Muskrat Lovely

There's a new movie about a pageant on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that I remember well from my several years of living there in the 1970s. In Sally in the Blue Tent, I call the university where we were "Chesapeake College" and the entire second part of the novel takes place here. I'm glad to be reminded of this pageant, which involves a muskrat skinning contest, because this contest is right up there with the blue crab races for exotic competitions.


I fell in love with muskrats while living in Salisbury, Maryland. I had never had muskrat stew in my life but some locals introduced me to the dish. Muskrat, to my palette, tasted a bit like rabbit only wilder, and I ended up preferring using it in my own hasenpfeffer recipe than in the local stew. I bought my muskrats from a trapper at the local tavern. I haven't had muskrat since leaving but while living there, I had it several times a month.


The blue crab races take place in Crisfield, Maryland, at the annual National Hard Crab Derby. One event is the Governor's Cup race. After I'd left the shore (divorced again), an actor friend of mine, also from Oregon, phoned the governor of Oregon to get a Dungeness crab entered in the race. No interest. So my friend entered a blue crab in the governor's stead, the Oregon entry. Since he worked at a seafood restaurant, he'd put a local waterman on the lookout for the meanest blue crab he could find. My friend was confident the Oregon entry would do well.


And so he did! In fact, Oregon should have won the Governor's cup. As my friend described it in a letter, and as I wrote later in an article I wrote for Northwest Magazine, the Oregon crab took off at the start like a sprinter. (The crabs are dumped onto an incline, which is the track.) He sprinted to the edge of the track -- and stopped! About an inch from the finish line. And sat there. Then the big Alaska crab slithered by, and the mean Oregon crab attacked him. They wrestled for a bit, and then tumbled into the finishing trough. Since the Alaskan crab was on the bottom, he was declared the winner in a photo finish. Oregon got second but we thought he was the winner in spirit.

And this is an episode that must go in the novel, especially since it's a good setting for some more important psychological stuff going on in the story at this time.


A wonderful book about this area is
Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay.