“While I was out, in the trade we call it “cruising” timber, it’s where you go out and you estimate the volume and the value of the wood. So to do that, you walk a very regulated grid through the forest, and every so many feet you stop and you take a sample point. And I’d marked my point with a stick. And when I jammed my stick down into the ground, I just happened to look down and I just barely missed a blue crab. There was a blue crab swimming around at my feet in the middle of a timber cruise, which made me shake my head.

And in all honesty, you normally don’t find blue crabs that far from the main part of the water either, you know? So that told me a bunch of things. One, that crab had become accustomed to the water laying in those woods for that long that he felt very confident in crawling around and making his living in those woods.” ”