Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Land's End. Straw hat required.

Turkey necks are purchased on trays of 10-12 in the super market poultry section.  I had never bought them before.  I'd had no reason to.  For giblet gravy, the pertinent innards and meaty non-standards usually come packaged inside the turkey, and one neck (whether or not it's the actual neck of the beast at hand) is sufficient for a decent-sized boat of savory sauce.  Cervical bones of flightless birds fall into that strange category of questionable, exotic, or ethnic menus that also include pork ears, tripe, face meat, and pig's feet.  Otherwise, turkey necks have one use: bait.  A week ago, I didn't know that. But I do now.  An invitation to a crab boil is what opened these new horizons.  Some friends of ours were planning a trip to the Rockefeller Preserve, and in the course of our conversation I revealed that I'd never been crabbing before -- in fact, I had just learned to eat the things from the shells only a few weeks earlier.  What had begun as an informal dinner invitation had in moments become a call to adventure. 
 License.  In order to catch crustaceans legally, it's necessary to pay the state a modest yearly tax of $5.50.  Now the accompanying documentation only proves you have 5 bucks and a half in your wallet, not that you actually know what you're doing.  I was no wiser after being made legal than I had been before.  Crab nets.  They come in various forms and shapes, depending upon how much you're willing to spend, and whether you'd like to reuse them on future excursions.  We went for the higher end: a set of concentric metal rings inset with substantial nylon netting.  It was something like nested basketball hoops with the hole closed up and with a Styrofoam float attached to a retrieval cord.  There were other models  made of less costly aluminum rings with thinner netting of something akin to trussing twin.  Also, there were metal nets that resembled collapsible fruit baskets some people hang in their kitchens to display bananas.  Our net was big and green.  Carrying it through the sporting goods store was empowering.  What the license failed to prove, the confident carrying of this net-and-ring device certainly did: we were going crabbing, and we knew what was what.  For a total of twenty dollars and fifty cents, we had become experts.  Walking out to the car, Blaine reminded me "Now, you own a crab net."  Of all the oddball things I've purchased in 40 something years, this was actually the most unlikely for me.  But it was very cool.
Every alarm in the house was set for 3:30am.  The required gear had been prepared and stowed in the car the evening before.  At 4am we were on the road, and by 4:30 we had met the rest of our group, having made one pit stop for convenience store coffee and the de rigueur honey bun (a junky confection best enjoyed on early morning road trips and at continental breakfasts concluding Easter Sunday sunrise services).  I knew we would be driving to Abbeville, then to Kaplan, then turning south.  Beyond Kaplan extended a territory I had never explored.  In every way terra nova
As dawn approached, the arch of the Louisiana boot was silhouetted in a scrim of balmy ground fog.  Pastures and fields yielded to limitless grassy marshland; live oaks to gnarled water trees, sparsely green, some long dead, reduced to skeletal hydras rearing serpentine headless necks hung with smokey moss. High perched water birds hoped for an easy catch.  Here was the end of the world.  At the edge of this landscape, begins the sea.  
The expert crabber has two methods at his disposal.  The first involves a length of cotton twine, one end tied around a hunk of bait meat, the other held in the hand.  The meat is tossed into the water to attract a hungry crustaceann.  Vibrations up the string signal the hunter to start a slow pulling of the creature from the water, as a second person stands ready with a fish net to capture the crab before he realizes he's been duped by clever human generosity.  For those hoping to entrap several crabs at once, there is the crabbing net -- like the one we had purchased.  Several hunks of meat are tied to the inside, and the whole thing is tossed into the water.  After a period roughly equal to the time required to consume one beer, several Fritos, and a sandwich, the net is hoisted from the water.  If Neptune's smiling, the contraption should be teaming with clamping claws.  Easy in principle.  It's the variables that determine success: the time of day, the number of others who also rose at 3:30am, and most crucial: the moon phase.  Turkey necks entwined, nets cast, we waited.  An alligator swam listlessly toward the shore.  A neighboring fisherman armed with a rod and reel cast his hook and caught the attention of the aquatic reptile thanks to a colorful bob at the end of his line.  Jaws opened and the beast was hooked.  The man tugged and the plastic bob flew up into the air, over his head and became ensnared in the pier behind him.  The Alligator paddled away.  Laughter ensued from the pier as the ruddy man tried untangling his line for a second cast.  No luck on our end.  "Mais, get dat bat!" we heard from the pier.  Had the alligator returned?  A bat?  We turned just in time to see the same man hoist a writhing eel from the water, set it carefully onto the edge of the wooden walk, in order to beat it to a pulp with the aluminum bat his friend had brought from the truck.  "Das an eel.  Dat thing'll burn you like a jelly fish."  There were perils here I had never imagined.  Even when first jumping from the truck to set up folding chairs, I landed directly into an ant pile.  Crabbing wasn't working where we were.  Too many people, and the moon had instructed the delicate scavengers to crawl away from the shore.  "Dey say on de othah side, da crabs ah runnin'."  Sound advice, we supposed.  Packing up our gear, we set out for "the other side".  A single-laned gravel causeway led from the main road straight out into the marsh.  Pools and canals lined both sides.  Cars parked precariously on the inclines.  We found our spot and sunk our nets.  Pulling them out, we were alarmed to find them completely covered with a thick black ink that splattered up from the water onto us.  This was the residue from last spring's offshore oil disaster.  The raw black sludge from deep inside the the earth had found its way here and settled atop the mud.  A dilute mixture of household cleaner was all that could clean this away.  Grease. This was the catch that ended our excursion.  Making our way back to the highway, we wondered whether crab caught from that mire was actually good to eat at all.  But this was the region where the fisherman lived.  From very nearby, they took their boats out and caught crab and shrimp in deeper waters.  Surely someone had live crabs for sale.  The way to find this out is to ask locals.  On Saturday morning, locals are at local grocery markets.  Ma and Pa shops with short aisles and dim lighting.  Stelly's.  "You know of anyone selling fresh crabs and shrimp?" Blaine asked.  The cowbell atop the door clanked.  "Morning!" While the clerk thought it over, she shook her head. A lady with a tight orange perm pushing a tiny shopping cart rounded the corner near the register, engrossed in small talk with an unseen person, "Poor Hazel.  She's bad fa dat." 
"There's another store on the other side of the Intercoastal Canal bridge.  We can ask there." We phoned the others and let them in on our plan.  "Now, when we go in here, there'll be people just sitting around visiting and drinking coffee."  Blaine had stopped here before.  The place was unassuming.  Neat.  A simple screen door marked the entrance from the porch.  "Morning.  Want coffee?"  Awesome.  The same questioning for live seafood was answered with a call to an adjacent room.  "Ma, you know someone selling crabs?" A middle-aged woman entered the room drying her hands on a dish towel, which she adroitly threw over her shoulder.  "Na."  One of the men pulled out a cell phone. "Wait. Let me see."  Two calls later, he was giving us directions to a local source. "Come to think about it, just follow me. She lives across the street from me."  Our caravan followed.  The road ended at a giant chest full of live crab.  Nine dollars a dozen.  We reached for our wallets. 
In essence, this wasn't cheating.  We had assembled the gear, purchased the licenses, driven here before sunrise, tied strange meat to string, seen an alligator hooked, and witnessed a caustic eel bludgeoned to death on the pier.  We had done everything prescribed for this, but had caught nothing.  And besides, there's no rule that forbids access to the most abundant crabbing grounds on the planet: a professional fisherman's ice chest in Forked Island, Louisiana.
  
   
                

Monday, July 4, 2011

L'heure exquise

I met Blaine after work.  Clients of his had recently made a trip to New York and returned with a little green box for him, neatly wrapped up with a yellow bow.  Per se, the things are chocolate nougat sweets, but they enjoy a peculiar mystique. "Before we do anything else...look, Teuscher champagne truffles."  They may not be consumed alone -- that would diminish their magic, like being the sole witness of some spectacular astronomical event.  No one else would ever believe or could ever imagine the true length of the comet's fiery tail.  So at the end of this day,  we stopped to look up -- only for a few moments -- to share something exceedingly rare and indescribably special.