The Short Memory of the Stone Crabber
/By Jason Katz
Toddlers and tourists lay out a carpet of petals from tropical flowers along the dock behind the Everglades Rod and Gun Club. Two preachers stand at one end. On the verandah behind them, a young girl sings to a karaoke version of “Can’t Help Falling In Love.” A crowd idles about in the late September heat, conserving energy and seeking shade. Everyone is in Everglades City for the Blessing of the Stone Crab Fleet, an annual event that heralds the beginning of the crabbing season.
Stone crabbing is an essential industry for Everglades City, and an integral part of Florida’s tourism machine. It contributes approximately $30 million dollars a year to the economy. Stone crabs brought into the dock here end up hours later on the plates of diners on Miami Beach, and in boxes shipped around the country on dry ice. Although the crabs may travel thousands of miles, the crabbing industry is intensely local and compromised of crabbing dynasty, undocumented workers, and a good deal of Southern lore. Today, the community is facing an increasingly common threat: warming waters and rising seas.
The first boats appear from behind a bend in the Barron River. The boats are mostly the same size and shape – some a little more dated than others, and some have turquoise trimmings instead of brown. They have names like “Slim Pickins” and “Strictly Busine$$.”
Among the crab crews are some undocumented Central American immigrants. These men make a decent living, despite the ever-present risk of being detained if the Coast Guard stops the boat they work on for any reason. One tells me he spent six months in prison. But they all agree they’d rather be crabbing than doing farm work in Immokalee like their peers. The pay is better, and they enjoy the work. One shares a story — with supporting smartphone video — of getting a leg caught in a line and being pulled overboard. His friend describes a handful of traps together as an enlace de salchicha, sausage links. These are the men who tie the boats off on the dock.
There’s another crew on land, unmoored from the business of crabbing. Young, tattooed, and wearing cutoff black denim shorts, leather boots, they push their expensive cameras through the crowd to capture the preachers marching down the dock.
Spritzing holy water on the bow of each boat, the pastors chant, “May the harvest be bountiful.” The locals don’t notice the film crew. People in Everglades City are used to being ogled.
Teala Stokes is a sixth-generation Everglades City native. She works as a waitress at the Camelia Street Grill. Her father and brother are crabbers. They own “Mine and Yours,” one of the boats among the blessed fleet. Stokes moved to Los Angeles for four years to work as a production assistant on the HBO show “Big Little Lies” before moving back home.
“I had filmmaker friends who wanted to come down here and get out on the crab boats, but my dad wasn’t into it,” she says. Stokes came home because she “couldn’t imagine raising children anywhere else besides Everglades City.” Asked about the prospect of raising children in a hurricane-vulnerable environment, Stokes shrugs her shoulders.
Stokes isn’t the only one who reacts this way to the specter of hurricanes and other climate events. Captain Richard Collins Sr. stands on the deck of his boat, “High Cotton.” At midnight, he and his crew will set out to drop their first traps of the season. In 10 days, the season will open, and they can retrieve the traps for the first time. Collins says he notices the water getting warmer but sees no connection between that and his business. To him, crabbing is a cyclical business, with some years being better than others. I ask if he believes the sea level is rising, and he replies, “Shit, no! I mean, yeah, it rises, but then it goes back down. It’s called high tide and low tide. Doesn’t matter to me anyway. Let it flow. I’d just as soon live in a Chickee Hut with no air conditioning.”
Richard Collins, Sr. hauling traps onto the High Cotton
But warming waters and ocean acidification have affected the stone crab industry. Over the last 20 years, the mean commercial stone crab haul has gone down by almost a million pounds. A study from the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, funded partially by proceeds from “Save the Reef” vanity license plates, shows that elevated ocean acidification and water temperatures will decrease stone crab survivorship by 150 to 200 percent moving forward.
Jean Baudrillard writes, “When you come out of the Mojave, it is difficult to see less than 15 miles ahead of you.” If spending time in the desert makes somebody farsighted, what happens to a swamp dweller? Can an Everglades native see only what is right in front of them?
Despite adverse natural conditions, history may provide hope for the folks of Everglades City. Not that they’re asking. In his book The Gulf, author Jack Davis writes about the area’s indigenous tribe, the Calusa. Davis writes how the coastal dwellers “were wise to natural conditions … and elevated their houses above tidal and expected storm surges, and up where breezes might knock back biting insects.” As the Calusa built homes on mounds of crustacean shells, many homes in Everglades City are stilted today.
Another storm-surge innovation can be found at the historic Everglades Rod and Gun Club, where the ocean rose eight feet over the seawall during Hurricane Irma. In the lobby are places in the Dade County-pine floor where a circle appears to be cut out. According to the owners of the century-old structure, this is where they let the water drain out after a hurricane. There are other circles from hurricanes past.
Everglades City is home to resilient people. But resilience is odd, especially in the context of climate change. When a population is described as resilient, it might be assumed that they are able to endure more, and thus shouldn’t be cared for as much. The folks of Everglades City are indifferent to sympathy.
“When FEMA came down after Irma,” Collins says, “I told them that I wouldn’t beg them for shit. But that I also wouldn’t turn down anything they offered.”
Collins son, Richard Jr., reports that 2017 was a great year for crabbing.
“The price was good, demand was high,” he says. “It’s funny though. We have short memories.”
The Blessing of the Fleet was not held that year.
Cliff Weeks standing on the gunwale of the Karen Sue
Stone crabbers say rough waters lead to a better haul. The claim was first made by Totch Brown, the self-proclaimed inventor of modern stone crabbing. His claim is corroborated by Cliff Weeks, a deckhand on Collins Jr.’s boat, the “Karen Sue.” Weeks is at the dock on the opening day of the season, displaying the boat’s catch. Two hundred pounds. More than on opening day of 2018, when they only came home with one hundred and forty.
“People were complaining today that it seemed thin out there,” Weeks says. “I tell them to just wait for a storm to kick up the sand. When the sand gets kicked up, the crabs come out of hiding, and that’s when we trap them.” According to a 2018 article in Fisheries Research, stress makes crustaceans change their behavior, to avoid predators and to seek refuge.
This bodes well for Everglades locals, who are not unlike the stone crabs: often in danger, but comfortable in rough weather and resilient when the environment changes.