This is the Mary Palace, I'm Nate de Mayo.

There were mornings after Norristers or summer squalls

when people would wake up to find hundreds

and wash the shore on the night.

Hundreds of writhing, pinching lobsters

stranded by the storm tide.

Hundreds of them scratching in sand coated

and starting to smell.

In the people would trudge out into the half light

down to a gunkwit or satuous to a horse-neck beach

and weighed into the undulating mass

of clamoring crustaceans, piled sometimes two feet high,

deep enough so these 11 and 17 and 29-pound lobsters

were clawing at these people's knees

as they tried to shuffle them back into the sea

before they rotted and the flies and seagulls

went to town there on the beach.

And if they had the stomachs for it,

they'd take one home for dinner.

For the first couple of hundred years

that white Europeans lived in North America,

the lobster, the surf to Flamignon's turf,

...