Whale Time: Re: Avram

Re: Avram
Ever Learning

all stories and essays by Avram Klein

Crab Grab

I'm living on an island in the southern Brazilian state of Parana. The island is called Ilha do Mel and I'm just loving life right now.

This place is killer. The second day I was here, I found a maimed kitten frying to death in the sun on the beach. A friend and I nursed the kitten back to health and the next day I took the ferry to town to try to save the cat. We couldn't save the cat, but in the process of taking care of it for a night, I became kind of famous on the island.

The owner of the resturant next to my campsite invited me to go pick up the crab meat for his restaurant. So I went with him in the boat, and we just got blazed. I haven't smoked anything is over a year, so I was having a good old time.

We pulled up to this dock like in the middle of nowhere outside the city of Paranagua. The dock is actually on an island, but it's a big island, so I could tell whether we were on the main land.

There were just a bunch of kids like rough-housing, and some moms who all shell the crabs, and we just hung out there while they got the crab meat ready. It was pretty incredible. We picked up a cooler full of seventy kilos of crab meat and a bag full of the shells of the crab backs to be stuffed.

On the way back, we came upon a group of about twenty dolphins feeding on a school of minnows. We continued a little further and we found a mother dolphin with a baby dolphin who had died, floating in the water.

Seeing a dead baby dolphin in the water is something of a site. Putting the cat to sleep at the vet was also kind of tragic. The cat was purring and was in a good mood, but he was paralyzed from the waist down, and he couldn't go to the bathroom.

I wanted to get him some wheels for his hind legs with a bucket hanging off the back. Sometimes you see cats with wheels in the back in childrens' movies, but if you think about it, even with the bucket, they can't go pee. So I had the kitten put to sleep. It was a tough call. Putting a kitten to sleep can make you question your own sanity. Because the cat wasn't even in pain and we don't put humans to sleep for things like that.

Also, I'm pretty close to a large city called Curitiba which is cold like San Francisco and is famous for being the home of smart people, so I thought there would be a good vet there.

Go to S. Brasil