Lobster Tale and Other Crustacean Stories

My friend Stacey posted a photo of her eating lobsters in Vermont during her vacation there this summer. It sparked a memory of the time I ate lobsters in Greenville, South Carolina during my vacation a few summers back. Then, as I thought about telling that story, I realized I had a few stories to tell about lobsters, shrimp, crabs, and crawdads, so here goes!

I'll start with the lobster story since it kicked everything off. As I mentioned before, I was on vacation in Greenville, South Carolina. That's where Rachel's big brother, Rich, lives with his wife and children. Rachel's mother moved there from St. Louis a while back, also. You can see Rich's wife and Rachel's older sister, Linda, in the photo above. We call Rich's wife Goose, but her real name is Sarah Lynn.

While we were visiting Greenville, and since Linda had also flown in, Goose and Linda decided we needed to have a lobster dinner. They ordered ten lobsters from somewhere. I would say it was either Legal Seafoods in Boston or from the store in Marblehead that Linda used for seafood when she still lived there. They were not the little one pound lobsters we get at HEB. In Boston they call those chicken lobsters and serve them as snacks in bars. No, these were nice big ones. They came with a nice big price. I remember hearing that with delivery they were somewhere between four and five hundred dollars. Unfortunately, when Linda placed the order, she messed up on the address, and the lobsters were delivered to Greenville, North Carolina, five hours away.

Well, if it had been me, I would have cried over the loss of those lobsters and got out some hot dogs and had a different dinner. Wait a minute! That's a lie. I would never have ordered $400 worth of lobsters to begin with. Only five of us were even lobster eaters that night. Rich was on call at the hospital and couldn't even eat with us. The sisters, however, decided to have the lobsters re-delivered by courier at a whopping cost of $500. When Rich came home for a few minutes to get something, he said, "Those women are crazy. I could have taken you out for lobster in a restaurant for half the price!"

Anyway, the $900 lobster dinner was absolutely delicious. I got to eat two of those huge monsters! The other members of the family (Rachel, Jared, Josh, and my nephew RH) got to eat some delicious pasta dish that Goose cooked up for them. Mix that in with great wine, a very nice dining room, and the company of Grandma Jane, and you had a very nice evening.

Now, set your time machines, and join me in 1975. In my earlier post called "A Funny Story About Mom", I mentioned how she and I had gone to New Jersey during the summer so she could attend the funeral of her uncle. While we were there, she decided to take me crabbing. Crabbing is something we did all the time up there. Mom loved to do it as much as anyone else. Grandpop always had everything you needed but the fish heads on hand. I don't know where he got them from, but he got us some, and off we went.

I can't remember exactly where we went that day. I know it was somewhere where we could crab from a bridge, as Mom didn't do boats very often. We would have been using those square traps that lay flat underwater and slam closed when you pull them up. I preferred using a crab line. That's just a long piece of string with a weight and fish head tied to one end and a stick for winding tied to the other. With a crab line, you wait until you feel a tapping on the line. Then you slowly pull the line in until you see the crab hanging on to the fish head just below the water. You put the net down in the water and scoop the crab up from below. The net's pole isn't long enough to do that from a bridge.

We spent as much time as we could catching crabs that day. The tidal conditions have to be just right. When they change, the crabs stop coming. Anyway, we caught a bunch of them. We were dumping them into a big cardboard box in the trunk of our Chevy Nova. We put a little bit of moist seaweed over them to keep them alive. Grandpop said we should never eat a dead crab, even if we knew it was freshly caught.

When we got back to the motel, I carried all the equipment back to where Grandpop kept it. Then, Mom and I grabbed the box full of crabs out of the trunk and started walking towards Grandmom and Grandpop's apartment. Suddenly, the bottom of the box gave out, and crabs were scurrying all over the motel parking lot. I ran and got crab tongs from the kitchen, and Mom, Grandmom, and I spent about twenty minutes re-catching all those crabs. I wish I could have filmed it. We screamed and squealed and LAUGHED the whole time. It was hilarious.

Later that evening, we enjoyed a great feast of steamed crabs. Grandpop and I cleaned them after they were cooked and dumped the whole pile of them on newspaper in the middle of the dining room table. It was everyone for themselves, except Grandmom. Grandpop always sat there and got a huge pile of crab meat out of the shell for Grandmom before he ever ate any himself. The only bad thing about that feast was when Grandpop reminded us, "That only an idiot would put wet crabs in a cardboard box!"

Back to the time machines! This time we are going to go to Mt. Eden, Texas in 1983. Mt. Eden was a small black community near Waelder at one time. Now, the only thing there are the Mt. Eden Baptist Church and the closed up building of the old post office. I moved out there from downtown Waelder, because it was not quite the fishbowl my apartment across from the school had been. I had twenty-one acres to roam around on with my dog Trooper. There was even a tank with lots of perch and crappie in it.

There was a dry creek that came from the tank and ran the length of the property line. I had explored it many times on hikes with Trooper. It was only about 300 yards from the house. I never saw a drop of water in it until one day after some pretty heavy storms had gone through. The water that was there was amazingly clear. I saw a huge crawdad crawling on the bottom. I was amazed. Where would a crawdad come from? The creek was usually dry.

Mr. Goode, the school board president at the time, rented my house to me. His brother, Jeff, took care of the cattle on my place. He would come to feed them, and usually stopped to chat with me. I asked him if he had known about crawdads in that little creek. He told me that they were in all the area creeks. When it was dry, he claimed they burrowed underground until the water returned. Someday, I'll research that on the Internet. Back then, I took his word for it. I had learned from talking to them that both of the Mr. Goodes were very knowledgeable about a lot of things.

Anyway, I decided I was going to catch some of those crawdads . I figured they weren't that different from crabs. I made a crab line using a chicken neck instead of a fish head. Mr. Hernandez, who owned the grocery store in Waeldar, saved chicken necks and guts from the chickens he barbecued, and gave them to me for fishing bait. I fished all over Waelder on just about every one's property. I brought home about $600 dollars a month back then, and fish was my primary food source. That is, when I wasn't eating fried chicken necks, livers, hearts, and gizzards from Mr. Hernandez!

I took my line, a net, and a folding chair down to the creek and tried catching crawdads. It worked just like I thought it would. Unfortunately, there just weren't that many crawdads there. I saved them in the fridge for a few days until I had about ten of them. But my story isn't about the crawdads. My story is about a snake.

The last time I was down at the creek catching crawdads, Trooper was going crazy barking at something. I just ignored him. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I watched in horror as the biggest water moccasin I had ever seen slithered right between my legs. It went down into the creek and swam in the direction of the tank. The shock of it drove me temporarily insane. I ran all the way back to the house, locked Trooper inside, and got my 22. I ran with it all the way back to the creek and hunted that snake down like a madman. I thought I saw it once and blasted away at it a few times. I'm sure I didn't get it, but man I tried. I was so dang mad that that snake had the audacity to slither right between my legs. Crazy? Yes. I agree.

Okay, I'm going to end with a shrimp story. This one takes place in 1991. When Rachel and I got married, Rich and Goose still lived here in San Antonio. Rich was a surgery resident at Wilford Hall on Lackland AFB. That is part of why Rachel ended up in San Antonio. Anyway, one day, Goose invited Rachel, Joshua (who was not quite a year old yet), and me to lunch. We went to the Café du Vin. It was a nice restaurant over in the space which Milano's Ristorante Italiano‎ now occupies on Wurzbach and Lockhill Selma.

The lunch was nice, I'm sure. I know we would have had wine and taken our sweet time eating while talking and enjoying being together. I can't tell you what we had to eat, except that I definitely had some shrimp. It may have been a shrimp salad or cocktail. I don't remember. What I do remember is giving a piece of shrimp to Joshua. He put it in his mouth, gave us a wide-eyed look of horror, and spit it out with the force of an atomic bomb blast. It sailed through the air and landed on a piece of bread. Unfortunately, the bread was on a plate at the NEXT table. We were really embarrassed, but the guy whose bread was bombed was nice about it. To this day, Josh will not even try shrimp. On some rare occasions, he will eat fish sticks. Other than that, he is just like Rachel. If it lives in water, don't serve it to either of them!

Now, don't think for a minute that I am out of shellfish stories. I have lots left. For example, I could tell you about the time I ate so much at the Boston Sea Party that I almost had to be rushed to the emergency room. I could tell you about the time I went on a Campus Crusade for Christ retreat at Port Aransis, and my buddy Jim and I were the only ones who seemed to know how to peel shrimp when they opened up a huge ice chest full of boiled shrimp and told us to have at it. I could tell you about my trips to Cape May where Grandmom would hand pick the lobsters she would take home and make the most delicious crab-stuffed lobster with. I could tell you about the time I took Rachel on a date to the Dry Dock Oyster Bar only to discover that she didn't eat anything from the sea. I could tell you many more stories, but I won't. Instead, I am going to take my daddy's advice and CLAM UP!