Early one morning in the summer of 2005, I woke up beside the steady blue flame of a hot-water heater in a basement somewhere in Baltimore. The day before I’d helped my friend move from Little Rock, Arkansas, and now there he was leaning over me, rustling my sore shoulders. “Kevin, c’mon, wake up!” he shouted with sick glee, “Crab walk! Crab walk!”

Needless to say, I had no fucking idea of what he was talking about. I mean, crab walk?

I had come to accept, however, this kind of a rousing from a man who over the past four years had so often and so unpredictably summoned me before sunup with a phone call that began not with a “Hello,” a “Good morning,” or a “Sorry to wake ya Kev…,” but instead with a maniacal laugh and a howled “Kevin, are you ready to drag a dead deer out of the woods?!” And, every time, to those woods I would go with this man, and there was always, always a sorry, dead, bleeding, gaping-mouthed deer. And, every time, he rewarded me for helping him drag that wretched carcass through the Arkansas brambles with a share of its meat. So, pretty much, I’d come to do any gruesome chore he asked of me between the hours of 5am and 7am with the expectation that I would receive weeks’ worth of wild game. You gotta eat, right?

The ride in the truck that morning in Maryland was one of those hungry, coffee-less, shiveringly cold transportations through purple dawn where nodding off is repeatedly stopped dead in its tracks when your head has just slammed against the passenger-side window because the driver doesn’t seem to think winding roads require any less speed than straight ones. (We’ve all been there, right?) Our destination this time, announced my psychotic pal, was somewhere along the Chesapeake Bay. There, he said, droves of crabs were scuttling out of the water onto the shore as if led by some sort of Pied Piper intent on making seafood bisque. As we like to say back in Arkansas, dems be ee-zee pickin’s. Where news of this good fortune came from I didn’t know – my buddy, you see, is a hunter and I’ve always assumed such things are inherently known by this class of people and that they are better off left a mystery to mere gatherers such as myself.

The sun had breeched the sky by the time our pickup rolled to a stop within viewing distance of the shore. He hopped in and out of the truck’s bed to fetch a bucket and a net and then we ran to the waterside. I was surprised to find other people there, bent over, wandering around with their own buckets and nets. But, like us, they were soon slumping with disappointment. Whatever was supposed to have happened, we’d all missed it. We couldn’t find one goddamn crab.

My friend tried to console me with a sausage, egg and cheese McMuffin, hardly the crab thermador I’d been cooking in my mind. In between mouthfuls of McDonalds he explained why crabs occasionally walk out of the water en masse. And I think he was trying to say that, inasmuch as this is a frenzied occasion for local fisherman, it might be a bad thing for crabs. Maybe he was even trying to make some larger environmental point (he’s crazy, but smart). Either way, I didn’t care. Why would I? I’d been working as a neurophysiologist for about three years and had on my hands and karma the blood of over 3,500 lab rats. Life, I had decided, was cheap and forgettable. I ordered it over the phone and executed it with a miniature guillotine. I had problems of my own, you might say, and couldn’t really give a shit if some bottom-dwelling crustaceans were being displaced from their homes.

*

About a year later I ended up giving medical school the finger. I was burned out, frustrated with the paper- and grant-machine, and tired of killing small rodents. Thinking it’d be good to get outside and breathe some fresh air, I looked into working at the New York City Farmer’s Market, and ended up presiding over an array of filleted fish at a Union Square stand run by a bayman from Long Island. Strangely, in this environment of watching people make their livelihoods from the land and the ocean, I started to care more about ecological issues and, I guess, life in general. I also became obsessed over whatever might have happened back at Chesapeake Bay that time. Why were the all those crab running from the water?

Late at night I would cruise around the online world of scientific journals looking for anything pertaining to sea life leaving the water. Finally, I turned up a mention of a “crab jubilee” in Chesapeake Bay. A jubilee, I discovered, is an event once thought to be endemic to Mobile Bay in Alabama. There, it is an odd summer phenomenon where rapid depletion of oxygen in the water forces a mass migration of all sorts of bottom dwellers to the shoreline. It happens only at night when the bay becomes a sort of temporary dead zone. Thousands of crabs have been seen marching out of the water, blowing bubbles as they try to respire. Flounder pass their upper gill flaps above the water’s surface trying to gather oxygen. Stingrays pile up on the beach like so many Frisbees washed ashore. And the eels bat their heads about on land, lapping at the air, trying to drink it in to survive. But then, when the sun rises, all of these creatures return to the depths from whence they came.

As I searched for more information I found only two scientific articles describing the spectacle, though, according to oral histories and Alabama newspaper archives, jubilees have been happening for centuries. In Mobile Bay, the buildup and decay of natural organic matter—like leaves, plants, and branches—tilts the water’s equilibrium of oxygen and hydrogen to a degree that it’s temporarily unsuitable for many types of sea creatures.

In the Chesapeake Bay, however, the situation is different because the phenomenon is new and there’s nothing natural about it. In this case, nitrogen-rich runoff from nearby farms and industrial waste are causing plankton and algae blooms, both of which remove tons of dissolved oxygen from the water when they die and decay. Matters are made worse by hot weather because the dead plants essentially cook and that uses up even more of the water’s oxygen. If you add to this mix of conditions offshore winds that blow away from the shore while the tide is rising, then the oxygenated surface water will be swept away from the coast. This creates a vacuum where the blown-away surface water is replaced by deeper waters, which have less oxygen due to the decaying organic matter. The result is a moving barrier that either traps and kills organisms or causes them to swim in search of oxygen. And, for bottom dwellers that are most often stationary creatures whose life is a game of wait and pounce, it’s the biggest move of their lives. When the sun rises, however, photosynthesis begins generating oxygen again. The dead-zone conditions vanish and the bottom dwellers return home, which is why my friend and I saw nothing at Chesapeake Bay that fateful morning.

What is most disturbing about this phenomenon is that the Chesapeake is only one of many bodies of water around the world where jubilee-like events have recently begun to be reported. That means millions of jubilee fish and crabs and squirmy things are literally smothering to death or else trying to swim themselves out of the water that is their home. It would be like if the sky in New York became so polluted that people jumped out of moving cars into the Hudson in order to try to breathe. Something is very wrong here.

Among the couple of publications I found that talk about the jubilee, Harold Loesch’s Sporadic Mass Shoreward Migrations of Demersal Fish and Crustaceans in Mobile Bay, Alabama (1960) is an interesting one. In it, the Texan oceanographer writes that he, like me, failed to actually witness a jubilee event but was able to piece together enough oral history from local residents to report that the marine animals’ behavior reminded him of the time when Deer River, a tidal stream west of Mobile Bay, had been poisoned with insecticide: “flounder were observed to slither up the banks, and the blue crabs were observed actually climbing tree stumps to escape the water.”


Elsewhere, Edwin May published Extensive Oxygen Depletion in Mobile Bay, Alabama (1973), which not only isolated the requisite conditions described above that need to occur in order for a jubilee to happen, but he also gave an account of a jubilee that he witnessed where, he said, the fish looked “depressed and moribund.” In the article cites a massive post-jubilee fish kill that included 34 species and left an estimated 10.6 million fish suffocated to death.

*

In the odd way that one’s interests evolve by following a line of research online, finding these materials led me to an intriguing sub-field of ecology where scientists study the behavior of dying organisms, with one project going as far as to create a chamber that reproduces marine habitats and then sets into motion events that lead to a dead zone in order to study the final moments of the life inside. The observers characterized these death throes as “leg movement,” “drooping,” “contraction,” or a “sustained wide gape,” in other words nothing they couldn’t have witnessed by staring at the aquarium in the window of a Chinatown restaurant.

After reading a number of these publications, I too wanted to know what suffocation was like. I asked my girlfriend to grab a pillow and press it hard into my face until my struggling dwindled to a mere twitch. Though she declined my offer, she did agree to hold my arms down after my roommate—who I owe a couple hundred bucks for months’ worth of unpaid bills—jumped at the chance. The following is a description of what it feels like from beginning to end.

For a few moments you involuntarily still try to breathe with all your might even though you know you can’t, thus sapping most of your diaphragm’s strength. Then you open your mouth to scream but nothing comes out. Sweat trickles into your ear. Negative pressure in your chest, throat and nose is countered by a tightening of your abs and quadriceps. Your toes crumple and you kick outward like a frog. At a certain point you begin to feel swollen and heavy all over, except in your head—your head is somehow buzzing, high now, and then your neck starts to slack to let its muscles loosen as if your brain above has given up fighting even as the rest of your body still wants to live.

When the pillow was taken away, cool air hit my mouth, throat and lungs like a slap across the face. I didn’t know how close I’d come to suffocating, but the room was all aglitter. When I could speak again the three of us sat around for a while retelling our stories of almost drowning, of friends who had gotten trapped in house fires, and of the fainting game we used to play at school during recess. It’s the one where children purposely deprive themselves of oxygen in order to feel light-headed and high-ish. In Arkansas we called it Indian Head Rush or Black Boxing; my roommate called it Bum Rushing; my girlfriend says her friends called it Speed Dreaming or Trip to Heaven. Pretty soon I was on the Internet looking up synonyms for the fainting game and I came up with everything from Hoola Hooping to Groobling to Rising Sun. I also was reminded of the erotic – sometimes autoerotic – overtones of strangulation and suffocation in our culture.

All of this seemed like strange, self-injurious, activity. (Come to think of it, so did my asking to be almost suffocated). Humans have – perhaps unreasonably or even foolishly – been tasked with the responsibility of caring for ourselves and, also, all the other species on Earth. And here we are Groobling and waiting for miserable fish to crawl out of the water and right into our nets. So too do we create unfathomable amounts of waste and dump it wherever is most convenient. Recently, at a conference on the overall challenge of conserving biological diversity on a planet that is increasingly crowded with humans, a marine biologist from Dalhousie University in Canada named Boris Worm had something to say on this topic; he concluded that humans should “at least stop doing the really dumb things.”

Afterwards, I asked him specifically about jubilee events. “Much of it relates to the superabundance of nutrients in land run-off,” he said, “some of it is related to a changing climate. I don’t think we will see the whole ocean turn oxygen depleted anytime soon, but the increasing trend in these events is very worrisome.”

One thing is for sure, though, says Dr. Worm. “We cannot use the ocean as a dumping ground anymore, and must become more intelligent in what we put into and what we take out of the ocean. “

I wonder, though, if we can rise to that challenge: if it isn’t more likely that one night there will be a jubilee in waters around the world, one that even photosynthesis won’t reverse. Before dawn on countless shores people will spot a growing bruise of crabs, eels, and flounder, suffocating on the beach. We’ll all run down with buckets, ice chests, nets and gigs. That day we will feast, and maybe we will even stock the freezer for a month. But then that will be the finale, and our jubilation will soon end too.

Kevin Bay researched the development of dream-sleep, publishing in The Journal of Applied Physiology, Neuroscience, and Sleep, before moving to New York to become a fishmonger.

Matt Richtards is an artist born in the barren wasteland of northwest Ohio. Visit www.matthewrichtards.com, www.youtube.com/richtards, and mattrichtards.blogspot.com to gain insight on other adventures. He currently resides in the wasteland of “Bushwick” Brooklyn, New York.

Copyright Last Exit 2009