Another year is coming to a close. I’m post-call on a brilliantly warm Saturday morning, for the one of the last times in my foreseeable life. Jane and I load our prepared bag of snacks, iced tea, and coffee into the car, and take off for another brief sojourn across the Bay Bridge, joining the parade of beach traffic that stretches from Annapolis to Ocean City all summer long. We return to the same destination as our last trip to Delaware - the shores of Delaware Bay at Slaughter Beach. After our failure in 2018 to see any more than a few scattered horseshoe crab carcasses, we’re determined, this time, to get things right. We’re visiting on the night of full moon in May, the spring tide is set to reach its peak just after sunset, and we’ve booked a room just minutes from the beach. I’ve brought everything a Californian wouldn’t wear to the beach: long pants, long socks, long-sleeved windbreaker, and bug spray. This time, nothing - not time, not tiredness, not even the omnipresent swarms of no-see-ums - will stop us from seeing the horseshoe crabs’ annual spawning ritual.
After a pit stop at the Arby’s Restaurant in Milford (a true post-call meal at 2 PM: beef brisket sandwiches, potato cakes, and an orange cream soda), we drive the last few minutes to the outskirts of town, where we turn off the highway and onto the narrow road toward Slaughter Beach. Down a neat gravel driveway and past a herd of grazing bay roans, we arrive at our home for the night: Iona Stables and Inn - a delightful bed-and-breakfast run by Robert and Linda, whose house sits between acres of open wheat fields and stands of loblolly pine. On the driveway, we pass by our hosts (on their way out to a wedding Robert is ministering), who tell us to make ourselves at home. After perusing the premises, we let ourselves in through the side door and up the stairs to our second-story bedroom. I take an afternoon nap while Jane goes back out for a meet and greet with the horses.
When I awaken a few hours later, the late afternoon sun is cascading through the bedroom windows in great, golden beams. From our room, I can see the house’s backyard, such as it were, basking in the light; cast upon it are the long, side-lit shadows of the oak trees circling the farmhouse, and, beyond them, the sinuous curve of Slaughter Creek as it winds eastward through ever-larger marsh guts and channels, to its point of union with the sea. Pulling on my clothes, I go downstairs and walk through the warm, quiet house; Jane is still out with the horses at the stable. I take my time, examining the portraits and hunting trophies on the wall, trying to absorb the feeling of the place, its beauty and its solitude. Outside, I set up at the edge of the wheat field with my tripod, taking stacked exposures of the field with brilliant blue bachelor’s buttons (cornflowers) in the foreground. After only a few short minutes, the sun drops below the treeline, the flowers fall into shadow, and the gorgeous light disappears.
I walk over to Jane, who is busily trying to lure horses to the fence by waving her hands and saying equestrian things, such as “Come here, you!” “I wish I had an apple. Do horses like apples?” Jane asks. “I’m not sure why they wouldn’t,” I say. “I think he fancies me,” Jane says of a tawny chestnut who looks up in her direction for a second before continuing to graze. “Uh-huh,” I say as I walk back toward the house and away from the shouts. “Come here! Horse!”
Back in the car, we make the short drive to Slaughter Beach to scope out the surroundings. We park in almost the same spot as we did last June, in the lot across from the community’s dusky brick firehouse. On the shoreline, a few families with children are playing in the sand. The wrack line is covered by its usual debris - kelp, bones, and a few crab shells - but no live horseshoes yet. The sun is sinking toward the horizon behind us, but there is a still an easy hour until dark (and we’ve forgotten our brown paper bag of Arby’s sandwiches for dinner, anyways), so we decide to head back to the farm to watch sunset over the marsh channel.
At the creek, we are joined by another guest at the inn - a birder from Washington’s National Zoo, who is also here for the weekend - to see the horseshoes, yes, he says, but mainly to see the red knots that feed on horseshoe eggs and tend to arrive in force during the spawning run. The migratory birds’ population has plummeted in the past few decades, he says, in large part due to human pressure on the horseshoe crabs, which are harvested by the fishing industry for use as bait, and by the pharmaceutical industry for a protein in their blood, which is used in medical assays. The nice thing about birders, I remember, is that they almost exclusively listen rather than talk. We stand together in silence, enjoying the slow summer sunset. Sweet birdsong. The wind rustling through the trees. The hum of mosquitoes. He spots a yellow-throated vireo and a whimbrel, while I take photos of the canoe at the water’s edge.
As sky grows dark and the colors in the clouds begin to fade, Jane and I bid the man farewell. We return upstairs to grab our drinks and our food before setting out once again for Slaughter Beach.
Back at the beach parking lot, a crowd is gathering in earnest for the horseshoe crabs’ annual show; there can be no other reason for so many to be arriving at an unlit beach at 9 PM on a Saturday night. Jane and I munch on our dinner while people-watching from our car. We play a game that only Asians are any good at - guessing the nationality of other Asians based on their appearance alone (I’m 3-for-3, we discover later when we hear them speaking Japanese on the beach). After polishing off the last of our roast beef sandwiches and potato cakes, Jane and I don our headlamps and cross the street to the beach. I’m carrying my tripod and covered from head to toe (with the exception of my fingers, which get nibbled to oblivion over the course of the night).
At first, there does not seem to be much going on. Slaughter Beach, one long, straight stretch of sand bordered by wildlife refuges in the middle of the Delaware Bay, appears quiet and deserted, like any other Atlantic beach at night. The moon, perfectly round and blood-red, is rising over the ocean to our southeast. Then, we begin to see them. Limulus polyphemus. Shapes at first, silhouettes bobbing in the surf, easy to mistake for a bundle of kelp or a stone caught in the breakers. But then, it becomes unmistakable - the stones are not stones, and there are dozens or hundreds of them. With each receding waves, we catch a glimpse of more and more circular bodies surging onto shore, their dark forms emerging from just below the surface. The high tide deposits them at the water’s edge - some right-side-up, perfectly round, their carapaces covered by limpets and barnacles and looking every bit as ancient as the trilobites of the early Cambrian; and some upside-down, their undersides and gills exposed, thrashing wildly in the surf, desperately attempting to right themselves with their long, pointed tails. For the most part, the flipped crabs eventually recover, often with help from the incoming tide. Jane takes pity on one or two that have been struggling for some time (this is, after all, the sexiest, most important night of their lives), and flips them by hand or with a nudge of the foot; they land in the soft, wet sand with a plop and go sliding off to find a mate, tails swishing back and forth behind them.
As we walk up and down the beach, this same drama plays out every few feet; as far as the eye can see, horseshoe crabs are emerging from the ocean, their hard shells piled atop one another and shimmering under the moonlight. Ditching my tripod, I dash in and out of the surf with my camera’s ISO cranked up to a blistering level; Jane lights each patch of crabs with her headlamp and watches for oncoming waves while I stoop down for a shot. It is a truly unique phenomenon, and exhausting to photograph - but, I tell myself, not nearly as exhausting as crawling from the depths of the ocean to mate and spawn in a single night. Not even a call night in the hospital could compare to that.
The next morning, I go outside to watch the sun rise over the wheat fields. Robert and Linda serve a hearty breakfast of fresh berries, crispy bacon, and scrambled eggs with mushrooms before we drive back to Baltimore in light Sunday traffic. Embarrassingly, I forget my wedding band at Iona and am ringless on the next day, the day of our second wedding anniversary - but Robert is kind enough to locate it and put it in the mail immediately, and all is well before the end of the week.
