Nichols, Ashton. Assateague Island Memories. The Vocabula Review 14, no. 9 (2012): 3-5. (Winner of Third-Place in The 2012 Vocabula Well-Written Writing Contest)

Assateague Island, in Maryland and Virginia, reminds me of my father for two related reasons. On my first trip here one August weekend in the 1960's he and I arrived when the prehistoric horseshoe crabs had come ashore to mate and lay their eggs. There were thousands of them on this beach, some as small as silver dollars, some as large as trashcan lids. They were clambering out the surf, across the sand, often on top of one another, pushing for places to find their partners, seeking for spaces to lay their eggs. These creatures have been coming here for hundreds of millions of years. Somehow they return every year to the precise beaches that were once inhabited by their ancient ancestors. These modern crabs -- they are actually more closely related to spiders -- know just where to come to; they know exactly when to return.

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