Out of Place

I suffered a vicious attack yesterday.

Okay.  Maybe not all that vicious.  And maybe attack is far too strong a word.

The whole event started when Kim, Lindsey, and I sat talking inside our beachside villa.  At that time, I happened to catch something of an odd movement on the elevated pool deck just outside the nearest window.   There, I thought I saw a fallen leaf very slowly skitching across the tiles, but moving in the exact opposite direction from which the wind was blowing.

Odd.

I looked a bit closer.  “I think there is a hermit crab out there by the pool,” I said to the girls.

I left the girls and stepped outside to investigate.   Sure enough, once I reached the deck I found a hermit crab laboriously clunking across the tiles.

“How in the heck did you get up here?” I asked the crab.  Our pool is completely elevated on a deck that is easily two feet above the sandy white beach in front of it.

The crab answered by vanishing away inside his shell with one final clunk.

“Well, I would say you are bit out of place here,” I told the crab.  With that, I picked him (her?) up by the shell for an expedited trip back to the beach.

That’s when the attack occurred.

Again, not so much an attack as a pinching tickle.  Maybe more like a crab feel-me-up.  And, by the way, hermit crabs have in inordinate number of legs—ten if you really do some close counting.

Even given the hermit crab’s resistance, I managed to carry the thing back to the beach for safe release under a coconut tree.

Fortunately, I had the foresight to document the entire event with my smarter-than-me-phone so I can share a few images of that here today.

—Mitchell Hegman