How I stopped worrying and learned to love my first Lowcountry crab

Lillie Behlin, a native of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, does not use the internet. She also happens to be a social media phenomenon.

She became famous online after her grandson Ment Nelson, a 28-year-old artist from Hampton County, sketched her tossing a crab net into a marsh.

“Caught my grandma slipping one day. Now she got her own gear,” Nelson wrote on Twitter, sharing his sketch and photos of his nearly 75-year-old grandmother.

Nelson’s art captures the lives of the Gullah people in South Carolina, which includes his family. And, as Behlin will tell you, crabbing is an integral pastime to the Lowcountry’s local culture.

Before Tuesday, I had never caught a crab, nor had I ever considered crabbing. I grew up in the Ozark hills of southern Missouri. My hometown is near the geographic center of the U.S., and it’s utterly landlocked. But when I moved to South Carolina in May, I was determined to learn as much as I could about my new home — and Nelson’s art inspired me to get out of my comfort zone.

So, despite my aversion to any animal that bites, pinches or stings, I asked my editor if I could go crabbing with Behlin and Nelson.

“Do you have rubber boots?” my editor asked.

Lesson one of crabbing, duly noted: Heels are a bad idea.

Early Tuesday morning, I traded in my newsroom heels for boots and my dress for an old t-shirt, and I was ready to go.

The marsh was a few minutes’ walk from the ruins of the Old Sheldon Church in Yemassee. Behlin, Nelson and I arrived around 8:15 a.m. The air felt cool for a moment, but I soon realized that the breeze had been playing a trick. I started sweating from the muggy heat.

Behlin held a plastic bag with what looked like raw chicken, and Nelson grabbed some string, a net and a few buckets from the trunk of his car.

“We used to have other traps and nets, but they got tangled,” Nelson said. “Really, all you need is a piece of chicken and a piece of string.”

We walked along a muddy part of the bank that jutted into the water. The bank sloped downward, where Nelson set down his tools. Unlike Nelson and I, Behlin wasn’t wearing boots. She wore sneakers and a long denim skirt, and she stayed at the top of the muddy slope rather than following us down. She sat on an upside-down yellow bucket like a queen on her throne.

Behlin liked crabbing, she told me. She taught her children and grandchildren how to crab, and she enjoyed cooking and eating the crabs — but she was absolutely not a fan of touching the crabs with her hands.

“They scare me,” she said.

Nelson snapped one of the chicken pieces in half. We’d be using chicken backs, he told me, though they usually used chicken necks. He tied the string tightly around the bait, and I followed his example.

Nelson then threw the his piece of chicken into the water. The other end of the string was wrapped around a stick, which he stuck into the mud so that it stood upright.

“Where should I throw it?” I asked.

“Trust your instinct,” he said.

“I don’t have instinct,” I told him. But I tossed it in anyway, a few feet away from Nelson’s bait — and then we waited.

A few minutes later, Nelson picked up his small net.

“We got a crab,” he said, crouching down by the string he’d thrown into the water. He began pulling the string back to our muddy bank, his grandmother watching from above and reminding him to pull it in slowly.

“Can you see it?” he asked me.

I strained my neck. All I could see was muddy water.

“No,” I said.

“You’ll get an eye for them eventually,” he said.

As he pulled the string toward him with one hand, his other hand held the net, which hovered just over the water. Then, all at once, he swiftly plunged the net into the water and pulled it back up. Inside the net, along with the bait, was a tiny crab — white and gray, with a few blue spots on his legs and claws. The crab’s shell was maybe two inches wide.

“That’s a small one,” the grandmother said. “You should throw that one back in the water.”

Nelson did. Within the next half hour, though, he’d caught five more larger crabs, with shells about five inches wide. I, on the other hand, had only succeeded in scaring the crabs away.

At one point, I saw my string rustle and I excitedly jumped down the muddy slope to pull the crab back in. Slowly, I tugged the string toward me. But something seemed wrong. The string didn’t seem heavy enough.

I lifted it out of the water. The bait at the end of the string had disappeared.

Behlin chuckled.

“They took your chicken,” she said.

I, stubborn to a fault, wrapped another piece of chicken with my string, securing it with a triple knot this time.

“I’m going to catch a crab before we leave today,” I told them.

It took another 20 minutes, but I eventually saw my string stir again. I dashed over one more time and made sure the net was in position. Once again, I carefully pulled the string toward me — and this time, the string was heavy. Something was attached to its end.

As soon as I saw a glimpse of white underneath the water, I hurtled the net into the water — and finally! Victorious, I held up the net. This Missouri girl had caught her very own blue crab.

I dumped my crab into the bucket that held Nelson’s crabs.

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked.

“Let them go, probably,” Nelson said.

“No,” Behlin said with a smile. “We’re going to take them home and cook them.”

This story was originally published August 16, 2017 at 5:57 PM with the headline "How I stopped worrying and learned to love my first Lowcountry crab."