The sun beats down on the weathered decking, which has faded from its natural, unstained grainy wood to a baked gray color that further highlights the knots and grain. It’s smooth on top but rough and splintery in low-traffic areas, like under the built-in benches.

St. Clements Bay is calm. Nothing can turn it from the dark brown tea color to ocean blue. It is cleaner than in years past, but the murky brown remains. When the wind gets strong, the waves look like dirty meringue peaks.

I daydream when I’m near the water. The laps of the waves, the sounds of the birds and the sun all help ground me. Being on the water calms me, quiets my nerves and lets me think.

“That trap ready?” Sharon, the family babysitter, asks, pulling me back to myself. She’s not my babysitter; I’m 12. She watches my brother, who is 9, and our sister, who is 5.

“Yes,” I say proudly, handing over a crab trap that’s almost as tall as me.

She holds it up, inspecting it. “You put all the chicken in here?”

I nod.

“Good work.” She hands the stinky trap back down to me. “Wanna toss it in?”

“Yes,” I say, the excitement and pride I feel cannot be contained.

My fingers work fast, pulling on the worn but sturdy bay-stained water. I tug hard, making sure it won’t snap off if the trap becomes full or the calmness fades. Satisfied, I walk to the edge of the pier, by the ladder, and toss it out as far as I can.

“Good throw,” she says, approvingly. “Remember, you can have what you catch. And go wash your hands,” she points to the ladder that leads from the pier into the bay. She set up a cleaning area, with a bottle of dish soap and a towel.

Sharon turns and walks over to where my brother and sister and a few other neighborhood children are loading crab traps with raw chicken.

“Be careful,” Randy, Sharon’s husband, says. I feel his watchful eye on me as I make my way to the pier’s edge.

Randy has agreed to boil our spoils tonight.

I don’t know if our parents think any of us will catch anything, but crabbing is a rite of passage. Plenty of them have done it, many of them still do it, and they agree it’s satisfying to cook what you catch.

Most of the kids on the pier probably won’t get this opportunity anywhere else. Our neighborhood is a bedroom community for the military bases and D.C.

We have military families, teachers’ families, Secret Service, NSA and other agency families, and those who do other things, medical stuff, clergy. It was a melting pot. My dad is a teacher and my mom is a claims adjustor for a car insurance agency.

I walk to the ladder, turn around and start climbing down.

When my waist is level with the pier, I reach out one hand for soap. The lemon Joy is crisp to my nostrils. It doesn’t smell as much like lemons as it does cleaning product, but I need to wash chicken funk off my hands, so I rub my hands together, leaning against the pier, then I climb into the bay water.

The warm water tickles my flip-flop protected feet.

Deeper down I go. My ankles, calves, knees, thighs go into the murky water. My faded blue swimsuit goes in, too. My hands are finally submerged. I loop my right arm through the ladder rung and wash my hands together.

All clean, I think.

I unloop and pull myself up the ladder.

Every part of my body that was in the bay feels cooler, especially as a random breeze swoops down.

The smell of the water is mild today, and combined with the tropical scent of Coppertone sunscreen, helps mask the odors of raw poultry, dead minnows and Randy’s fresh-caught fish.

The fish and poultry are kept on ice in two Styrofoam coolers, but ice can only do so much to contain the smell.

The dead minnows are putrid-smelling. I had to cover my nose when I was on that side of the pier.

“Somebody wasted good bait,” Randy said, shaking his head. “Hate that.”

I jump over a crab trap line and join my sister CeCe across the pier.

“You OK?” I ask her. She seems to be struggling to help our brother with his trap.

The look of disgust on her face registers in my brain. “Yeah, raw chicken is gross,” I say, taking the clammy but cold lump of mystery part-of-chicken from her. “But, if you do it right the first time, you only have to touch it once.”

“Open this,” I open the trap’s mesh door as I show her, “and drop it inside.” I pull on the string, testing its strength as I had done to my line, “then make sure the line is not goin’ break off, like if a bunch of hungry crabs pinch it,” I make a crab claw and pretend to pinch at the line, “and, if you’re sure it’ll hold, you throw it off the deck.”

“But you haveta make sure you’re not caught up in the line, CeCe,” Sharon called over. “We don’t wantchya goin’ overboard.”

After she nods in approval, CeCe and I hand the trap to Tim. I walk her over to the hand-washing station.

“Hands,” I say. She holds them up and out, palms up. I squirt Joy onto them. We watch as a few bubbles escape from the bottle and float up, away from us and into the sun.

Webbifying ideas:

1. Geomap: Show the area where this happened.

2. Video: Show a video clip (Vimeo or YouTube) demonstrating how to set up a crab trap. This could be produced using a smartphone.

3. Photo gallery with audio overlay: Photos describing the bay with audio describing activities or the area’s history.

4. Interactive calendar of peak crabbing season.