Cranberry Crawdad

Tractors putt-putt. Trucks come and go. Conversations begin and fizzle with our energy levels. The soft sounds can be easily missed: the wind through the cattails, the gentle splash of water through irrigation canals, the call of water birds along the river that runs by our farm. It is these soft sounds I love best. They draw me out of my inner musings more effectively than a blaring horn.

We are filthy. Every one of us covered with bog-mud that clings, encrusts, and only comes off with the hard scrubbing of a fingernail brush. There are cranberry leaves everywhere. The tiny photosynthetic centers of our crop lodge in every imaginable place.

I am incredibly tired, but happy. So happy.

Planting cranberries is not a farm job we do often. Once established, the low-lying woody vines will live indefinitely, if properly cared for. We knew when we purchased the neglected 70-acre bog that it would have to be excavated, re-leveled, and planted. So we are gathering armfuls of mucky vines from the wagon behind an ancient tractor, dropping the vines and spreading them; not too thick, not too thin.

Great-Granddaddy, at eight-five-years-old, relishes the chance to get his hands into the gritty work. His ornery eyes twinkle as he teasingly pokes mud on the one clean square-inch of my sleeve. He tells stories of the old days of cranberry growing, before the work became “easy” with machinery. He tells us of hand-scooping the entire crop, of removing stumps with mules instead of tractors. He tells us how things used to be when he was strong and his brothers were living.

I think how odd the channel life’s river digs in the landscape of our lives. From headwaters of youth, we envision a straight path to the sea. But is that the way gravity pulls us toward our purpose? How did an Alabama girl view the life ahead of her? Certainly not far from her Southern roots, on a Yankee cranberry farm where life is messy bliss.

“Look what I found,” Cindy says. She is another imported Alabamian, the most recently added member of The Cutts Wives Club.

“What is it?” We gather around as she untangles the creature who found an unlikely sanctuary in the vines while they lay in the ditch before planting.

“A crawdad!” I recognize his shape from lazy days playing in the creek in front of my grandmother’s house trying to keep cool in the heavy Alabama summer.

“Crawdad? That’s a crayfish,” Uncle Bill corrects me.

“Well, where we’re from they’re called crawdads.”

Cindy holds the little fellow by the abdomen and we examine him, discussing his regional nomenclature and edible parts. Other Southern versus Northern terms are discussed, and I tell the story of how I tried to order a piece of pecan (puhKAHN) pie in a restaurant recently. The waitress kept asking me what I wanted, three times, until my husband said, “PEE-can,” and interpreted for her. To cover my embarrassment at his smirk, I retort, “We grow them in the South; I should think we know how to pronounce them.”

We spend a few too many precious daylight minutes looking at this crawdad, discussing how my sister in New Orleans might prepare him for dinner. He is spared that end, and given a seat of honor on the hood of the tractor until we get to the end of the section we’re planting and can return him to the irrigation canal.

We’re quiet for a while, busy in our work, and I reflect on heritage and language and how little any of that matters to the creature-turned-tractor-hood-ornament. A crawdad by any other name fulfills his biology. At the end of the row, Cindy places the crustacean in another irrigation ditch. He is not far from where he started by my measure, but as far from NJ as Alabama in his. Good-bye little critter. You will always be a crawdad to me.