We walk up the beach just in time to see a three year-old make her first kill. She is neat and efficient, bringing a blue, broken broomstick handle swiftly down onto an overturned Dungeness crab, which is flailing in her father's hand. If I'd learned this trick this earlier, I'd probably eat crab. But I grew up in a place where we didn't set our pots in the morning, where we didn't row a little dinghy out into a gorgeous bay with our friends, leaning out over the side at a 45 degree angle to pull up the heavy pots. I experienced neither the romance of the harvest, nor the carnage of the kill. By the time I came to live in a mysterious place by the sea, I'd been unduly influenced by Disney's singing crustaceans, by serious philosophical treatments of environmental limits. By the time I came to the sea, I was a vegetarian.
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