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http://neilfeather.com/category/uncategorized/ Andrew with a crawfish.

where do i buy antabuse When you’re in a car, you drive by people sometimes and wonder, “What the hell were they doing?” But you’re already long past, and don’t circle back to find out. On a bike, you just press the brake, drop your bike, and find out. I grabbed a sprig of a white-blooming shrub I hadn’t recognized – a privet as it turns out, an invasive which has taken over vast amounts of the South – and brought it over to this black couple, who were sitting, without fishing poles, by a bucket beside a ditch. The ditch was not more than a foot deep.

“Excuse me do you know what this shrub is?” I said, proffering the man the little sprig of white flowers.

He looked at me. “Dat – dat deah is a white flar, dat blooms in de springtime.”

I was not sure if he was mocking me, or if I had come across the most literal-minded person in Louisiana. I’m still not sure. But I could now dispense with the preliminaries. “So… what are you doing?”

“We crawfish fishin’.”

“Crawfish fishin’! Here?”

“Oh yeah dis is a goodplace.” The accent on the first syllable of Southern compounds – like a redlight – is quite a phenomenon.

“Can you show me how it’s done?”

“You nevuh seen nobody crawfish fishin’?”

“Never. Never in my whole life.”

Zana with some crawdads.

“Where you from?”

“New York City.”

“Hooooo-wee! You come all de way heah from Newyowk on dat bahsickle?”

“No a friend drove me down here, I’m biking up the Mississippi River. I started in Venice, I’m going to Minnesota.”

“Minnesota?” They both looked at each other. “Why you doin’ dat?”

“Well, this way I get to see everything. A couple of days ago I got a shrimp fishermen to take me out to the Gulf, I saw them fishing for shrimp, now I’m seeing crawfish fishing! We don’t have stuff like this in New York.”

“Oh yeah, it’s different down heah. Oh yeah.”

“So have you caught any?”

“Oh yeah we got some.” He showed me the bucket, at the bottom of which about half a dozen crawfish were crawling about.

“I’m John by the way.”

“Andrew.” He gave his last name too.  He was wearing jeans and a very large white t-shirt.  He was probably in his fifties, with white hairs in his thin moustache and at his temples.  The rest of his head was covered by a now-almost-formless baseball cap.

“Zana,” she said.  She looked at least a decade younger.  Both were wearing white rubber boots – coonass boots.

“So how do you catch them?”

The crawfish and the bait.

“We’ll show you,” Zana said. She took a garden hoe and reached it into the center of the ditch, where a kind of wire pyramid could be seen coming up out of the water. She put the hoe into the wire pyramid and lifted, pulling out a net which was suspended on the wire, like a pair of scales or a hanging brazier. Three or four more crawfish were crawling on the net around a gooey meat-colored glob. Holding onto the glob, the net was dumped into the bucket, and then returned to the water.

“That thing in the middle is meat?”

“Yup dat’s the bait. And they come right fuh it.”

“Can I try?”

“Shuwah. We got anodduh net right deah.” So I grabbed the garden hoe, pulled the net up with it, and put the crawfish into the bucket without dumping the bait.

“This is great! It’s easy!”

“Oh yeah dey jes come right fuh dat meat.”

“Should I put the net in the same place or should I move it to a new place?”

“Move it ovuh deah.”

So we continued our crawfish fishing. To me it is a miracle that people can be fed so easily: put a little bait in water, and there appears a meal. But it takes some knowledge: until I did this, I had no idea that there were crawfish in the wet ditches next to the road. They asked me about New York and I asked them about various things I had seen along the road. I tried to ask about the mud mounds I had seen around – mounds of mud about four or five inches high, with a hole in the middle, like a little volcano. Andrew tried all kinds of answers – alligator holes, muskrat holes – but I kept saying they were much smaller. I then found some on the other side of the road and showed him.

“Oooooh, dose. Dose ah fiddluhs.” That made sense – fiddler crabs. The holes were everywhere in drier ditches.

“Do you eat those?”

“Fiddluhs – yeah, shuwah you can eat dem. Crawfish is easier to catch dough.”

I stayed for awhile, for another changing of the nets. When I got up to go, we spoke about my trip to Minnesota, and how long it would take. I said two months. He seemed to think that was about right. “And when you get to your destinay” – dropping off the -tion – “I bet you gonna lay on yo back, and jes look at the stahs.”

It was a strange prophecy, I thought, but I hoped it would be true. It was beautiful.