A crab bit my foot yesterday, a blue claw, in the late afternoon surf, as I waited for waves on the sandbar. The cut is red-lipped and painful, even after hours soaking in the sea. Same green, glass-flat ocean today, water clear and clean—vast numbers of coquinas at low tide—waves not as big but curling perfectly at the bar, more of a shelf, a flat plateau of sand, some sea lettuce floating around, but not the vast sheaves of eelgrass. And there were rays in the surf, their white underbellies in the curling wave, wingtips breaking the surface, a whole bunch of them (flock, herd, school, flotilla), several dozen, swimming with us, unafraid. They must have been feeding on the smorgasbord of that sandy table—everywhere underfoot countless mussels, pebble-sized coquinas, clams, a few scallops, moon snails—the boys identify their orange, glassy “doors,” which should better be called shoes, as they cover their feet—and a zillion mangled crab parts, claws, legs, guts and shreds from blue and green and calico crabs, Japanese crabs, spider crabs, horseshoe crabs, churned and broken bodies of crabs, and little schools of killifish and silversides, and the rays, feeding.