I hate airports. I hate the hurry up and wait mentality. I hate the security checkpoints. I hate the close seats (I’m a fan of personal space) and stale air. Frankly, I don’t know how people a hundred years ago traveled not just hours, but days on trains. Or boats—and these were no cruise liners. I don’t know how, 200 years ago, they traveled in coaches for even weeks on end.

Maybe I’m missing something.

Maybe I need to enjoy the journey as well as the destination. But the journey is a few busy airports, and the destination is…

…Paradise. So can I be blamed for hating the process that transferred me from there to here?

Almost the first thing I did once I stepped onto the Bahamas (other than get slapped in the face by a suffocating blanket of humidity—as if water particles had been knit into invisible fibers and layered over the island) was go to the ocean. It’s like an instinctive pull as old as we are. How else do you explain the conglomeration of humans along the coast?

But we’re not the only ones that live in the viable, shifting space between land and water. These little guys are plentiful. And tiny. The hermit crab: