blowing on the exposed claws & legs of a hiding hermit crab to get them to come out. Strangely this technique has had almost universal success with me—and then one may carefully tug the hermit crab free of its shell, to observe the odd, belegged little swirl of soft flesh. Yesterday, having had an awful birthday, my wife suggested that we go and pull a hermit crab out of its shell. We assayed several tenacious individuals, until we felt they’d been molested overmuch, and then we sought another to pester. We were being extremely gentle, for the same local boy told us that it was possible to rip the crab in half, if it holds too tightly. Fortunately our fourth or fifth subject wore a shell which was not so strongly volute, leaving the uropod but little to grasp; this one removed so easily, that I initially thought I had ripped him in half by mistake. What odd and tender little whorls of flesh they hide in those shells—what an odd little finger is an uropod—what a pitiful little panic an exposed hermit crab displays! They’re grotesque! I tried to put him back into his shell, but he was too startled to take it, and I had merely to leave him alone.
I also, for experimentation, set the hermit crabs in my belly button, and waited for them to run away. Thus came I to comprehend a certain recklessness in this creature’s personality; for they inevitably ran across my stomach to the edge of me, tucked into their shells, bore the fall, which was some half-meter high, and went on running in the sand. I can think of few things more charming than this kind of considered carelessness of the hermit crab, which is to some extent the result of the shell he wears. (We are no different; I make frequent risks, for example, social or otherwise, on the grounds that, if I end by falling, I may at any rate hide myself in my Aelian, and take no serious harm).
But their temperaments do differ on the individual basis: there are those who categorically do not emerge from their shells when I blow; those that do; and those that emerge like fools, unprovoked—and then, under each of these categories, there are three more: those that seek only to escape the peeled rambutan I offer; those that pick twice or thrice at it before escaping; and those that seem to see nothing of existence any longer save the rambutan. This third type I can trust, when I let his shell go, to remain atop the ripe fruit, twice his size, exerting his minute push and pull at the sweet stringy flesh, to rip it—a most logical response, I think, to encountering a fruit twice one’s size. There is, then, at least one reasonable hermit crab among them.
I will make one last observation. When my mind puts on the hermit crab, initially I find that I am dragging my shelled & prone posterior by my arms—as if I were simply crawling across the floor, with my legs tucked into in a box or a large vase. This is a great inaccuracy of the imagination, however, for the hermit crab’s lateral posture must be as comfortable to him as my own uprightness is to me, or likely moreso, given the great universality of such a posture in nature, a time-honored bearing from which we alone are exempt. Still it is an enjoyable riddle of empathy, to untangle such imaginative knots—and I find it a strenuous and health-giving exercise, to attempt to force my mind to experience that proneness as naturally and comfortably as it does this uprightness.

Theodore Engelhardt is a Pennsylvanian poet living in Costa Rica, and working remotely. He is working on a “great Medieval compendium” of literary sketches of plants and animals, entitled respectively “The Herbarium” and “The Bestiary.”