Starfish Husbandry

I grew up on a starfish farm, on the chilly waters off the coast of Maine. Mother kept a running advertisement in the Bar Harbor Gazette, and signs posted around the Bass Harbor ferry slip that said, “Starfish – for food, ornament, or pets.” I spent all day balancing on the rim of the cages, and walking the lines like tightropes. It is a tricky deal you have to judge carefully, the tide and currents, and the timing of the swells, such that the line is taught enough to hold your weight without dropping you in the drink.
We fed the starfish different meal, depending on what we wanted them to be, big or little, blue or red or yellow, midnite black, whatever was the fashion in the gourmet, ornament, and fish fancy magazines, and whether we wanted them to be smart or not.
My schooling was training trick starfish for circus shows and the movies. I could teach them to do every trick a dog does, sit up, roll over, beg, bark; whatever I had time to get to in a season before they got sold or cut up to make starfish for the next season.
That was always a weird thing; I would think I knew “who got the brain” in a separation, and over the days of regrowth, I wouldn’t know for sure, and be amazed sometimes that the shortest stub of starfish tentacle, with just a tiny couple of suckers on it will grow back into a cartwheel-tumbling, multiplications-table mastering chameleon starfish that would steal my heart and be the pride I would have to turn over to the highest bidder at the Ellsworth Hydroculture Fair. They say you shouldn’t give bay fish names, but what else is a girl to do with her time?
Sometimes I took the dinghy and went ashore the nearby islands. It was disorienting to walk on dead granite, or the springy high moss on black dirt under the pines, in which one does not have to correct for the push and pull of the rolling water. And it was so very dirty, too. I couldn’t help myself; I followed the deer paths and climbed the trees, and I was streaked with black earth. As much as I’d have to swim to wash it off, I may as well have towed the dinghy back to the cages we lived on.