Close Call At The Crawdad Cook

When it’s summertime in the Mississippi Delta and too wet to go to the field, crawdads are boiling. Our favorite place to undertake this excursion into Cajun crustacean culinary conviviality was at Skeet’s crop-dusting strip, known locally as Redneck International. The men set up cooking equipment while the women arranged tables, chairs, and coolers filled with sodas and canned euphoriants.

---

I kept a Piper Cub at Skeet’s strip. Providence peered approvingly over Mr. Piper’s shoulder when he designed this tiny tandem-seat trainer. No aircraft is more fun to fly. My Cub was nicknamed “Freddie” in memory of Fred Frazier, a legendary pilot who taught me and countless others to fly. We had bought several hundred pounds of crawdads. While my brother, whose cooking skills attracted eaters from all over, went through the ritual of purging, boiling and packing ’dads, spring potatoes and corn on the cob in coolers to steam in the flavor, I took kids for plane rides. It was windless, sunny and warm, ideal for real kids and overgrown kids to take plane rides, enjoy good food, good music, and country-style cuttin’ up.

---

---

Every pickup had at least one shotgun in its rear window rack, and one of my hunting buddies came up with the idea of using empty cans for target practice … as they floated down from the heavens. After strapping can-filled buckets in Freddie’s front seat, I climbed several hundred feet and dumped them above the waiting can killers. Since Cubs are piloted from the rear seat and the doors can remain open in flight, dumping buckets was easy. As the cans floated within range of my armed amigos, they blazed away, and I spiraled down to refill the buckets. Mr. Fred wore a huge ring that he rapped on students’ head when they made dumb mistakes, one of which was failing to apply carburetor heat when landing to avoid fuel starvation. That day, he would have given my noggin a painful rap. Amidst all the hurried landings and takeoffs, I forgot to apply carburetor heat. Two hundred feet up on the next takeoff, the engine died. I turned for the runway, hoping altitude — a pilot’s best friend — wouldn’t desert me before I reached the end of the strip … precisely where the party was in progress. As the plane swooped toward the revelers, its engine soundless and propeller motionless, they fled in panic, like prairie dogs beset upon by a hungry hawk. The wheels banged the ground and Freddie jack-rabbited skyward, barely missing the cooking pots, tables and pickups, and fluttered a few yards further down the strip, flopped to the ground, ping-ponged a few hops, and lurched to a stop, all in one piece. When it comes to devising wacky ways to have fun, such as shooting cans tossed from an airplane, no one can out-devise us country folks, but every now and then we tend to get a tad carried away, as when we had the close call at the crawdad cook.

---