Seashell Memories

While walking home today, I picked up some seashells to add to my growing collection. Cowries, scorpions, trumpets, scallops, jingles, tellins, clams. The list of shells found here in Yap is long and varied. Brought in on the tides, deposited on the beaches and among the mangroves, some end up in the gravel covering the island’s roads along with chunks of coral bleached by the sun.

When I was very young, we lived on the Gulf of Mexico in Corpus Christi, Texas. Padre Island, the world’s longest undeveloped barrier island, stretches south from the city more than 130 miles toward the Mexican border. Padre, as it’s called by the locals, was a frequent destination for my mother and me. We had an old orange Jeep for my father’s fishing expeditions that we borrowed for our shelling expeditions. Packing up the cooler with baloney sandwiches, Frito's and Dr. Pepper, we headed out with a pile of paper grocery bags to see what had come in on the tide.  Padre was then, and still is, accessible by access roads that cut through the dunes. Mere tracks in the sand, they branch off from the main road, back then just two narrow lanes often covered with shifting sand.

Parking at the end of an access road, we would each take a bag to fill with our finds and begin walking along the beach, digging our toes into the hot sand, until the Jeep disappeared from view. A Coast Guard helicopter would fly overhead now and then, dipping to make sure we were okay and moving on down the coast when we waved. We rarely saw anyone else as we walked several miles and as many hours next to the water’s edge. Padre was a place to go for solitude on a hot summer day.

It was during those forays that I became fascinated with shells and the tides that carried them to shore. I acquired books about shells and the creatures that made them. I read Rachel Carson’s books when others were reading Nancy Drew. Visited local shell shops, adding to my expanding collection by buying exotic shells from the other side of the world with my weekly allowance. Collected in commercial fishing nets or by professional shell hunters, I displayed those tropical shells next to the bounty from Padre Island, knew their names and what an operculum was, and fell under the spell of the sparkling oranges, whites, tans and pinks of the different species, imagining the places they came from and the tides that swept them along on their voyages.

Now living in a place where those extraordinary shells of my childhood obsession were from, I marvel at the sight of a spotted cowry or pearlescent clam that once held a special place in that long-ago collection. I pick it up, turn it over and around to see the colors and patterns, clean away the sand, and add it to the basket beside my reading chair.  Each one is a fond remembrance of those times my mother and I wandered along the shoreline together reaching down to pick up a shell or a sand dollar, a skate’s egg case or a piece of driftwood, sea glass or a dried seahorse, watching the sandpipers chase the breaking waves, wading knee-deep in the cool water as the wet sand pulled at our bare feet.  

The shells of Yap transport me back to those sun-warmed days on Padre Island all the while creating new memories that spiral around the old ones like the whorls of a mollusk’s shell.