Watermen on the Chesapeake Bay recently pulled more than twenty-four thousand lost crab pots up off the bottom. A crab pot is a wire cage about two feet square, baited and dropped overboard on a line tied to a buoy. Sometimes a storm takes the buoy, or a propeller cuts the line, or a man simply gets too old to go out, and the pot stays down there. The watermen call those ghost traps. A ghost trap doesn’t know it’s been abandoned. A crab crawls in after the bait, can’t find the way out, and dies, and then it becomes the bait for the next crab. One lost pot can go on like that for years.
Most of us assume that when we walk away from something, it stops. We quit the job, skip the reunion, let a friendship go quiet, and figure that’s the end of it. But plenty of what we leave behind keeps working long after we’ve forgotten it, for harm and for good.
I have a few of those down there myself. There’s the cutting remark I made to a friend in college when he decided to pledge a fraternity. I thought the whole business was childish and said so, more than once. He didn’t, and I never bothered to ask why it mattered to him. We didn’t fight. We just let it go, and then it was twenty years. There’s a grudge against a man I used to work with, so old I can’t remember what he did, only that I never forgave him for it. And there’s the apology I always meant to make to a pair of twins I teased in middle school. I knew my words had been mean. I never said I was sorry. About a year later I heard they had both been killed in a car crash. That one has been sitting on the bottom ever since. I don’t go looking for any of these. I don’t have to. They’re still down there in the mud, catching.
That’s the hard news. The good news is that it works the other way, too.
A woman I knew prayed every night, for twenty-two years, for a grandson who wanted nothing to do with God. She died without seeing any sign it had worked. But a prayer doesn’t stop just because the person who prayed it does. Some years after her funeral, the grandson walked into a church on an ordinary weekday afternoon. He still can’t tell you why. He says he just felt pulled. I believe him. I think her prayers were down there the whole time, still fishing, and he finally got caught.
The kindness you did a stranger and forgot is down there too. So is every rosary somebody’s aunt said for you while you were busy being twenty-five. None of it knows it’s been forgotten. It all keeps fishing.
The watermen didn’t clean up the bay by feeling bad. They went out with grappling hooks and pulled the traps up one at a time, cold, muddy work. That’s how it goes with us. You go back to where you set it, find the line, and pull. It’s always heavier than you expected, and you’re always lighter afterward.
Thank you for reading. If something here stayed with you, I’d be grateful if you’d subscribe to Grow Grit & Virtue and pass it along to a friend. Take a look around the archive, and tell me what you think in the comments. I read every one.
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