It’s early May, I’m sitting in a wooden shack that’s built on top of the ocean with a plate of crabs in front of me. Even though I’m from Maryland, I’ve completely forgotten how to eat them. I remember vague gestures, but the overall task is not formulizing in my brain.
After a kind stranger helps me dismember this small crustacean, I am swiftly reminded why I chose to stop eating these little things in the first place: you do so much, yet you get so little. So little.
As I looked around I saw how the heaps of discarded crab remains towered on every table. Dismembered, dissected, discarded. I felt a strange thought… ‘crabs are intelligent enough to make friends.’ and then a memory of my childhood where I tried to hide the lobsters my dad had bought for dinner that night.
I have always felt very conflicted about eating life that I did not take. On a cellular level, it feels wrong. But I was reminded that the crabbing industry in Maryland is one of the novel exports of the state and has helped prop up the economy, and make several families on the Eastern Shore very wealthy.
I didn’t know how the experience on the beach would play into this project, but I knew that I needed to honor crabs in some way. So I decided to partially mock and partially praise the crabbing industry by wearing them as a crown.
Months later I was standing on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay with a bespoke crown of crabs on my head. It was raining. The sand was completely wet. I looked out into the distance and saw the Bay Bridge. Holding still, we got the shot. I thought about how many crabs were out there right then, feasting on the stirred up ground from the rain.
