Empires Of The Crab

Asia

It had been a 30 hour trip from home. Through several airports. Thirty hours from the marshes of Maryland. We had taken off into an easterly wind, circling out over the Eastern Shore and the Chesapeake Bay. I was on the port side of the plane when she leveled, and could see down the bay. I imagined I could see Hoopers Island way down to the south. Maybe I could as we climbed. That’s where it had all started. In one of the Empires of the Crab. In the great bay, and Tar Bay, the Honga River and all the rest. Where the schooner McCready had home-ported, in whose aft-cabin Miss Leone, my grandmother, and the second Captain Augustus Phillips had created my father.

It was just down there as we climbed, just under the wing, in sight really, where Brice had sat me on the stool at the wheel of the old Gertie V and, leaving Annapolis, had told me, “Take her home, Steve.” I’d been six or seven then. Conning the Gertie V on the bay I loved. Heading for the Honga. A long time ago.

And then we’d left our home on Fishing Creek, went to another island, to Ocean City. We loved it there and we had prospered, my parents, my great brother Jeff of the unbending spirit, and me. But we had a restlessness. An irresistible desire to see what’s on the other side of the hill.

And they’d come, the emissaries from the west, from the great city at the head of the Chesapeake. ‘Come’, they’d said. ‘Come’. ‘We have a place on the harbor.’ And we had gone. It was great. But, it wasn’t enough.

And now I had flown half way around the world looking for another place where they reigned. It had been near as we began our descent over Manila Bay into the international airport. Been near when, after a short trip to Thailand, I’d caught an inter-island Philippine plane the 400 or so miles to Cebu Island, situate between the Tanoft Strait and the Camotes Sea. Now I’m sitting on the deck of an outrigger ‘pump’ boat, moving over the Visayan Sea, twenty miles or so to a special island, to Bantayan.

It’s a beautiful twilight as we approach the white beaches framed by the green of the mangroves. I look over the side into the crystal clear waters of this remote island. They are down there. I know they are down there, relatively untouched over eons of time. In their other Empire.

I can feel them, smell them. Crab. I’ve come for crab.