…than rancid crab juice.

I’d found a claw on the beach and tucked it into my jacket, thinking it’d make a funny photo. It wasn’t funny: I was just high.

The smell didn’t hit me until I’d tossed the claw back on the beach. Usually, crab shells on the beach have been pecked clean by assorted scavengers, but not this one. Rotting crab juice spilled all over my hand with such permeance that rinsing it off with water from my sports bottle had little effect. And plunging my stinky meathooks into icy seawater seemed to lock in the smell.

I needed an artificial means of de-stinking, like alcohol from the spray sanitizer mounted inside the outhouse around our campsite. As soon as the alcohol evaporated, the crab juice was like, “Hello!”

How about wet wipes designed for de-shitting baby behinds? Not even that!

The hand lotion left my hands moisturized yet still fishy.

It wasn’t until the campfire got going that I was able to smoke my hands into oblivion. When I crawled into my tent that night, the only foul odor was that of my shoes tucked into the vestibule. At least that was from my own juices.

The second-biggest failure of this trip was the forgotten plan of stopping at a park somewhere along the Lochside Trail to see whether Nate and I remembered how to do “The Worm.” Stay posted!