‘Never quit’: Unlikely coronavirus hero brightens darkest spring in SC Lowcountry
One day, when we again gather on Easter weekend in pink skirts and white gloves that aren’t latex, we’ll put up a statue to our humble hero.
We’ll give credit to the little star that has shone so brightly in a dark and shuttered South Carolina Lowcountry, huddled alone against the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
We will honor the lowly, bottom-feeding soft shell crab.
With restaurants unable to seat diners, with streets virtually empty on what should be one of the biggest weekends of the year for Beaufort County businesses and churches, the flimsy little crab could easily have been kicked to the curb.
But no. That didn’t happen. We didn’t let it happen, and that’s the important thing.
The invisible virus can take our paychecks, but it can’t take our spirit.
Sign of spring
The soft shell crab is a highly anticipated sign of spring in the Lowcountry, like Vidalia onions with claws. And we’ve learned over the past three weeks that it is more than that. It is the crack cocaine of the creek.
Soft shell crab addicts poured out of their hermetically sealed living rooms/slash/offices/slash/classrooms.
The split second word got out that the soft shell crabs were being sold in a market or empty restaurant, money flowed.
The Sea Grass Grille on Hilton Head Island went from selling 30 take-out dinners one night to 82 the next night. Suddenly, chef Chad Newman was busy sauteing soft crabs in brown butter and almondine, topped with a spoon full of the butter and roasted almonds.
The next night saw 80 more soft shell crab dinners leave the curb.
With it came a trickle of hope in this lost season of thousands of layoffs.
At the Piggly Wiggly at Coligny Plaza, a tiny reminder that Hilton Head is still part of South Carolina, owner David Martin was selling 12 dozen soft shell crabs a day last week.
“I see fear in their eyes,” Martin said of his masked customers. “This is World War III.”
The toilet paper grab is part of the war. He said 70 cases can disappear in an hour and a half, sold one pack at a time.
But not so for those who come, sometimes more than once a day, for a fresh batch of soft shell crabs. The word goes out on social media when the crabs have arrived, and in flock the customers, more interested in smiling than grabbing.
Beaufort
Craig Reaves in Beaufort has been harvesting and selling Lowcountry seafood so industriously for so long that he has barnacles for fingernails.
“The soft shell crabs have been a bright spot in this otherwise hard time,” he said.
No, he’s not selling as many as usual because fewer people are here and fewer restaurants are open, and there will be no 17th annual Soft Shell Crab Festival in beautiful downtown Port Royal this month.
Reaves’ Sea Eagle Market retail seafood business is keeping up as usual, but his catering business cratered, and the wholesale business to restaurants is way down. They delivered soft shell crabs to a third or a fourth of the local restaurants they usually serve.
But Reaves didn’t quit on the soft shell crabs, typically one of his biggest bumps in business for the year. That means he tends to tanks of running water filled with crabs from the creek, where they shed their shells and have to be pulled as soon as they do. Reaves checks the tanks at 11 p.m., 1 a.m., 3 a.m., 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. before heading home.
The last two weekends, he set up a food truck for curbside pickup of fried soft shell crabs and other seafood. Crowds came. Workers kept their jobs. And you can thank the soft shell crab.
At the Bluffton Oyster Co., Tina Toomer said Friday she’s ready to quit cleaning soft shell crabs. And their local season is about gone.
“Every other phone call is about soft shell crabs,” she said.
Her husband, Larry Toomer, a fourth-generation Beaufort County waterman, has been tending the soft shell crabs for years, but they may have never meant more to him than this year.
At Hudson’s Seafood House on the Docks on Hilton Head, tanks of soft shell crabs are being tended in a wooden house on the dock where Gullah women used to head thousands of pounds of shrimp.
Owner Andrew Carmines said they sold about a third of the soft shell crabs that they usually do.
Reflecting on a quiet restaurant that usually has its busiest day of the year on Good Friday, he said there’s more to the story than the soft shell crab po’boys, BLTs and salads.
“We wanted to show that we are resilient,” Carmines said. “It’s a lot of work to produce them, but we never considered not doing it. This is what we do in the Lowcountry, and we did it. We would never quit. That’s how I see it.”
