Best of the Decade: #1 Ian Frazier's "Blue Bloods"

Illustration by Owen Freeman, from Ian Frazier's "Blue Bloods"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #1 pick – Ian Frazier’s "Blue Bloods" (April 14, 2014).

This wonderful piece is about Frazier’s fascination with horseshoe crabs, an animal that, as he points out, has “been around at least two hundred times as long as human beings.” But now they’re in decline, he reports. Humans may be driving these tough little creatures to extinction. He says, “Sea-level rises may cause shoreline reinforcement that wipes out their habitat.” 

There’s an unforgettable scene near the end of “Blue Bloods” that illustrates Frazier’s point. He’s on the shore of Delaware Bay, driving a gravel road that “skirted the bay so closely that it required a barrier wall of riprap for protection.” He writes,

The crumbling brittle of horseshoe-crab parts under the car wheels now became so thick it was unnerving, with uncrushed, whole horseshoe crabs all over the road as well. I pulled onto the left-hand berm to investigate. When I climbed up on the riprap wall, I saw throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks. The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks.

That description of horseshoe-crab carnage, likening it to “the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg,” is inspired! It’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen “Blue Bloods” as my #1. 

Another reason is that it’s so quintessentially Frazerian. Frazier is a superb describer. “Blue Bloods” brims with delightful description. Here, for example, is his portrait of a horseshoe-crab person named Diane SanRomán:

On that morning, she wore knee-high rubber boots, a bright-pink cotton shirt, and complicated turquoise earrings: an in-the-field style that became familiar. “My life was good before I discovered horseshoe crabs, but now it’s even better!” she announced to me, adding that she was raising a thousand horseshoe-crab eggs in the bathroom of her apartment, in Manhasset, and that her husband, a doctor who specializes in clinical nutrition, kindly put up with them. Along with playing conga drums, she throws pots and is pursuing her second M.A., in experimental psychology with a focus on marine biology. She looks enough like the late Bea Arthur, the star of the nineteen-seventies sitcom “Maude,” that it would be negligent not to say so.

And here’s his depiction of the Dupont Nature Center viewing deck:

Bird-watchers lined its railings with emplacements of telescopes and cameras. Some of the bird-watchers were talking on their cell phones and leaving excited messages for other bird-watchers. When the other bird-watchers called back, the ring tones were birdcalls. Jeffery Davis, a birder from near Philadelphia, offered me a look through his well-positioned 30-power Kowa telescope. Oystercatchers, stilts, dowitchers, willets, black-bellied plovers, dunlins, royal terns, ruddy turnstones, semipalmated sandpipers—along the sand and in the shallows, thousands of heads were going up and down as long, thin bills plucked up what probably were horseshoe-crab eggs. A single horseshoe crab swam nearby on the surface, on its side. Lenses turned to the odd swimmer for half a minute, then went back to the birds.

Conga drums, “complicated turquoise earrings,” birdcall ring tones – I love Frazier's details. He notices stuff most people overlook or disregard. "Blue Bloods" is one of his finest acts of attention.