The daughter of a road paver, Chloe Edwards is the rare crab picker with no seafood in her blood. She was born and raised in Rockland, and never got the taste for seafood. But picking crabs is another story, something she’s done for nearly two years. At 24, she’s the youngest on the team picking for Millard Creamer. Each person’s output is about ten pounds of crabmeat. The crab, packed in ½ pound containers, is then sold in his shop and a few stores in Rockland and Damariscotta. In winter it’s exclusively bull crab (Jonah crab) while in summer there’s also some peekytoe (Rock crab). The work week for the pickers goes up and down with the demand, from three to four days in winter to up to six days in summer. Only the radio station doesn’t change – set to 103.3 FM, The Bear, playing new country music. Chloe left home when she was fifteen, bouncing from sofa to sofa at the houses of friends. She has worked almost as long, with five years at McDonald’s in Rockland to support herself and then her daughter Alanah, tool, now seven years old. Three and a half years ago, the two moved to Waldoboro after Chloe fell in love with Hayden Reed and he with her. They are expecting a daughter in April. Chloe’s deepest hope is that her girls grow to be good people, change something, and make an impact on their generation. Maybe even be president.
My cousin was picking crabs for Millard and needed some help, so she’s like, “You want to come down and pick?” So, I did, and I said, “Ooooh, I really like this,” so I just stayed with it. It’s fun. It’s tedious, but it’s interesting. I’d never really picked apart a crab and looked at them, but now I do and it’s kind of cool. I just really enjoy it. Mesmerizing. The claws are the funnest, but I don’t pick the claws first. I pick the bodies first. It’s kind of like getting the worst out of the way and then doing the fun part. Because they’re quick. You just fly right through them.
I’ve had one crab that looked like its claw was giving the okay symbol. And I think that’s cool – you see different shapes that aren’t normal for crabs. It’s cool, too, how they can lose a leg and they’ll have all normal-sized legs and one little leg on there. But they grow back. It’s cool.
Millard typically already has crabs cooked and they’re ready to go fresh that morning, so then I get there, I get in my groove and get everything ready and set up. I have my own crab pick that I bring – it’s older than I am, and it still works wonderfully. My boyfriend’s grandmother Sara Reed, she used to pick crabs and her husband used to make picks, and it’s one of his original crab picks. It’s like a wooden dowel with a metal whisk piece stock down the dowel.
The day goes pretty good if my daughter wakes up on the good side of the bed. I’m not a morning person but I can’t wait to get to work in the mornings, just so I know I can make some money and pay my bills and that sort of stuff. I put Alanah on the bus by 8:20, 8:30 and hop in the car to Millard’s. We all have to sanitize before we start in on the picking. We have a block and a knife, and I use a hammer, I’m the only one that uses that. But I’m also the only one that doesn’t cut my bodies because I just use my pick to clean them out. They use their knives and just cut underneath the bodies.
We each have a bucket of crabs, or sometimes we share them all on the table. It’s whatever we all feel like doing that day. And I start picking. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we don’t really talk. It’s just however the mood is for the day. I’m not really a talkative person, so I don’t try to start conversations.
Picking crabs can be challenging because you’re working with other people. And we’re all women. Sometimes we don’t get along. But most of the time it’s great. I love picking with who I pick with. And sometimes, you just want to pick by yourself. And that’s fine, too. You don’t want to have an uptight environment. And here, you don’t have to deal with people like at McDonald’s. Or customers. And it’s not as loud and chaotic. I think being kind is a good thing.
You need patience to pick crabs. But you also have to try to be quick. I tear off the claws, I tear off the legs off the body. I throw my legs into a pile, throw my claws into another pile, and scoop my body meat with my pick right into the container. Then the claw meat on top of my body meat. And then I put the legs on top so the box looks super pretty. I always count my fins – on the body, the legs and the claws – so they don’t end up in the container. We all do it that way.
I hope that crab picking never goes away. I hope I can pick crabs for a very long time. I really enjoy it.
It makes me so sad to watch jobs like this go. Because I know there used to be a canning factory, One Pie, and other factories. And now they’re gone, and it’s sad. Just watching farms and stuff around here go out of business is sad, too. We need that! I just hope crab picking never goes away.
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