The crayfish  − 11 August, 1984

The summer after second grade:

Grandma arranges the great crayfish hunting contest. There was a new, non-indigenous species of crayfish invading the lake. The new species was mean - they kicked the crap out of the locals and ate fish eggs. My grandmother realized the army she had at hand in 6 eager grandchildren and took on the daunting task of species eradication. There were prizes, with daily counts and a cummulative summer total.

We captured thousands. I would spend hours, dangling bacon fat on a string into the water and pulling those little buggers up, one by one, into the boat. The honor of "great crayfish hunter" was extremely motivating for me.

Once captured, disposal became the issue. We tried cooking them at first: writhing and twitching in the boiling water until their shells turned bright red. Cleaning them was tedious, and no one in the family was really all that excited about eating little crayfish tails on toothpicks.

We needed more industrial methods to deliver the death. So my father and I dug a huge hole out in the woods and filled the pit with cray fish –crawling all over eachother, clicking and tearing off appendages. They'd build piles of bodies with the strongest climbing to the top, fighting to get a foot hold and climb out.

For a moment I had this horrific though of I what it would be like if I were buried alive with the cray fish – how they would slowly eat me and then eat eachother. I had nightmares that night that one crayfish had eaten all of the others and gotten so big that it could dig its way out of the hole.

It came out of the ground and tried to find me - seeking revenge.

Instead, a raccoon came and dug up the crayfish. A tasty treat for him I'm sure, but he only ate a few. The rest made it out of the hole and walked across the play yard.

I got up in the morning and went running out to find my sister. There was a sickening crunch and a sharp pain in my foot - when I looked down I saw the mucusy guts oozing out of the cracked shell, those eyes and tentacles waiving wildly trying to feel anything as the life drained out. I jumped back, disgusted, only to realize the whole play yard was a living carpet of crayfish - all trying to get back to the water.

I think this was the beginning of my fear of crayfish.

I tried to get over this in the following years. I would catch them and kill them, trying to get power over them. I remember putting them on the shuffle board court and smashing them with pete. We would put them in jars with fireworks.

My grandmother had stated that killing all of the red dot crayfish was the goal – so torturing them didn’t seem like a bad thing at the time.

I had a recurring nightmare, where I’m half asleep and all of a sudden crayfish are crawling all over my bed. I wake up and throw the sheet off of me and all the crayfish dump over the top into bed with me. I would wake up sweating – adrenalin pumping.

I still have this nightmare when I'm really sick. It hasn't happened in years, but when I get a bad fever, I always go to bed with some trepidation.

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