A Hearth is a Kind of Home Isaac Yuen (bio) The King may sway and sing that home is where the heart is, but for some it's the reverse that holds the appeal. To ensconce one's whole being plus belongings inside a portable palace is the dream of any RV owner or singing scallop. Oh, to take off on a whim to visit oddporiums in Delaware one afternoon and New Jersey roadside elephants the next! To hinge-hinge-jet away at three in the morning when unscrupulous seastars might come a'prying! There is no freer living in this world than roaming the open road and sea, heeding only the words of wind and wave that the world can indeed be your oyster, as long as you never settle down like one. ________ But even should you fare more oyster than scallop, are instead salaried and sedentary, take comfort in the fact that there exists homebodies out there even less uprootable than you. Some will never have left their abode, not even if they live to the ripe age of a hundred sixty-eight, like one particular geoduck did before being dug up unceremoniously. Entrenched beneath silt and sea, this giant clam has never given a second thought (or a first) to moving out of its drab shell affair, even though the three-foot elephantine siphon it sports long outgrew the eight-inch interior. Then there is the Giant Aldabra Tortoise, who spends its own triple-digit lifespan in the same shell patrolling its atoll, tending to its proprietary turf blend of twenty herbs and grasses, and gazing out at the Indian Ocean. There is attachment to one's childhood home and then there is having it fused directly to your spine and ribs. While this does mean the tortoise need never worry about being eaten out of carapace and plastron, it also means that most accidents it suffers also double as at-home mishaps (Tortoise insurance claims must be simpler to process and then deny). Baked alive by the equatorial sun if it cannot lug shell and self into shade or cave; flipped over and stowed on deck by 17th-century sailors seeking respite from bad beef and hardtack—woe to be the architect of one's own non-ventilatable and easily tippable doom! Worst of all might be to trundle on through the decades attired in hopelessly dated decor. There are timeless styles and then there is tortoise scute mosaic. Luckily fashion trends are fickle, and nostalgia for upper-class Roman stylings may cycle back around one day to make tortoiseshell happen again. ________ For those unfazed by the sweet succor of childhood memories and bygone ages, you may be more concerned with the challenge and stress of changing places in which to lay your head. In an ideal world landlords would let you try a suite on for size, to see if the kitchen color scheme works in the afternoon light, or if the den has space for both you and your Rubbermaid-toted possessions, expanded. Purple [End Page 161] pincher hermit crabs in Belize sometimes test-drive their homes at impromptu swap meets, with up to twenty showing up and forming a conga line of descending size around a prospective shell. Once the Goldilocks crab comes to claims its new Goldilocks home, the house-swapping frenzy can commence and conclude in seconds. In an ideal world this social arrangement known as the vacancy chain would have everyone coming away with extra square inch-age, but often the shell game lives up to its name, with unlucky hermits clamped out of their homes and left even more bereft of worldly possessions than their misty mountain counterparts. There are likely as many regretful shell-pickers as there are regretful homebuyers, but instead of griping about not putting an offer on that duplex with the deluxe carport, the crustacean might rue loosening its grip on its old chestnut turban haunts in favor of the pink throat murex affair that seemed to have everything going for it, except for coziness. Luckily hermit crabs harbor no notions of qualms or shame or economic theory; they have been known to...
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Nov 1, 2024
Ronghui Hao + 11
Open Access
Just Published
