One of the first lessons I learned from traveling is that the same thing can be called a different thing depending upon where you live. Everyone I knew growing up drank water from a hose pipe in the summer. When we moved to Florida I found myself in need of a hose pipe for the back yard, so I moseyed over to the Home Depot in search of one. Having spent nearly as much time wandering the aisles of the home improvement super store as the children of Israel spent wandering in the wilderness, with a mixture of frustration and humility, I approached an employee for assistance.
“Can you tell me where I can find a hose pipe?” I meekly asked.
“Hmmmm, I’m not sure, let me think...I think I know. Follow me.” He replied enthusiastically.
I followed him alright....to the plumbing department to look at PVC pipe. It was painfully obvious to me that, as the captain said to Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” After many more words and several hand gestures to illustrate, the employee corrected me.
“Oooooohhhhh, what you’re wanting is a garden hose.”
I don’t remember the first time I heard a debate on whether a carbonated cola was called a soda, a pop, or a coke, but I’ll never forget the first time I heard one of my wife’s co-workers refer to a couch as a davenport and a refrigerator as an ice box. She was from south Florida the best I can remember.
When I was trying to learn enough Spanish to get by in Central America I kept getting tripped up whenever I would ask for a drinking straw, until I learned that virtually every Spanish speaking country has a different word for it. The point being, the same thing can be called a different thing depending upon where you are, which brings me to crawfish, or is it crawdads, or is it crayfish?
My history with these crustaceous decapods is as long and meandering as the Suwannee River. To say the Suwannee River takes the long way around on its journey from Fargo, Georgia to the Gulf Of Mexico, is an understatement. The straight line distance between point A and B is roughly one hundred miles, but the river made famous by Stephen Foster, who ironically never visited the state of Florida (so much for Mark Twain’s advice to “Write what you know”), takes two hundred forty-six miles to make this journey. Some would say my writing, and especially my preaching, is patterned after this wandering water. Like any good Southerner, I guess we both know the joy is in the journey, not the destination, but I digress.
Like so many of my learning experiences, I first encountered one of these crawling creek critters on Chicken Creek, or more accurately, in Chicken Creek. While playing in the creek, exploring, and throwing rocks like little boys do, I lifted a rock from the creek bed and was fascinated by what I found. It might as well have been an alien. Whatever it was it had a strange fan like tail, ten legs and an armor plated body that was the same color as the creek bottom. There was one part of its body that stood out, both for being terrifying, and tipped with a bright orange...the claws, or pinchers as we called them. With a mixture of curiosity, excitement, and fear, I put my hand into the water to grab it for a closer examination, only to be further enraptured when I saw it dart away backwards. When I first asked for a name to put with this bizarre, and slightly terrifying creature, I was told it was called a “crawdad.” To this very day, if I am down by a creek I will lift up a rock or two to see if I can catch a glimpse of one.
Over the next few years I logged countless hours honing and perfecting my crawdad catching technique until I was a self appointed expert in the field. Catching a crawdad requires four skills: speed, a spooked crawdad can escape in reverse faster than the Duke boys; sneakiness, you have to approach them low and from behind so they can’t see you coming; patience, they are good at kicking up mud and clouding the water to get away so you have to wait for the water to clear up; and the most important ingredient of all, courage. If you’ve ever had one of those little guys latch onto you with those pinchers you know exactly what I mean.
Just when I thought Chicken Creek and the fantastic beasts that occupied it couldn’t get any more amazing, I discovered buried treasure. One day, while walking across the pasture from the creek to the house, I noticed a dozen or more little temple shaped mud mounds with holes in them on the ground. My next step was to do what I always did when I wanted answers, I asked my uncle Ryan what they were. Nothing could have prepared me for the revelation I was about to experience. Ryan taught me how to lower a stick down into the hole, feel for the “grab” and then quickly pull out the stick and sit in awe at the subterranean beast dangling from it. I only thought I knew crawdads. These holes were dug by large blue crawdads. When I say blue, I mean such a dark blue that some appeared almost purple or black. If you were lucky you might catch a crawdad in the creek that was a little bigger than a Matchbox car. By comparison these underground blue crawdads were often the size or your whole hand. This discovery sealed the deal for me and I was forever caught in their grip.
Chicken Creek was my practice field, but the creek behind Exchange Little League Baseball Park was where I performed. When we weren’t playing baseball we were walking across the twelve inch drain pipe to the other side of the creek to eat honey suckle and catch crawdads. If you were wearing your baseball uniform and had a game that night you had to be extra careful not to fall in and get wet and muddy while trying to navigate the slimy and slippery rocks in baseball cleats. Weeknights in the summer a couple dozen boys would nearly stomp that creek dry trying to catch the biggest, the most, or the weirdest looking crawdad. We kept our prized catches in water filled, wax paper Coke cups from the concession stand, until it was time to go home or take the field, at which point we tossed them back into the creek. Having visited Exchange Park recently it dawned on me that this “creek” was actually a sewage run off ditch, which they have since made inaccessible with a large chain link fence. Looking back I wonder if those weird crawdads with one giant pincher and one tiny one weren’t actually just mutations caused by the contamination of the ecosystem. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?
Growing older has a way of changing your focus, and catching crawdads in the creek was eventually replaced with trying to catch the attention of the girls swimming in the creek. Not unlike the crawdads, I would learn this too required patience and courage, and though they didn’t have pinchers, girls could hurt you twice as bad as a crawdad.
Though I moved on from crawdads, I would soon be introduced to the crayfish. Remember how I said the same thing can be called by different names depending on where you are? Well, what was known as a crawdad on Chicken Creek, was called a crayfish in Freshman Biology class. It has been my experience that the only person who calls this critter a crayfish is a scientist. While the creek was my domain, the lab belonged to the scientists, so, when it Rome...
Our introduction to anatomy came via dissection. We started out with things like worms and insects, but then came the day my old friend the crawdad was staked out on that weird and gross black wax that looked and smelled like a pan of brownies gone horribly wrong. Having logged countless hours in the creek with these guys I was already very familiar with every part of its body, only now I was required to learn all about the inside of its body, and what to call it all. His “Christian name” was Cambarus bartonii, and he didn’t have pinchers, those are actually legs, and they are called chelipeds. His tail is actually his abdomen and that armor plating is just a chitin based carapace. We did get one thing right on Chicken Creek, those long things sticking off his head, er, I mean, cephalothorax, are actually called antennae’s. The wax was gross, the preservative fluids smelled disgusting, and I’m of the opinion that the best way to get to know what’s inside a person is to talk with them and spend time with them, not cut them open and pin down their parts, sooooo I wasn’t a fan of the crayfish.
Like any good story where the first act introduces you to the setting and the characters, the second act introduces the problem, and just when all hope seems lost, the third act gives us the happily ever after, I’ve saved the best for last.
Before I could drive a car I met, what would become one of my lifelong friends, Jode. His family moved to Tennessee from Louisiana, and he showed up one day in the middle of my Babe Ruth Baseball League practice to join my team. Little did I know at age fifteen, but this chance meeting would be the first domino to fall in my love of all things pertaining to Louisiana culture. Not only did Jode and I become fast friends, but his family became my extended family. I loved being around them and everything about them, from the music, to the accents, to the attitudes, and ultimately, the food. His momma, Ms. Diane, made a boy raised on beans and taters fall in love with shrimp, and oysters, and crabs, and, the Tennessee crawdad’s crazy Cajun cousin, the crawfish. The circle was now complete. You catch crawdads, you dissect crayfish, but you eat crawfish. As an adult I have little reason to catch crawdads, unless I’m introducing children to the fun of catching them, and I have zero desire to ever dissect another crayfish, unless you are referring to ripping apart crawfish to pinch the tail and suck the head. I mean pinch, the abdomen and suck the cephalothorax.
In a stroke of what I’ve come to know is called serendipity (the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way), I was first pinched by a crawdad in Chicken Creek when I was only five or six years old, and when I was fifteen, in Marvin and Ms. Diane’s cabin, just a few hundred yards upstream from that very spot, I was bitten by the mudbug. Boiled crawfish, crawfish etoufee, crawfish corn bisque, crawfish Monica, crawfish bread, crawfish pie. I’m pretty sure if they made Crawfish Cheerio’s I’d eat that for breakfast. I’ve got it so bad that my fourth favorite Elvis song (after “Love Me”, “Peace In The Valley”, and “This Time You Gave Me A Mountain I Can’t Climb”), isn’t “Love Me Tender” or “Viva Las Vegas” or “Houndog”, but “Crawfish” from the soundtrack to the movie “King Creole.” Seriously, YouTube it, you’ll be singing it the rest of the day. Crayfish, crawdads, or crawfish, call them whatever you like, just be sure to call me when they are ready to eat.
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