Of course, I knew southwestern Louisiana was low and flat when we moved here a couple of years ago. What I didn’t realize was that with the flat land, clayish soil and the significant annual rainfall numbers, I would in essence be running a crawfish farm (it’ll always be pronounced that way to me no matter how Daniel Webster’s book says to spell it or pronounce it).
After our first little rain, those dirt “chimneys” began to pop up in the backyard. Thankfully, they don’t seem to appear with any regularity or large numbers in the front yard. I’m sure Life Mate would find ways to eradicate them if that were the case. Crawfish chimneys don’t do anything for your landscaping, especially when the same rains that produce the chimneys are the impetus for those blossoms that Life Mate coos at and cultivates to tickle the spring and summer fancy of the traffic on our street.
While the backyard mud village doesn’t seem to be a threat to the ability of the gentleman who mows our yard, it probably doesn’t help his attitude any when he sees a plethora of the nefarious mudbug chimneys. Just as long as he doesn’t charge me a higher rate over it or my “live and let live” attitude toward the critters could change.
My view of crawfish has been generally accepting. As a mere boy I used a “fishing” apparatus consisting of a piece of string about 18-24 inches long with a small piece of raw bacon tied on one end to hunt crawfish. I’d feed the line into the chimney/crawdad hole and leave it for a few seconds, after which I usually got a “bite.”
However, it’s not like a “bite” from a fish in a pond. You don’t necessarily feel it unless the crawfish is sizable and decides to, uh, ahem, “take home the bacon,” in order to enjoy it as a meal. You patiently wait until you think maybe a crawfish has begun to chow down, then you gently draw the line out and, voila!, there’s a crawfish.
As a youngster, my mother assured me the fan-tailed, forward-thrust-clawed, prehistoric-appearing amphibian was “too nasty” to eat.
But, as a young man out in the world of service clubs trying events to raise money to finance public service activities, those groups found a crawfish boil was a popular fund-raiser. So, I learned to eat crawfish tails. Plus, the ones out of a backyard hole weren’t really the eating variety so I learned that the “boil” offerings were pond-raised and much “cleaner.”
A series of newspaper publishing moves produced no areas with crawfish yens, so I went a few years without until I saw it done on a grand scale.
In Jasper, Darrell Flurry is a well-known and respected businessman and a successful logger who has done exceptionally well. He believes in thanking the community that provides him that opportunity. For years, his “thank you party” was a major event, attended by hundreds.
Darrell hired a firm that specialized in such events and they’d boil thousands of crawfish for his annual event.
It was also a freeloader’s heaven, which the genial logger tolerated as he showed his appreciation to those who really helped his business.
It was there that I learned to be an “expert” eater of crawfish. I learned the art of breaking the tail and head apart and quickly peeling the tail enough to suck the meat out, chew it and move on to the next one. Seeing how many trays of shells/hulls you can return after polishing off the crawfish is the “mark of a man” in that realm. However, I miss the mark on one count: sucking whatever out of the crawfish head. I’m a “tail” guy all the way.
I would never have won a “championship” in crawfish eating.
Willis Webb is a retired community newspaper editor-publisher of more than 50 years experience.
