It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  For my benefit, he narrated as he worked. “You gotta get rough with him first,” he said, plucking a frog from the trap. “You grab his front legs, pull ’em back, and kinda push his head flat on the board.” He pinned the frog and sawed its head off with a quick push-pull of the knife. The frog cartilage crunched and the head rolled six inches before it stopped and fell over, landing in such a way that it was looking back at its own body with a disinterested gaze.

  “Then you cut the legs at that last joint,” Jody said, “the one just up from the foot.” He started with the right front foot and turned the frog counterclockwise as he cut the other three, his movements deft and precise. “You gotta spin that frog,” he said happily. With the legs removed, he inserted two fingers between the loose skin and the frog’s back to make room for the pliers, which he then inserted, and stripped the back skin off in a single, long pull. He did the same thing on the frog’s other side, then removed the diaphragm and innards with his hands, tossing all this into the gut bucket.

  “Your last move is to split the pelvic bone, same as you would a deer. It takes a little strength,” he said, pressing until the faint crack came. “And there,” he said, tossing it into the water, “is your frog.”

  I watched him do three or four and then said I needed to try it. I tried to steel myself with the knowledge that a cute bullfrog will eat any animals it can swallow, including rodents, turtles, snakes, birds, and smaller bullfrogs. I closed my eyes for the first beheading. I forced myself not to think as I cut the legs at the first joint.

  By my third frog, I found—in a strange mixture of relief and shame —that it hardly bothered me at all to be dispatching frogs. It’s extraordinary how quickly humans can become desensitized to barbarism, especially when the stomach is involved. One thing that helped was that the process of butchering required a lot of attention. I really didn’t have time to empathize. It took me five times as long to do a frog as it did Jody, which gave me a new appreciation of just how skilled he was.

  I knew that it was hard for Jody to watch, although for completely different reasons. He wasn’t squeamish. He just couldn’t stand to watch somebody do something he could do quicker and better. It was killing him to stand idle and watch my learning curve. Once he had the knife back in his hands, he became his old self. “You got to spin that frog!” he’d call cheerfully as the frog’s limbs seemed to detach and flee of their own accord. In twenty minutes, the thirty-five frogs were done. He hefted the bucket. “Aw, Bill, we’re gonna eat good tonight, podnah!” he said.

  We had the meal at the house of Mike Bienvenu, the crawfisherman who had first hooked me up with Jody. We arrived to find that Mike had already cooked up some of the frogs in a rich sauce piquant, which we ate over rice, savoring the light, sweet meat and the sauce and picking out the tiny bones. There were also fried frog legs, which had the same flavor but also a kind of riverine bass note, wild and clean. I was developing a serious taste for frog. I was in the kitchen, tucking into seconds of both kinds—for research purposes, naturally—when I heard laughter out back. Jody was telling the group how tentative I’d been at first and how I’d taken to it as the night went on. “He was leaning so far out the boat I thought he was going in,” Jody said. “But he wanted that frog. Yeah, ole Bill was grabbing ’em pretty good. After about an hour and a half, I asked if he was ready to go, and he says—get this—‘Yeah, my ass is wet.’” Jody clapped and laughed his big laugh and everybody else laughed, too. I guess having a wet ass comes with the job if you make your living off the swamp. At that moment, however, I felt pretty satisfied. I was soaking up the last bits of frog and sauce piquant on my plate with one hand and had a cold beer in the other. I had a dry ass. And I had acquitted myself honorably as a novice frogger.

  A call later that night brought good news. Michelle had found a cheap last-minute flight to Lafayette and would be down the next day. I’d already asked about her coming and Jody said that would be fine, as crawfishing had slacked off a bit since he’d called me and there would be plenty of room. “If it was later in the season and I was catching fifty or sixty sacks a day, it might be a problem. But we’ll be fine,” he said. “I just want y’all to see it.”

  Two days later, Michelle and I met Jody at his house at nine a.m., piled into his truck, and headed back to the same ramp we’d used when frogging. We stopped at a bait wholesaler along the way and picked up four 40-pound boxes of frozen fish. The boxes bore the logo of Lund’s Fisheries of Cape May, New Jersey. I asked what kind of fish they were and Jody said, “We call ’em ‘bunker.’ It’s a real oily kinda fish.” He already had a couple of big yellow bags of a dry crawfish bait—Crusty Chunks, a Purina product. I’d never considered that there might be money to be made manufacturing crawfish bait, but there obviously was. Jody liked to use both kinds in his traps. Fish had the stronger smell, while the Crusty Chunks lasted longer. Jody figured he owned about 1,400 traps in all, enough for four or five “runs,” or the number he could handle in an average day. He had only two runs out at the moment. The one we were going to do had been sitting for two days.

  Jody was clearly happy to be crawfishing again, singing snatches of songs as he sorted his gear. We launched and twenty minutes later were deep in the same narrow, twisting roads we’d been on two nights earlier. In daylight, I noted bits of pink flagging tape dangling from bushes every twenty yards or so. These marked Jody’s traps, each of which was secured to the bush by a string. Jody uses “pillow” traps, which might more properly be called “pillowcase” traps, since they’re closed at one end and open at the other and fold almost flat. They’re made of vinyl-coated wire mesh and typically measure about two feet wide by three feet long. The traps are dumped and then rebaited through the open end, which is usually then shut with nothing more elaborate than a clothespin. Inset in the other, “closed” end were two inverted mesh funnels. It’s through these that crawfish, drawn by the smell of the bait, found their way into the trap. The funnels were constructed in such a way that once a crawfish was inside, it was possible but highly unlikely that it would find its way out again.

  Jody wore foul weather bibs against the muck and slime of the traps, even though the temperature was already in the eighties by ten a.m. Before him as he stood in the back of the boat was a squarish metal tray with sides about five inches tall. The edge facing him had no side. It was open and had a sort of throated hole just before the edge. It was down this hole that all the keeper crawfish went, into a plastic mesh sack, just like the kind you buy potatoes in, which tied to the throat. I’d already told Jody that I wanted to help and had been assigned the job of baiter. I sat facing aft on the middle seat, facing the tray. I’d been told to rebait each trap with half a frozen bunker and a handful of Crusty Chunks, which bore an unfortunate resemblance to large dog turds.

  At the first flagged bush, Jody threw the boat into neutral and hoisted the trap by its string. As it reached the waterline, he gently pushed away the surface scum so it wouldn’t coat the trap’s mesh, hoisted the trap, undid the clothespin, put it into his mouth, and dumped the trap onto the tray. Out clattered half a dozen crawfish, their claws spread wide and high and like little gunfighters ready to take on whatever this new world might portend. Each dumping also delivered a fine spritz of swamp water and bait slime into my face. Along with the catch came the partially eaten baitfish and its skeleton, muck, bits of vegetation, a baby catfish, and a few snails. Occasionally, Jody said, he pulled up a water moccasin, but he said this in a way that suggested the foulest-tempered of North American venomous snakes posed no special hazard. Jody projected such confidence and mastery that you felt like such a snake ought to be grateful that Jody didn’t bite it. He quickly sorted the catch, hurrying the keepers along and down the hole and discarding everything else over the side. Then, in an almost courtly gesture, he dipped the open end of the trap toward me to rebait. I tossed the bait in and he carefully lined the trap back into pla
ce. “You always have to set that trap so it’s leaning against something,” he explained. “If you set it flat on the bottom, the crawfish can’t get to the funnels and into the trap. They don’t need a lot of room, but they need some.”

  We moseyed along the twisting road, the sun beating down on us. Michelle sat in the bow and watched. I’d learned after the first few times to turn my face when he dumped the trap and avoid the spritz. After twenty traps, we had less than half a bag of crawfish. Jody admitted that this was uncommonly slow crawfishing, but didn’t seem disappointed by it. “It’s early,” he said. “It’ll get better in a few days.” At one point, maybe an hour in, Jody complimented me on my work. “You doing real good, Bill,” he said. “You’re turning into a real master baiter.” As soon as he said it, I realized that every person who had ever done the job must have had to endure this pun. I tried to give a good-natured groan, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  A little later, Jody called my attention to the water. “See how still this water is? All that scum? How low the visibility is? That water should be moving. Current is what keeps this place alive. What you see here is what those spoil ridges do.”

  The day got hotter. Michelle and I had somehow neglected to have anything but coffee before coming out and had brought neither water nor food. Jody didn’t seem to have brought any, either. Unlike us, he didn’t seem to mind. He wasn’t even sweating, while Michelle and I were both sweating just from being out under the unmitigated sun. We were also hungry, thirsty, and—as much as we hated to admit it—thoroughly bored. We’d both been looking forward to going out with Jody. The unfortunate reality, however, was that the charms of crawfishing were lost on us.

  On a really good day, Jody went on, he might get fifty sacks, close to a ton of crawfish. But the wholesale price fluctuated with the supply. When the crawfish were scarce, the price might go to $1.50 or $1.75 a pound. When the crawfish were running thick, the price might drop to 50 or 75 cents. Like virtually all crawfishermen, Jody had a complicated relationship with Bayou Land Seafood, his regular buyer. “They were paying $1.50 a pound yesterday, but were making noises about dropping it to $1.25 or even a dollar.” This was unusual for so early in the season, he said, when the crustaceans weren’t especially plentiful. “The price should be higher. They’re selling everything they can get, Bill. You can bet your last dollar on that. They always make money. They’re not supposed to, but they all talk to each other and set the price. And they know we’ve got to take it.” But if it dropped to a dollar a pound, Jody would sit it out until the price went up or the crawfish started running heavier. “The way it is now, I’m working all day to lose money by the time you figure in your overhead.” Jody’s overhead—which includes bait for 250 to 400 traps a day, gas for the boat and the truck, depreciation on the truck and boat, and the traps themselves—runs 25 or 30 percent of his total take. Jody says there have been times when no processors would buy his crawfish because he argued with them about the price and tried to organize other crawfishermen to do the same. “But I’m older now. I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut a little better.”

  The day wore on, the temperature rising. The water intensified the sun’s power and there was nothing tall enough out here to offer any shade. Michelle and I were both working on robust sunburns. I was sweating heavily. And I wasn’t even standing up, much less sweltering inside waterproof bibs. How Jody could come out here day after day, on his feet and slinging traps for eight hours in ninety-five-degree heat and 90 percent humidity, was beyond me.

  “You get used to it,” Jody said when I asked if it didn’t wear him out. “You have to.” He’d had pain in his shoulder last year, which his doctor diagnosed as a rotator cuff injury. Jody finally traced the problem to the way he was shaking traps over the sorting tray. “I was sorta trying to throw the crawfish out,” he said, and demonstrated, shaking the trap as if trying to expel salt from a giant shaker. “When what I should have been doing was just rattling it.” He demonstrated again, a motion more like grabbing someone by the lapels and shaking him.

  For the life of me, I couldn’t understand what Jody loved about this work. He had already told me that he could make better money bending metal tubing on oil and gas lines. He shrugged, saying he did that work when he had to. “But they’re not the healthiest places to work, you know what I’m saying? Some of them expose you to a lot of chemicals. And I get bored doing the same thing after a while.”

  Really? I thought. And what, I asked, did he call lifting and rebaiting 300 traps a day? I winced inwardly when I heard the note of frustration that had crept into my voice. I hadn’t intended it to be so obvious. Jody heard it, too. His face didn’t change, but he set down the trap he was handling—something he hadn’t done all day—and took a moment before answering. It reminded me of the long silence after I’d asked Mike Bienvenu how he kept fighting for crawfishermen’s rights when the system was so corrupt.

  “We’re only five hundred yards or so from where we hunted those ducks in the fall, Bill,” he finally said quietly. “You know that?” I said I didn’t. I felt suddenly and deservedly chastened. The ramp where we’d launched was twenty miles from the one we’d used when we went duck hunting. I’d have thought we were at least that far from that cypress trunk blind and the narrow lake where Jody had shot the ducks. Everything out here looked pretty much the same to me. To Jody, every inch of it probably distinct. This man had graciously offered to show me the work closest to his heart and I’d all but insulted him. He was too sure of who he was and where he was from to take offense, but I’d clearly shown the limits of my understanding.

  “Every day out here’s different,” he said. “You might hardly make your expenses one day and catch so many crawfish the next that you have to make two runs just to get ’em all back to the truck.” Besides, he liked working outdoors, liked being his own boss, liked not having anything but the weather, water, and crawfish telling him what to do. He liked seeing the critters and being attuned to their rhythms and ways, how the birds and mammals would be active one day and not the next. I knew that Jody was counted the best of the thirty or so hunters who belonged to the hunting camp. It wasn’t surprising that he was a good hunter. He lived a good part of his waking hours out here. He knew where the deer hid when the season opened and the swamp was suddenly full of rifle fire and men who came only a few days a year to hunt. He knew where the turkeys liked to roost and loaf and feed, when and where the first ducks tended to come in the fall. He’d told me how one member of the hunting club had recently offered $300 for Jody to “guide” him and his son deer hunting. “What they really want is to know my secret spots,” Jody explained. “Not for sale, podnah!”

  What Jody was all about, I realized, was the act of being hooked up to the swamp, relating to it over the seasons of each year, feeling its rhythms. To me, on this hot day, the swamp seemed a static thing, and hauling crawfish traps was mind-dulling, repetitive work. To Jody, it was a chance to see how the swamp felt on a particular day. And I suppose that once you got tuned in, no two days were exactly alike.

  I knew he couldn’t get lost out here but wondered if he ever got afraid, working alone so far from help. He frowned, perplexed, as if the very question struck him as odd. He did say that he sometimes worried about being in an aluminum boat when a thunderstorm came up quickly, not an uncommon event in summer. Or about a lightning strike felling a tree onto the boat. But that was really it as far as his personal safety went. His greatest fear was what he might do if he surprised someone else in the act of robbing his traps. It had never happened to Jody, but it did happen. “I’m not near as hotheaded as I used to be,” he said. “But something like that, a man stealing my living . . .” he left the thought unfinished as he pulled up another trap. Jody was powerfully built, surprisingly deft in his movements, and exceptionally strong. I’d seen him waltz with perfect ease down the three-inch catwalk from bow to stern with a full ice chest on his shoul
der. The thing had to have weighed 150 pounds. I’d never seen him speak to anyone with the slightest edge in his voice. But you also got the sense that you wouldn’t want to get on his bad side.

  By two o’clock we had three and a half sacks of crawfish. “There’s still a lot of daylight left, but the fishing’s not that good,” Jody said. “Besides, y’all look tired.” Michelle and I exchanged knowing looks. We’d been ready to go for hours. The spray of swamp water and bait slime seemed to have permeated my clothes, skin, and entire being. Michelle and I couldn’t wait to get off the bayou and find food, water, and a shower.

  As we stowed gear in preparation for the run home, Michelle looked into the box of now-thawed baitfish. “That’s shad, Jody, isn’t it?” Jody said he didn’t know. He just called it bunker. Then he recalled that he’d heard it called both menhaden and shad somewhere. Michelle looked more closely at one of the fish. She was sure it was a shad, more specifically a hickory shad. She had grown up eating shad, a migratory fish that had once been a major food fish in the country but was now eaten primarily by a dwindling number of old people. She especially liked fried shad roe.

  “You eat the eggs?” Jody asked, incredulous. He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, all I know is that it’s a trash fish that nobody around here eats,” he said. I was trying to square this with the mantra that had led me to Jody, “A Cajun’ll eat anything that doesn’t eat him first.” He’d described every animal we’d seen in the Basin as good to eat. But he was adamant about the ­inedibility of bunker.

  At Bayou Land Seafood, Jody’s sacks were placed on a certified scale of indeterminate age. The needle settled at 186 pounds. Bayou Land was paying $1.50 a pound, although the guy running the scales acknowledged that the owner would drop it to $1.25 or even $1 if the crawfish didn’t get “nicer,” meaning bigger and meatier. The crawfish being brought in evidently had yet to regain their pre-hibernation weight. Jody pocketed a check for $276. As he drove us back to our car, he totaled up his expenses. He had put $48 worth of gas in the boat today and used nearly all of it. He’d gone through four boxes of frozen bunker at $14 each, so that was $56. He’d used up two bags of Crusty Chunks at $13 apiece, so that was $26. And, having driven about fifty miles in a truck that gets fourteen miles to the gallon when towing a boat, that was another $12 in gas. By his count, after expenses, that amounted to $137 for an eight-hour day, not counting taxes, or wear-and-tear on his boat, traps, and ten-year-old truck. “If the price had been a dollar a pound, I’d have made $49,” he said. “But that’s alright. It’ll get better. April’s coming.”