The Last Word On Nothing

Some years back, in search of sunshine and sand, my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I packed up the Bronco II and headed down to the Florida Keys (we love punishingly long and mind-numbing drives). We’d brought camping gear because we hadn’t booked anywhere to stay and, more important, we were dirt poor. The fee to pop a tent on the beach was manageable, plus we were still young enough to count Cup-a-Soup and gritty cheese sandwiches as a meal.

The “beach” we ended up on wasn’t quite what we’d had in mind. It was narrow back to front and there was more dried-up greenish black seaweed than sand in any direction. But there it was, and there we were, and we were tired of driving. So we set up camp on the sandiest spot, took a walk, ate a granola bar each, and, having run out of ideas and energy, crawled into bed.

That’s when the many-layered nightmare began.

Sand is such a tease. It looks soft. When you’re picking your way from boardwalk to beach towel—never mind the 2nd degree burns—the sand feels billowy underfoot. It invites you to lie down and snooze.

Truth: Sand is hard as fucking concrete. Even with our camping pads and sleeping bags stacked up, it was bone against rock. There was absolutely no way to get comfortable. Bruises took shape as we tossed and turned.

But back then we were not put off by such things. There’s always a solution within reach. So we looked around and what did we see? Seaweed. (Remember? I said it was everywhere just a second ago.) Mounds of it. Miles of it. Reasonably dry and soft as feathers.

So, in our underwear, in the almost- dark, we moved the tent aside, made a big, heavily layered bed of seaweed, and then wrestled the tent on top of it. Genius! Problem solved. We crawled back inside, exhausted and pleased, and sprawled out on our feather bed.

It was comfortable, if a bit lumpy, for a few minutes. I wouldn’t recommend seaweed over memory foam, but we thought we could sleep.

Then, it started to smell. This wasn’t Mist of the Sea. This was Sour-Pit Lagoon. Fishy enough to drive fish away. It was powerful. And it wasn’t going anywhere. It was hanging out right there inside the tent, nice and close.

So there was that. Which was enough.

But the nightmare continued. In very little time, even as we tried to lie still, our puffy seaweed mattress got harder and harder. The seaweed flattened out until it was like a single leaf of lettuce on a sandwich—not worth having. We were back to bone on hard place.

Surprisingly, we hadn’t yet hit rock bottom. And then…
Cue ominous music, please.

As we lay in the dark inhaling only through our mouths, trying to keep from bruising our elbows, hips, and heels, we felt something strange. Something was moving against our backs. Wiggling. And then it was like someone was snapping rubber bands on our skin. At first it was just here and there, but soon it was happening all up and down our bodies. Snap. Snap. Snap. Popcorn but with impressive force.

Something was alive beneath us. And it wanted out. Or worse, in?

Sand fleas.
Of the Talitridae family
Maybe Platorchestia sp.

Now, just to clear up any potential confusion, another small crustacean also goes by sand flea (or mole crab). Genus Emerita. As kids we called the little barrel-shaped amphipods sand diggers. We used to stand in the warm sea foam and scoop up a handful of wet sand, hoping to capture one and feel it dig against our skin as it tried to burrow. Of course, we’d been told it was a filter feeder and were fools to believe it. I’ve since learned it was strong enough to dig right through a human palm! And it would eat the flesh as it powered through, even digesting the bones! This type of sand flea works fast, too, especially if you give it a chubby thigh to burrow into. One can bury itself fully in a frantic 1.5 seconds.

Whether or not any of those facts are true (the last one is), at first we thought maybe we were camping atop directionally challenged sand diggers, which was scary because, as mentioned, they are flesh-munching monsters hiding their hideousness inside tiny, almost cute, grayish shells. Damn them for their near-preciousness!

I’d like to say we were fortunate, because those weren’t the sand fleas we were dealing with that night. But fortune wasn’t shining on us. We had their even more despicable cousins. I’m talking they-might-as-well-be-roaches amphipods that appear suddenly from under stuff, front legs waving in mock friendliness. They’re duplicitous like their digging cousins. They try to look all innocent with their big shrimp eyes (sometimes baby blue, for God’s sake), hiding in beached seaweed.

But they’re like fleas, jumping around like pinballs, with a sick twist. At any moment one might leap on you and rip open your tender parts or swarm your orifices and lay hundreds of eggs. Those toasty nooks between our cartilage and bones are just incubators to them. Even if that’s another series of lies, I really hate things that suddenly jump on me (unless they’re puppies!), and I’ve seen pictures of sand-flea bites on human ankles and they aren’t pretty. (Some web sources say sand fleas from this family don’t actually bite people. But don’t be naive, especially because I’m sure they carry all kinds of diseases, including type I diabetes, Tourette’s syndrome, and lots of others we never knew were transmittable.)

The nasty little buggers, which sometimes eat their own children (truth), crouch hunched-back in the seaweed, dining on beach detritus but really just waiting to open you up. If you disturb the piles of vegetation during the day, a beach hopper army will explode forth by the hundreds, programmed to attack. They can jump 40 times their own length, like a tallish person jumping some 240 feet. (Really!)

Just imagine scads of those horrific things leaping on you from afar. If you’re like me, you’d shriek and do the “OMG I walked through a huge spider web” dance, then leap into the ocean and pray the sharks come put you out of your misery. But by then it would be too late. The alien fleas will have drained you of blood to create a nice dryish pillowy nursery, plugged up your eye sockets with seaweed (food for their future young, to supplement the rotting flesh the larvae prefer), and left you writhing on the shore stuffed full of their eggs. Who knew?

Even against Rip Stop fabric, beach fleas can’t be stopped. (Hear that, REI?) They just keep on jumping, looking for the weak spot. It’s a matter of survival, after all.

Which brings us back to the beach in Florida.

As we lay there feeling like someone was shooting BBs against us, I started freaking out. I got all itchy and wiggly. There must be many hundreds of those tiny aliens down there, hell, thousands of them, with just a thin tent fabric between us. I was sure soon enough they’d find a seam with a loose thread or two, break through it, and swarm our not-yet-tan flesh like zombies in the Walking Dead. There would be blood. Oh, there would be blood. And there would be a lot of egg laying, which reminds me of pooping, and that’s just gross.

And the sound. THE SOUND. That might have been the worst part. It was Poe’s hideous heartbeat beneath the floorboards, driving me mad. (I foamed! I raved! I swore!) The damn things just wouldn’t stop pop-pop-popping against the nylon as they sought a way through. They were like mosquitoes buzzing in your ears, a slightly irregular faucet drip, and a creepy little kid poking you over and over from the booth behind you at Pizza Hut—all at the same time. It was madness.

We were so tired. So miserable. But I couldn’t sleep with those monsters under my bed, with that sound popping in my ears as the fleas jumped up and down in their tiny blood-letting fury. We didn’t have the energy to tear up the floor and set them free. (They’d chase us anyway. Did I mention they move with freakish alien speed and can catch and take down a small antelope? If one happens to be on the beach in Florida?) So we did the only thing two serious campers can do under the circumstances.

We slept in the car.

———

Disclaimer: I lied some in the text above. Kids, this is not a good source for your diorama on the biology and behavior of small crustaceans. And that’s a terrible subject for a diorama anyway. 

Photos:

Adorable blue-eyed sand flea (probably not the species under my tent, but you get the idea) with kind permission from Krista Queeney (Sea Stone Photography).

Sand digger of childhood memories, again, no promise on species, from http://www.outerbanks.com/.