Night of the Blue Crabs Midnight on the Great South Bay. Smudgy clouds, a stiff wind, a full moon, now hidden, now in the clear, gloriously bright, high beams on rippling blacktop. On a pier at the end of Blue Point Avenue, a dozen people are doing what they do on the South Shore of Long Island on summer nights: catching the blue-claw crabs that swarm the muddy inlets and dock pilings every July and August. The boat fishermen are in bed. The night surf-casters are out on the barrier island, flinging bait chunks into the ocean. The crabbers are on the inland side of the bay, a few feet from their cars, with nets, buckets and flashlights. Fishing is complicated and expensive. Crabbing is easy and cheap. Your arm is your fishing pole. The line is some string. The bait is a chicken part, raw and slimy. You lob it out gently, let it plop. At some point you pull it back up, slow and easy, fingertips tuned for a tug or quiver. You shine the light into the greenness until the end of the line appears. Usually it's just your soggy drumstick, a whitened corpse in a miniature crime movie. But sometimes clamped beneath it is a green body with blue claws. The crab is stubborn and hungry but not stupid, so you have to net it fast. Sometimes the movie is "Alien," and you get a spider crab, a warty disc with long scary pincers, like hinged chopsticks. Those you let go. There are teenagers in the darkness, yakking about drinking and dating. Suddenly they become little kids again. I got one! Get the bucket. Grab it. Squeals. They have one legal-size keeper, well over four and a half inches. Think of the unpleasant things that unite Long Islanders: the Department of Motor Vehicles, jury duty, the expressway. What besides crabbing brings them all down to the dock to do exactly the same thing, for fun? The Blue Point dock, by some miraculous breach in Long Island's locals-only force field, is open day and night to everybody. The little crabbing society on the pier the other night was Long Island itself - white, black, Salvadoran, Korean, Chinese, immigrants, the native-born and transplants. They all huddled under a gazebo as a storm rolled in. The next night was dry. I saw a couple out for a walk, a man and a woman, in pajamas and slippers. They had a flashlight, and now and then stooped to check the abandoned chicken lines that garlanded the pier. There was a language barrier, but we could still say to each other: lovely night, maybe too windy for crabs, good luck. I wished I knew enough Chinese to say: nice pajamas.