Crawdads Part 2

It seems cliché to talk about the weather, especially when it’s bad, but when it’s this bad it’s impossible not to. It would be like walking about with an arrow sticking out of your chest, and not mentioning it in conversation.

We went down the creek on the farm to try our hand at crawdads there. We actually found more than we found in the Bourbouse, and they were a bit bigger. That is to say, some of them were. Most of them looked more akin to crickets than to seafood. But we still collected enough to make a small meal.

Everything on the farm was unbearably hot. It was hard to touch a metal gate long enough to open it. I thought I’d try some jug fishing for catfish, and when I went to pick up some scrap iron to use as anchors I could barely handle the metal. And we had to splash water on the boat at the pond to cool it down enough to sit on it.

Dad had warned me that when he tried jug fishing, all he caught were turtles. I had the same luck, catching one turtle in a short time with two jugs. I cut the line and let him go. He looked a little sad and pathetic with a big hook piercing his lip, but really no worse than those kids that hang around outside of the mall.

So we returned to Columbia right after lunch with potatoes, crawdads and blackberries in hand, not a ton of any, but enough to get by. Not bad for a 24-hour visit.