A bag full of Ozark lobsters. Greg & Alex Stephens on the creek bank.
Someone once wrote that, at the twilight of our physical life, all we are is a soul filled with all of our life’s experiences. In simpler terms, ‘we are a summation of our experiences.’ Experiences in a life ranging from the sad to the happy, from the aggravating to the funny, from the good to the bad, and from the simple to the profound, these are what you will be at that last moment in this physical world just before entering the ‘Happy Hunting Ground.’ It occurs to me that in this life the trick is to learn to rejoice in the run-of-the-mill, everyday life experiences and learn lessons from the unpleasant life experiences so as not to repeat our mistakes. Once you learn to enjoy the simple things in life the happy and fun experiences are just a bonus. With that in mind, it is amazing how run-of-the-mill, simple experiences with something as simple as crawdads can make for experiences in a life ranging from very unpleasant all the way to laughing-until-you-cry hilarious. Enjoy the simple stuff I say.
Crawdads you say? Yes, crawdads, also known as crayfish, crawfish, mudbugs, and many other names. These delectable crustaceans have been the source for many a memory of summertime night fishing, of warm season camp feasting, and of hilarious canoeing antics. The simple experiences in my life pertaining to crawdads have brought great pleasure and provided many memories. Some would say, like a bobcat swatting at a turkey feather on a string, it’s pretty easy to keep a one-eyed hillbilly’s attention in the Great Outdoors. In some instances that trait is a virtue.
Crawfish in the Missouri Department of Conservation code book are listed as live bait with a possession limit of 150. There are various methods for legally catching the pinching critters but the method that I find the most fun is using a long handled dip net. Just at dusk, as the crawdads come up to shallower water to feed, we wade into the water with a long handled dip net and Coleman lanterns. In the bluff holes of clear, spring-fed streams, slowly wading upstream to avoid disturbing the water, a fisherman is easily able to spot large crawdads as they crawl along the bottom of the river. Since crawdads swim backwards using their tail to pull them through the water, dropping the dip net in just behind the crawdad and quickly dragging the net toward his tail is generally the most productive tactic for catching this live bait. And live bait is a good description because not only can you use a crawdad tail to catch practically any type of fish in the Ozarks, but if you have enough of them you can catch a hungry hillbilly as well.
For a hungry hillbilly there is nothing better than Hillbilly Surf and Turf (any wild meat and crawdads) and it’s not the most expensive thing on the menu when you do it all yourself. For the tastiest results it is best to purge a mess of crawdads before cleaning them. Purging is simply immersing your live crawdads in a container full of cool salt water (a cooler with a white interior is best). In the salt water the crawdads will regurgitate all the mud in their system. You simply empty the dirty water and repeat the process until the water is clean (generally two purges are all that is necessary). Then you can boil the crawdads whole in spices or you can peel and boil the meat from the tail. A word of caution – when cooking or cleaning, never start with a dead crawdad because there is no way to know how long it has been dead. When boiling a live crawdad whole, the tail will always curl under its body. If the tail is straight when it comes out of the pot don’t eat it! There’s nothing worse than a bad experience with shellfish!
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| Dinner on the creek bank. The One-Eyed Hillbilly cookin' late-night Ozark Surf & Turf. |
Dinner on the creek bank. The One-Eyed Hillbilly cooking late night surf & turf.Speaking of unpleasant experiences, there’s nothing more aggravating than a big crawdad getting a hold of a finger. And there’s nothing funnier than when that same crawdad is getting someone else. Case in point and one of my laugh-until-you-cry moments, once while canoeing with a group of friends my close friend, David Gray, had done something to me, I forget what it was. Anyway, I slipped up behind him, pulled his swimming suit out about 8 inches, and dropped in a big crawdad. To this day I have never seen anyone move so fast! He was spinning circles faster than a Jumpin-Jack firecracker. He had both hands in his drawers digging furiously like there was a hornet’s nest down there. It was a sight to behold! I’m sure it’s not a pleasant memory for him but to this day I can nearly get down laughing when I think about it! I hope we’re getting too old for him to think about revenge, besides, he deserved it…I just can’t remember what he did to me. But I’m sure it was real bad. So says the One-Eyed Hillbilly. Good luck, be safe, and get a big one.
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