Becoming Louisianan

If you come to Louisiana for only a semester, it might be the fall semester and you'll get all you want of NCAA football, but you might miss out on crawfish. If you're in Louisiana for a year, it's pretty difficult to miss out on crawfish season. It coincides conveniently with Lent, because crawfish are God's manna for swamp people.

When you live in Louisiana, you learn by and by how to eat a boiled crawfish. And if you're lucky, you learn how to identify the good ones from the bad ones. The good ones, it turns out, are the ones that are boiled alive. Their tails curl. The bad ones are the ones that are dead before they're boiled, and their tails extend straight and uncurled. (By the way, that is a sort of myth, although it seems by my estimation to be a good test.).

Eating a crawfish entails breaking the arthropod's carapace apart from the tail (actually the abdomen, or in crustaceanese, the pleon). Learning what's best about eating crustaceans from their shell involves learning about the juicy yellow fat which is usually spooned out of the carapace with a finger and ingested with the tailmeat. It's what people are going for when they "suck the heads" of their boiled crawfish. And it's good. It is, as I learned on www.crawfish.com, hepatopancreatic tissue. There it is said that it is, in fact, not fat, but actually, as far as what I can understand from what a hepatopancreas does--metabolizing lipids, we might as well call it fat.

You might think that eating your share of a mountain of vermillion mudbugs in this manner might as well make you somehow Louisianan, but of course not. After you're in Louisiana for a while, you also get to learn how to execute the crawfish boil. You get your crawfish, you wash and purge the crawfish. You use a giant's pot and a Texas sized burner. You use Zatarain's. You boil potatoes and corn and onions and maybe sausage with the boil. You heat it up for so long. You boil for so long. You let soak for so long. And then so long, hepatopancreatic lipids and sumptuous tailmeat.

Purging crawfish means dousing them with saltwater, which makes them empty their digestive tracts. The digestive tract, which has the similitude of a small "vein" running through their tailmeat should be nice and clean. Black full digestive tracts are from negligent purging, and adds to the mud and detracts from the delicate tailmeat and sumptuous hepatopancreatic lipids.

You might think that cooking up a genuine crawfish boil makes you Louisianan. And it helps, but today I realized that after 10 years of a connection with the Pelican State, that I finally took the next step in being even more Louisianan. That was when I went down the bayou with the one-legged father-in-law and his .45. We drove back into a property that his brother has spent 10 years taming. There we harvested wild crawfish from crawfish traps. The .45 was for the alligators. What deserves note is the plentiful birdlife down there--something I had forgotten. But just in our little excursion we saw herons, cranes, egrets, stilts, ducks, ibises. There were some I didn't know. The excursion was actually quite brief. But it was real Louisiana.





And you might think that somehow I'm going to get to the point of calling myself Louisianan, but there a good deal of other labels I would rather attach to myself. Maybe after I buy some land down the bayou and build on it, knowing that it will flood. And I have to make the traps. And I have to get a .45 probably, and go half deaf, or maybe lose a leg or finger. To an alligator would be best, but cancer or a staph infection will do. But I did marry a good old Louisianan, and all three of my spawn have been delivered in this odd state of birds and Republicans.



The thing is, I have as much love for Louisiana as I do for, say, most of the midwestern states combined. And if you throw in the badlands and forests in the Dakotas, that's probably pretty accurate, because there's a lot in Louisiana that really moves me. Today, in Louisiana, was one of the best days of my life, actually. Not only did I have this wonderful adventure, but we had a birthday jamboree of family times and dinosaur delight.