ON THE BEACH
Swept up in a beachcomber gold rush on P.E.I.’s terracotta
beaches, we prospect feverishly for the mighty sand dollar
with one ‘buck’ already in the bank— while up ahead, a gull
bullies a hapless crab, savaging it with her jabbing beak, yanking
it, flipping it onto its back in a stark wild-kingdom cinéma verité…
And then, mouthful of appendages clamped like clothespins in her bill
and bomb-laden with the cumbersome cargo, she lumbers herself airborne…
where, at an altitude of twenty feet, some of the string-bean, plastic, Legos
legs pop their joints and then... it's 'Bombs away!' for our little Buster Crab
who bounces off the beach-head below with a carapace-jarring thump!
Whereupon this gull, this Jackie the Ripperess, this Angel
of Death, descends with deadly finality upon her victim’s
now much-handicapped gesticulations-- when…
“Here I come to save the day! That means
that Mighty Mouse is on the way!”
Later, cradled in my cupped palms, our reclaimed-but-crippled
crustacean bogarts me his best grimace, a wink, a tip of the hat, a
brave thumbs-up… and then with a ker-plunk, I sink him like a stone
back into the safety of the salty surf to live another day to regale his
future grandcrabs with his tall tale of the fantastic flight over the sand
...and of that rescue he’ll never tire of re-telling…
Swept up in a beachcomber gold rush on P.E.I.’s terracotta
beaches, we prospect feverishly for the mighty sand dollar
with one ‘buck’ already in the bank— while up ahead, a gull
bullies a hapless crab, savaging it with her jabbing beak, yanking
it, flipping it onto its back in a stark wild-kingdom cinéma verité…
And then, mouthful of appendages clamped like clothespins in her bill
and bomb-laden with the cumbersome cargo, she lumbers herself airborne…
where, at an altitude of twenty feet, some of the string-bean, plastic, Legos
legs pop their joints and then... it's 'Bombs away!' for our little Buster Crab
who bounces off the beach-head below with a carapace-jarring thump!
Whereupon this gull, this Jackie the Ripperess, this Angel
of Death, descends with deadly finality upon her victim’s
now much-handicapped gesticulations-- when…
“Here I come to save the day! That means
that Mighty Mouse is on the way!”
Later, cradled in my cupped palms, our reclaimed-but-crippled
crustacean bogarts me his best grimace, a wink, a tip of the hat, a
brave thumbs-up… and then with a ker-plunk, I sink him like a stone
back into the safety of the salty surf to live another day to regale his
future grandcrabs with his tall tale of the fantastic flight over the sand
...and of that rescue he’ll never tire of re-telling…
