My beautiful wife Chris impresses me everyday. She possesses what, in Maine, is known as "Moxie" and she shows it in a lovely feminine manner that just floors me. I was first made aware of this on a very memorable day:One of my favorite things about a trip to Delaware to visit Donald and Chris (besides staring at Chris on the beach) was the crab feed. Hot crabs and cold beer on the picnic table covered in newspaper, doesn't get much better than that! But first you needed to get the crabs. This was done by dropping your crab trap with an old chicken neck tied inside for bait into known crab waters.
For this hunting trip, we took their canoe down to the channels around Lewes. We set out with Donald at the helm sitting (high up) on the stern thwart and Chris and I sitting on the bottom of the canoe pulling in the traps and dumping the catch into a bushel basket between us.
It was a great day to be out and the crabbing was excellent. Then Chris pulled up her trap and when emptying the catch into the basket, one fell on the floor of the boat. This was perhaps the largest, most ferocious crab either of them had ever seen. I looked down and saw this creature coming straight towards me at full crab speed, it's arms wide apart it's claws snapping and it's beady eyes looking straight at me with one thing in mind: Revenge!
Now, all of you that have been in a canoe can understand the rather cramped quarters. There is no place to run and I am sitting there about to be chewed to the bone by this savage animal. In my brain I am running down my list of options: I could scream and flail about wildly and reveal to Chris the wimp that I am. I could scream and flail about wildly and capsize the canoe dumping all of us into that murky, crab infested water and be hated by them forever or, I could just "take one for the team" and hope it didn't hurt too bad.
In the split second I had left to make a decision, Chris reached over, grabbed the crab and tossed it back into the basket with a "you get back in there". I was impressed then and even more impressed today.
