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.

I admire this three year-old girl's skill. My partner Bo has been killing crab for thirty years, yet our friends tease him as the crab thrashes in his hand. All of you who eat crab in its various formats, in buckets and bakes, in butter and bouillon, I want you to see this moment. I want you to see the mallet when it comes down. I want you to know where your food comes from.

I'm not asking you to stop eating crab, although I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to stop by the hardware store, pay your ten dollars for your crab license and follow its precepts. I'm asking you to take part in the carnage if you're going to eat the damn thing.

Camus warned his protagonist to wait to see the whites of his victim's eyes, before pulling the trigger. Without this intimate contact, the kill was not noble. I wince when pulling a weed from my garden. I celebrate nature in the abstract, appreciating the sway of the alder, the song of the sparrow, but I yield to a toddler with a stick, I steer clear of the crab feed.

My friend Kirby finally got me to eat salmon, after 15 years of my vegetarianism, not because he talked me into it, but because he's a fisherman. He kept bringing fish to my house, fish he'd left his wife for the summer to catch, fish he labored and loved. I began to eat fish because I respected my friends and their values. But as an adult, I still have not caught my first fish, have not removed the hook from its mouth, have not sliced the scales from its flesh.

I may be coming around. Lately I've been more cavalier in the garden. Just this morning I dug salmonberry out of the earth, from a place it didn't belong. I didn't wait for a wetter time of year when I could have replanted it somewhere else. I just got on with my business. I made this little sacrifice. I killed the thing, I didn't even throw it in the compost.

I don't see myself trading my shovel for a broomstick anytime soon, but perhaps living in this wild, island place I'm starting to be more comfortable with the kill. Perhaps I'm getting closer to engaging in the real, violent, visceral struggle of this world. Until then, there's more crab for everyone else.