It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  Finally, at the end of March, Jody called to say it was time. The water was starting to rise, nature’s signal to crawfish to emerge from their winter holes and get busy feeding, molting, and mating. “I’m on the road headed to the processor right now with twenty sacks,” Jody said, sounding happy as a kid just freed from school for the summer. I asked how many pounds of crawfish a sack held. About forty, he said. The man had 800 pounds of wild crawfish in his boat. I booked a flight that night. I was hoping to bring Michelle along a few days later, but I wanted to scope things out first.

  At Jody’s house in Henderson, I happened upon something you don’t see every day: swamp people watching Swamp People. The History Channel’s hit reality show about alligator hunting in the Atchafalaya Basin was playing in the background as Jody, Tracy, and Bryce, their fifteen-year-old, were finishing up a dinner of fried wild turkey tenders and fried potatoes. On the TV, Troy, the show’s alpha gator hunter, was driving his boat and talking into the camera about the big gator he was hunting. The Meche family took a clear interest in the show, but Jody wanted to educate me about a few things. “Some of those boys are okay, but a lot of ’em really Cajun it up for the cameras, you know what I’m saying? Troy makes out like he’s just a poor swamper. Lemme tell you, he was brought up with money. His father runs a gas station and bait shop and is also a crawfish buyer. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be out there fishing, having to depend on his prop not breaking if he’s gonna make his money.”

  The other thing was that you had to be rich to even get a gator license in Louisiana. “You have to be a landowner with certified wetland habitat property even to apply,” Jody explained. “So you got to suck up to those people if you want to hunt gators. And that’s what Troy does.” Jody also faulted the way gators were purposely agitated to make them thrash and bite for the cameras. “And those scenes where they show guys sticking their hands in the water with a big gator on the line? Tell you something, podnah. You wouldn’t do that unless you tired of having two hands.”

  There was one other surprise. Rather than go crawfishing, we were to go frogging the next day. In the Basin, just as at home, ripeness was king. And Jody knew a spot where the frogs were plentiful. As it happened, tomorrow was March 31, the last day you could legally take the amphibians. Frog season is open nearly year-round in Louisiana, closing only during April and May so the frogs can mate unmolested. Actually, it had been Richard Robin, Jody’s alligator-skinning buddy, who had told Jody of the spot. Last night, he had caught 200 there, which he’d sold to a wholesaler for two dollars each. I asked Jody if taking 200 frogs from an area wouldn’t leave slim pickings for us. He exchanged looks with his wife and son before Bryce could no longer keep a straight face. Clearly, I didn’t know frogs. Jody was just barely able to keep from laughing. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that, Bill,” Jody was finally able to say.

  While it was possible to catch frogs all year, he continued, late winter and early fall were best. Late winter was good because the water lilies hadn’t greened up yet and it was easy to spot the frogs. Late summer and early fall were good because the water in the Atchafalaya Basin usually fell then, concentrating the frogs. Ideally, you wanted days that were warm but not too warm, followed by nights that were cool but not too cool. “Frogs feed on the crawfish under the lilies right after dusk,” Jody explained. “If the day’s warm, they’ll be hungry and active when they start hunting at dusk. Then, when they’re full, they float to the surface and kinda lie there. If it’s cool, that makes them sluggish and easier to catch.” The next day’s forecast called for a daytime high in the mid-eighties, dropping to the mid-sixties after dark. Jody reckoned we’d have have excellent frogging.

  And so the next night found Jody, Bryce, and me in the drive-thru line at McDonald’s for dinner before we headed out. This was consistent with my outings with other serious foragers. Just as the cobbler’s children had no shoes, the forager of choice edibles often ate junk food. As we inched forward in the drive-thru, Jody decided that this was as good a time as any to start my frogging education.

  I’d already been surprised to learn that most of the Basin’s froggers, Jody included, didn’t use gigs, spears, or mechanical grabbers of any kind, although many such devices were sold at Hebert’s, the local gas-grocery-bait-beer-ice-ammunition quick-stop. Jody grabbed frogs with his hands. For one thing, he said, mechanical grabbers usually killed the frog. A dead frog required ice, and ice required cash. Between all the critters Jody trapped, shot, and caught and then had to keep cold long enough in southern Louisiana to get them where they needed to be before they spoiled, he already spent more on ice per year than he cared to add up. A grabbed frog could be kept alive for days if covered with nothing more than a wet gunny sack. Furthermore, gigs and mechanical grabbers cost money and could be damaged, get left in the truck, or be dropped overboard. Whereas nobody ever forgot their hands. We finally made it to the squawk box and shouted our orders at it.

  I knew that you located frogs by shining lights on them, since their eyes reflected the light, but had no idea how this was actually done. Jody kept hard hats with “sealed beams” on the boat for this purpose. Once he spotted a frog, he’d drive the boat over. If possible, he’d try to put the frog on my strong side, my right. My job was to kneel in the front of the boat and be ready to grab the frog. Jody wasn’t sure whether the light stunned the frogs or if they simply had too much faith in their natural camouflage. Either way, a frog generally let you get pretty close before it dived.

  “Now, Bill,” Jody said, and his changed tone of voice indicated that we had come to the crux of the lesson. “You got to remember something when you go to grab that frog tonight.” He paused to let me know that what he was telling me was important. “You’re not petting that frog,” he said. “You’re not slapping that frog. You got to . . .” He pressed his lips together, searching for something—an image, a prop—that would illustrate his point. His eye came to rest on an empty Styrofoam coffee cup in the truck’s holder. “You got to grab that frog.” With these words, his right fist shot out like a striking snake, seized the cup, and crushed it so quickly and completely that it basically exploded inside the cab. The noise alone was extraordinary. Even Jody looked surprised, as if he hadn’t intended the demonstration to be as violent as this.

  “Well, okay then,” I said, as bits of suspended Styrofoam whirled slowly down, the cab of the truck transformed into a Louisiana snowglobe. “I think I get it.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was Bryce who finally rescued us from the awkward silence.

  “You got to excuse my dad, Mr. Bill,” he said. “He just gets excited about frogging. He really just wants you to have a good time out there.” Jody nodded, as if happy to have an interpreter. That was exactly what he wanted, for me to have a good time.

  Bryce said there was one other thing. “Mr. Bill, if it seems like my dad’s getting impatient or upset with you out there, he’s really not. It’s just the excitement.” I thanked Bryce for telling me that and told him I wasn’t worried in the least. This was a total lie.

  We got Bryce’s order, dropped him at home—frogging is a nighttime deal, and Bryce had school the next day—and headed down the road to the ramp, about eight miles away. I asked if there would be gators where we’d be frogging. “Oh, yeah,” Jody says. “Lotta gators. Most of ’em are small, six feet or less, but there are a few big ones around. They’ll be out, hunting frogs same as us.” He continued talking but I was too busy trying to look unconcerned to take in any more information. I was still trying to process this part and pick a sudden-onset illness—influenza, ptomaine poisoning, acute hypochondria—that would get me off the hook. When I finally checked back in a few minutes later, Jody was still talking. He was saying that frog eyes are white, or sort of greenish, and harder to spot than gator eyes, which were red, as I had already seen while duck hunting. “You don’t want to grab anything has red eyes,” he
said. Right, I thought. No grabbing red eyes.

  At a boat ramp fifteen miles east of Henderson along I-10, Jody backed the skiff off the trailer, jumped in, and ran the boat up on the bank, walking the four-inch gunwale forward with a grace you wouldn’t expect in a guy built like Jody. Thirty-five feet overhead, trucks rumbled and hummed along the I-10. I’d learned by this time not to be fooled by comfortable temperatures. I bundled up in a hooded slicker for the twenty-five-minute run to our destination, a place named Upper Billy Little Lake. Then, in the rear of the skiff, Jody donned a hard hat and clipped its two wires to a twelve-volt car battery at his feet. Then the night went away. Jody had become a minor god, his headlamp sending out a beam of light you could have hung clothes on. “Jesus, Jody!” I blurted. “You look like the Statue of Liberty. What the hell is that thing?”

  “Just a regular sealed beam,” he said. “Everybody down here wears ’em at night in the swamp. Comes with a GE 4405.”

  “What’s a GE 4405?” I asked.

  “Bulb that comes in the standard unit. It’s pretty good. But I put in a TC 7512.”

  “Which is?”

  “The navigation light they use on airplanes.” Leave it to a Cajun.

  He gunned the engine and we were flying down a canal directly below the highway, a waterway straight as a rifle barrel. Jody’s light darted everywhere as he pursued his favorite on-the-water activity—looking for critters. Night just meant that he looked for the reflective eyes of deer, turtles, frogs, and gators, rather than the critters themselves. The light was jumping around so fast I had to look away to keep from getting disoriented.

  We turned into a smaller, twistier waterway, then into one smaller and twistier still. Jody called such things “roads” but they reminded me of the four-wheeler trails we’d ridden to get to his duck hole. During the day, he said, this was where he crawfished. He and a few other crawfishermen kept this road open with chain saws and regarded it more or less as theirs. Then the scenery changed. We were slaloming between broad-trunked cypress trees dangling Spanish moss just so, as if both trees and moss had been placed by set designers. It was ridiculously scenic, a living Discovery Channel backdrop. I kept reminding myself that it wasn’t a theme park.

  Jody throttled down and the boat settled into the water. I put on the helmet and clipped the wires to the battery at my feet the same way Jody had. Now my forehead cast its own godlike light. Meanwhile, Jody had already begun calling out frogs. “Little one over there, two more over there. Little gator by that log.” I registered one of the frogs but had trouble seeing the others. Then I made out the glowing red embers of a gator. I remembered the inch-to-the-foot rule—the space between a gator’s eyes, in inches, equals its length in feet—from duck hunting. This gator was as big as I was. “They’re not afraid of the light, are they?” I tried to say casually. “Not most of ’em,” he replied. “Nice frog by that brush there.” Jody was clearly unconcerned about gators.

  “Ooh, good frog!” Jody called excitedly. “See him?” He illuminated a bush sticking up among lilies. I caught a momentary flicker, then lost it. “Gonna put him on your right side, Bill. Get ready now.” I still saw no frog. “He’s right in the middle of my light,” Jody said. Maybe so, but it was a big circle of light. “He’s right there!” Jody said, exasperation creeping into his tone. “Right next to the boat!” At last I saw the frog, motionless in the pads, all of eighteen inches away. The damn thing was the size of a rotisserie chicken. I wasn’t sure my hand would fit around him far enough to keep him even if I did manage the grab. With no time to waste, I stabbed down at the animal. The frog executed a single, almost languorous kick. I caught a glimpse of his fully extended legs as he dived. They looked as long as the distance from my elbow to my fingertips. The swamp must have been contaminated by some nearby nuclear power plant. There were Godzilla frogs, freaks of nature, breeding in the swamp.

  “Aw, Bill, you got to be more aggressive,” Jody said sadly. “You’re not trying to be his buddy. That’s your frog, know what I’m saying? He can’t hurt you. And they’re tough. You don’t have to worry about squeezing him too hard.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I knew that I’d blown that one. I was nodding my head now, psyching myself up. Jody had been right. You couldn’t half-ass this frog grabbing. You had to commit. The truth was that I was more afraid of disappointing Jody than anything else.

  Meantime, Jody had already spotted another one. “Good frog,” Jody said. “See him? I’m gonna put this one on your left side, Bill.”

  “I don’t see him,” I said.

  “Right there. Right in the middle of my light.” Jody’s voice had become patient, as if he were talking to a retarded person. I was thankful for this, since it was what I had become over the past few minutes. “Look in the middle of my light,” he said.

  “I’m looking, I just don’t . . .”

  “Right in the middle of my light!” Jody repeated, but his patience had run out, his tone suggesting that Stevie Wonder would have seen the frog by now. And then I did see it. This frog was actually a bit less huge than the last one. I resolved to nail it or die trying. As the boat glided silently forward I leaned until I was halfway out of the boat, feet hooked under the seat for leverage, arm cocked and ready, gauging our speed and the moment to strike. When we were a foot away, I pounced. I grabbed the frog at the narrow point across its back—the waist, if frogs could be said to have such a thing—and plucked it from the water. It was so big that even at its waist I couldn’t touch my thumb to any of my other fingers. This was when I discovered that I didn’t have the waist after all. I had part of the body and part of one leg. And the rubbery creature was kicking hard to get free. I clutched the frog to my belly with both hands.

  “There you go, podnah!” Jody laughed. “Now you froggin’!” I staggered aft and transferred the frog to Jody, who slipped it into a crawfish trap, a rectangular envelope of rubber-coated wire mesh. I looked down at the frog, sitting suddenly motionless save for the fast, faint thrumming of its throat. A pang—guilt, remorse, or both—­suddenly coursed through me. I didn’t really want to kill this thing. “He looks so . . . cute,” I stammered out.

  “He’ll look even cuter fried up on my plate, podnah!” Jody shot back. “Hoo!”

  My grabbing average picked up and I started gaining confidence. Then I grabbed a frog that felt dead, or at least deathly sick. It went limp when I grabbed it and remained so in my hand. “This guy’s hurting,” I started to say. It was at that moment that the frog, sensing the lessening of hand pressure, made its move, leaping out of my hand and onto the deck, where it continued jumping hard, doing its best to vault over the side of the boat. I was angry at the frog for trying to trick me. I practically fell on the thing, pinning it with both hands. As I struggled, I heard Jody’s deep laugh. “That’s one of Mr. Frog’s best tricks!” he said. “He’ll play dead until whatever’s got him drops its guard.” Well, good for Mr. Frog, I thought. Because Billy Heavey’s not dropping his guard again.

  We cruised on, the slough opening into a lake. By now, I was thinking of myself as a deadly predator, the John Rambo of frogging. Each frog down there was my frog, dammit, something I owned by virtue of having laid eyes on it. Soon I was catching nearly every frog I tried for. Being good at something new was an unusual but not at all disagreeable sensation. “You’re doing real good, Bill,” Jody said at one point. “You’ve got an interestin’ motion. I sort of smash-grab, you know. I’ll push that frog down another six inches when I grab him. But you sorta pluck him out. Almost like an eagle.” The degree of relief and pride I felt at these words was shameful. Here I was, a grown man and experienced outdoorsman. I had caught a 150-pound tarpon in Nicaragua, killed a bull elk with a single arrow in Colorado. I had been a father. I had survived an IRS audit. But at that particular moment, there was nothing I wanted more than to be counted a good frogger by Jody Meche. />
  At a certain moment, Jody brought the boat alongside a four-foot gator floating motionless in the water. He threw the boat into neutral, walked forward, and stared down at it. The gator never moved a muscle. Finally, with a grimace, Jody shook his head. I asked what he was doing. “I wanted to show you how you can pick a gator up. You grab them across the back of the neck and it sorta paralyzes ’em. This gator’s just a little too big, though. And if you don’t get him just right you got a pissed-off gator in the boat.” He seemed genuinely saddened not to be able to demonstrate.

  “Oh, that’s okay, Jody,” I said as airily as I could while contemplating how much I had enjoyed having ten fingers. “I expect we’ll find another one.”

  I didn’t know what time it was or how long we’d been out, but I was tired and soaked. Jody reckoned that we’d bagged about thirty-five frogs, averaging a little more than a pound each. It was plenty for a frog fry. And we still had a good run back to the ramp and back to Henderson. He asked if I was ready to go.

  “Yeah, I’m ready,” I said. “My ass is wet.” For some reason this remark cracked Jody up.

  The next morning I was back at Jody’s house to help butcher, a process I felt obligated to learn if I was going to eat what I’d caught. Jody had covered the trap with a wet tarp, beneath which the frogs sat atop each other listlessly. When he picked up the trap to move it to the cutting board he’d laid across an empty boat trailer, some of the frogs began to mew, like cats, but louder and more plaintively. The sound was unearthly. Frogs have a brain that weighs less than three-tenths of a gram. It’s a stretch to think of them as having particularly complex emotions. But those frogs knew this was not going to be a good day.

  Jody was set up for business, wearing foul weather bibs and with a garden hose at the ready. He had his Gerber pocketknife, a sharpening steel, a set of pliers designed to pull the skin off catfish, an empty bucket for frog guts, and another bucket filled with water ready to receive the finished frogs.