There was a creek behind our house. Looking back, it was more of a drainage ditch that has since been covered in cement and turned into a culvert. But for us, it was a natural wonder. This was not a group of kids who got to visit Yellowstone or Glacier National Park each summer! It was a place to ice skate and play a very linear form of ice hockey in the winter, a place to build tree forts along the banks, and a place to dream of starting adventures that would lead to faraway places.
In that creek lived many wonderful creatures. Among them, and probably largely limited to only these, were snakes and crabs. I really don’t know if they were officially crabs, but they had pincers, and that’s what we called them. A lot of people near the Texas Gulf Coast where I live now eat creatures that look a lot like these did. This is probably not only a better use for them than described below but may, in fact, even be more humane.
About the same time that we were in the early stages of experimenting with launching ourselves off structures in attempts to parachute to the earth, we were also using the handkerchiefs our moms forced us to carry in our pockets as parachutes for smaller, non-human items, like toy lead soldiers we made in our basements. In retrospect, this creative work with lead may explain some of our behavior. These parachutes were very simple to construct. The handkerchief would have light strings tied to each corner, and then the lead toy soldier would be fastened to the free end of each of the four strings. The strings would be wrapped loosely around the toy and the handkerchief, and the whole thing would be thrown high in the air or dropped from a tree. With practice, these worked pretty well.
It occurred to us that with slightly larger pieces of cloth, like those cut from an old sheet, we could conduct transitional experiments between the proven results already obtained with the toy soldiers and our dreams of parachuting ourselves—much like NASA would eventually use chimps in the space program. Sadly, there were no chimps living by the creek behind our homes, but it seemed to us that the small crabs we were pulling out of the creek were just the right size.
Surprisingly, it’s not that easy tying four strings around an unwilling crab without getting pinched, and the snapping of the crab on your fingers severely limits the quality of the toss. While the personal sacrifices were great, there were some limited technical successes in that, on the very best combinations of throws and perfect wrapping of the strings around the cloth, some crabs would fall back to the ground noticeably slower than others.
After the experiments, the crabs were all released back into the creek, where the stories of their bravery and historical significance are probably still repeated by their descendants, living much less exciting lives under the cement culvert covering their creek.
Bob Marksteiner was born in Chicago and grew up in Franklin Park, Illinois
