Rocky Road

I took myself to the beach the other morning. As I sat by the water, being one with my rock, I caught a movement from the corner of my eye and turned my head to see a fat black spider crawling over the log a few feet away from me. Before my brain identified the type, the thing fell off the log and disappeared between the pebbles.

I had not seen a spider like that at the beach before. It looked exactly like the one Ter described discovering in her office: a fat, chunky body and short stubby legs. Weird, that a bug seen twenty kilometres away on one day would suddenly appear in the wild a few days later. It seemed a little improbable, despite my talent for imagining things into reality.

Then I spied it again, closer this time, creeping sideways over the pebbles. How it got so far from the log so fast—wait a minute. Sideways? Spiders don’t crawl sideways … good grief, it’s not a spider! It’s a tiny little crab! And it’s not alone!

The one I’d seen first was climbing back onto the log, so there were clearly more than one of the species; three, in fact, as yet another weeny little guy was crawling a little further up the beach, slipping and sliding over rocks as big as or bigger than it was, on its way to … where?

Once convinced that I wasn’t hallucinating and they weren’t converging on me (which took a little doing, by the way), I realized that they were heading toward the water. The tide was way out, far enough to reveal a fair stretch of sand, so the crabs’ collective destination was yards away, the crawling equivalent of miles over really rough terrain. I observed the three little critters struggling up, over, and around each pebble in their path, sometimes tumbling into a shadowed recess in between, sometimes pausing (for breath?) in a patch of sun, and I thought, All they want is to reach the water before a crow or a gull spots them. They’re trying to get home, but it’s a long and rocky road.

Then I realized we’re all trying to get back to where we came from. The path is long and bumpy, part in sun, part in shadow, some uphill climbs, some sudden drops, a mix of straight lines and meandering detours, all of us aiming in the same direction and most of us unaware of it. Many of us are more concerned about evading the crows or the gulls so we lose track of where we’re headed. We all lose our way once in a while, but we’ll get there eventually.

Us and the crabs.