unexpected shrimp
I wonder if it would be easier or harder to climb big rocks if our feet were like shrimp feet. But proportional to our size. Shrimp feet, human scale. Hopefully I never find out but it would probably also depend on the type of shrimps we’re taking after, I think. That would affect how thicc or lanky our many legs are. Or do shrimp across species have leg sizes consistent with their shrimpiness? Are most shrimps basically scale versions of each other? I don’t feel like looking it up.
One shrimp that probably differs from most others is the fairy shrimp. This can be found in the vernal pools atop Enchanted Rock, and before you make the same mistake I did, understand that the fairy shrimp is a type of shrimp, not a single really cool shrimp. They’re about the size of a dime and look mildly prehistoric. They’re not pink, more translucent grey/yellow, and this is from Google because we didn’t see one at all when we went, despite hunting diligently the whole time. We did see a loose cow, in many ways a shrimp’s opposite, and were thrilled with that too.
Two things I didn’t plan were for this blog (1) to have the first two posts be about unique Central Texas fauna, and (2) to ever have anything to do with actual shrimp. I make a thing called shrimp and grimps and two days later I’m saying the word shrimp more than I ever have in my whole life, for reasons that have nothing to do with the blog! wow!! Just goes to show that things really do happen.
Enchanted Rock is a big ass protruding dome of granite that people in Texas hike up. You don’t really know what to expect before you get there, and although it looks cool as you approach, it doesn’t seem like anything that will blow you away, but it really is kind of bizarre in person. I imagine that in the pioneer age before parking lots, standing on that large of a solid, smoothish surface must have been entirely surreal. I thought it was pretty cool even though I’ve stood on parking lots and even multi-story parking structures before.
“I want to powerwash the Rock,” said one member of our group in reference to the hill and not the actor, and now I do too. The granite is naturally a glistening salmon, but the dust, lichen and moss render it basically brown. Up the brown we went, locating the marker denoting the highest point, but noticing that a bump a hand’s length away had it beat by a quarter inch or so. Then down the other side and over to the shorter but steeper peak next door and up that one as well.
We felt a need to climb everything, and we thought about why. We converged on a sense of a need to conquer, and there might be some truth to that, but I questioned that notion when we came across something that was basically just a cluster of big boulders, each 12 feet high, but rivaled the two peaks in terms of fun-ness. Climbing things is just fun. Going up is fun and coming down isn’t that bad either. And I don’t think any of the seven of us would have had nearly as much fun alone. All high places have shrimp and our job isn’t to find them but to look for them.
Enchanted Rock looks brown because it’s covered in things that are alive. That moss etc. nourishes the shrimp that chill up there regardless of whether or not people can see them, or are even there to try. For all the day-to-day time I spend looking at objects as they could be, more effort could go toward looking at them as they are. The Rock could certainly be pink, but in the cases of both the hill and the actor, that would mean something is very wrong.