by Walter Agnew Moore II
6 June 2002, Amiens, France

You know, you can sell bugs and snails and anything else that crawls creeps or slithers to people, and they will eat it, no, they will PAY to eat it. All you have to do first is say it comes from the ocean.

I am sitting in the shade on a hot day contemplating the enormous heap of mollusks and arthropods in front of me. I have ordered the "Platter of the Fruits of the Sea" here in this pretty little seaside town of Le Crotoy.

Good God. This crab on top is as big as a puppy. Yep, those are oysters, but what are these? How many snails do I have? At least a dozen big ones, and several handfuls of small ones. And that thing...

Back to my point: Let's start with the shrimp. I love shrimp. I have eaten them all my life. Because I was given shrimp as a child, I still eat shrimp. I would gag on grasshopper, but I bet it tastes the same. I was not given grasshopper to eat. But what is shrimp if not sea-grasshopper?

Aw, don't pop off that "reason" about the number of legs being different. I was in 5th grade biology too. You know you don't count the legs when you are eating shrimp. You just eat it.

Why? Because it's seafood.

Don't believe me? I bet you like calamares. I know I do. Now imagine some type of squid that lived on land instead of in the sea. Would you even touch this slimy land-squid, much less fry it up? Of course not. You'd pick it up on a stick and chase your sister with it, but you'd never eat it.

It's not seafood.

I sip my beer. I imagine that I am the US Ambassador to some benighted tribe that has just served me up a Meal of Horrors, and I must enjoy it or else offend my hosts. I go straight for the big crab on top.

My great-grandfather started out as a blacksmith and ended up as a dentist. A little skinny guy with really strong hands, the kind you need for hammering iron or prying open jaws. I don't know what to do with most of the tools they gave me, but I inherited the hands. I twist and tear, crack and pop shells and claws. Meat!

"Check out old Henry the Eighth there", observes Chrissa to Steph.

"Did I splatter you with crab-bits?"

"No, not much," says Steph.

They have steaks. We drove here together in a rented blue Fiat Punto. I slurp down raw oysters. It helps if I imagine that I am drunk. Chrissa shows me how to stab the snails in the head with a pin and pull them out of the shell. They are sort of like curly earthworms with crunchy bits inside.

"My uncle back in Maine used to sit there and eat periwinkles and drink black coffee," she grimaces.

It is an hour later and the big plastic bowl in front of me is full of dismembered scraps and shells. I am working on my boiled shrimp, I saved them for last. There is a very tangy lemon sauce I am dipping them in. We are commenting on the various tourists who have filled up the terrace. The waiter wears a grim mask of over-work.

"Check out that lady who yelled at the waiter. Boy is she smug. I bet she eats some spit in her meal."

"You know it... man... look how those Swedes burn."

"Jesus! If this brat on the roller-blades bumps the back of my chair again—!"

"Ah, for a pellet-gun. I could train her quick with a pellet-gun."

"Can we get a pellet-gun here, Steph?"

"Sorry, what? I was trying to understand this English girl next to Walter. I don't understand a word she is saying."

"You're lucky. I do understand her, and it's all mindless gibberish about how she couldn't lie to her professor in person, but it was easy to do it by e-mail..."

"My God, what an annoying voice. It is like a hammer on my head."

They get up and go inside. They come running back a minute later.

"Walter! You GOTTA go inside, they are playing 'Sweet Home Alabama' in French, in there by the bathroom!"

"You're messin with me."

"NO! Check it out!"

I stroll inside the stuccoed main part of the restaurant, and all I hear on the speakers is a fading guitar chord. Then some other song starts up, it sounds like country music sung in French.

They don't have any pick-up trucks here. What are they doing listening to country music? They do drink a lot, though. And they do ride trains in the rain. But to me, real country music needs a puritanical starting point that you can back-slide from, and then you sing about what a screw-up you are. I don't see that happening here, the French aren't real big on feeling guilty about things.

Check out those painted porcelain figurines on the shelf. Little 1920's jazz musicians in white suits, dark brown skins, lips bright red and white teeth in idiot grins.

We saunter down the beach in the wind. There is a man trying to get a parasail working, it is like a giant kite that he is sitting in. There is enough wind to keep the sail up over his head, we look at it against the blue sky. It roars back and forth:

frooooOOOOWOOOSHshshshsfsffrooooOOOWOOOSHshshs

"That's a cool sound."

"Yeah..."

I find a perfectly preserved dried-out little orange crab. He still has all his legs, but he is light as a piece of dust. Ants must have eaten the meat. He is about one-tenth the size of the one I ate earlier. I turn him over.

"Look, you don't think of them as having tails, but they do. They tuck them under their bodies."

A group of kids are by the sea-wall blowing up fire-crackers.

POOM

"Ah, there goes a finger."

POOM

"Yeah, there was definitely a finger flying off that time."

The kids are intent on their game. We climb the stairs near them.

POOM

The plaque to the town's dead lost at sea goes back about a century, with names, dates, and the ship they were on. Two men were on the "Bretagne" in 1940. I point it out to Steph.

"Mers-el-Kebir."

He nods.

POOM

We are at the part of the seawall directly over the kids. I turn back to Steph.

"What I really need right now is a bottle of water I could dribble down onto those kids, and when they look up, I could act like I'm zipping my fly."

We get in the Punto to go around the bay to St. Valery. That is the town where William the Conqueror built up his fleet for the invasion of England in 1066.

"Every time you tell me a history story, Walter, I feel like there should be drums rolling in the background."

"Thank you Chrissa. Anyway, the Normans under William land at Hastings. The English under King Harold make a brave stand, but their pointed sticks and voodoo rattles are as nothing against the Normans' tanks, airplanes, and modern artillery. Harold dies, shot through the eye with a burst of machine-gun fire."

"And that," says Steph, "is why English is just poorly-pronounced French now."

"The FRENCH didn't beat the English, Steph, it was, it was NORMANS. And everybody knows that Normans were really Vikings, which is why they spoke French."

Chrissa is driving. She really wants to get the attention of the dog in the back seat of the car in front of us. It is a big white dog. She goes "Dawgdawgdawgdawgdawg." When the beast fails to hear us, she starts waving and beeping the horn. The dog still sits there, but I think I see the driver looking at us in his mirror.

Chrissa collapses sideways laughing on the steering wheel. We are still moving. I do some quick calculations of body-weight-versus-beers-drunk-at-the-restaurant, and I come up with alarming numbers.

St. Valery nowadays is a postcard picture. We climb inside the photograph and walk around with the locals moping along the boardwalk, the ice-cream stands, and restaurants, the boats trolling in the canal with the big dogs sitting in the sterns.

"Dawgdawgdawgdawgdawg."

We drink cider in a beach-side cafe. I am about to collapse from the heat.

I ask, "How hot is it today?"

"About 27 celsius."

"27 times 9 divided by 5 plus 32 equals maybe 80. Yes, I am gonna die in Texas."

"You went and got all European on us, huh?"

"The cold was no problem. I felt like a Husky pup raised in Florida, the first time he ever got to see snow. I'm built for this climate."

We follow a little girl burnt lobster-red up a path to the medieval part of St. Valery. Steph comments on all the William-the-Conqueror, Joan-of-Arc names on houses and businesses.

"This town, it is, totally, you know, anti-English."

By which he means Chrissa and I, the two Americans. Once you set your watch to French time, all English-speaking people are English. This has strange effects on the Irish.

We look down over the wall at a house with a William the Conqueror statue on the side of it. Chrissa says: "Hey, that's where William used to live! That was the garden where he worked. He used to raise carrots there."

"And he built lots of things in this town, like that cider-place down by the beach. Lots of people think all he did was kill people, but it's just not true."

"Yeah. He was also a big alcoholic."

"No, not an alcoholic. A drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings, drunks don't. He was a big stoner too."

"That's right. After a hard day in the garden, he'd come in, Mrs. Conqueror would have him a bowl all ready to smoke."

"Which set him apart from the other Normans. They were coke-heads. That's why they designed their helmets that way, to protect their noses."

"Anna Comnena said a coked-up Norman could smash through the gates of Babylon."

"I hear those drums again, Walter."

We get back to the Punto, and Chrissa notices a bashed-in place in the plastic below the rear bumper.

"Aw damn, Steph, that's where I hit that post last night!"

"Did you get your deposit already?"

"Yeah, but they got my credit card number! Damn! Damndamndamndamn DAMN!"

She drops to the ground and starts wrenching at the caved-in plastic. She has as much chance of fixing it as a gorilla has of tuning a violin. I pull the dried up crab out of my pocket and start talking to her in a high-pitched voice:

"Whatcha doin', lady?"

"Who the hell are YOO?"

"I'm Fred the Crab. Whatcha doin'? Whatcha doin'?"

"Fixin' the damn car. Wanna help?"

"You can't fix it, you stupid human! HAHAHA! It's no use! I have seen the other side! You struggle all your life then you wash up dead on a beach! Give up! Give up!"

"Begone, Lovecraftian Hell-Spawn! You ain't nothin' but a damn crab anyway. I ain't losin' no 900 euro deposit."

The drive back is peaceful, and the sun takes forever to set. I am driving us through all the little towns and villages on the way back to Amiens. Noyelles. Abbeville. Epagnette. Epagne. Long. Longpré-lès-corps-saints. Hangest-sur-Somme. Picquigny. Ailly-sur-Somme. Dreuil-lès-Amiens.

It is green and beautiful.

Chrissa has the back seat to herself, and she flops about, roaring out original lyrics to the bad pop music on the radio, talking to herself in different voices, carrying on a conversation imitating various robots from Star Wars. Then she is yelling about how for one song there was a guy throwing a monkey up into the air. Finally she collapses in a torpor.

After a few miles of silence, Steph talks to me.

"You know, that girl you like, the one we met..."

"Yeah."

"She's cool."

"That's what I think."

"She's cool, but she's never going to leave here."

"What do you mean? She travels all over the world."

"Yes, she travels—on her vacations. She will always come back here to France to live, for her career. She has invested too much work to do otherwise. She is not like you, wanting to live different places."

I mull it over. It's hard to think about much beyond the scenery. It is lush.

"You think she'll always want to stay here?"

"I am certain."

There are trees making the road into a tunnel.

"You know, Steph, if you ever saw the place where I grew up... it looks so much like this valley."

"Like right here?"

I nod. "It's amazing."