At Water’s Edge: Consider the Crayfish
By: Sandra Park
Tags: Science Fiction, Photography, Nature, Foodies, Nature Photography

At Water’s Edge: Consider the Crayfish

In our young and brutal years in San Francisco, my partner and I would read about something in the San Francisco Chronicle and then pursue it, sometimes a nature hike in the Marin headlands or maybe a hot spot in the city. For us, diversion was a science, to be divided and classified according to our throbbing senses. At the Elite Café on Fillmore, we looked in for New Orleans food and drink, vaguely thinking Sazerac and Hurricane. At the marble bar, we took our perches. After plunking down our drinks, the bartender announced, “Today we have crawfish.” We shrugged ignorance, having never encountered such a creature. With brusque authority, he told us the only thing we need is crawfish and drinks. No sides. No distractions. When we each marveled at the mountain of boiled-red crustaceans on our platter before us, he tutored us on the how: break it in half, pinch and scrape off the tail meat with your teeth, and then suck on the juices of the head. Starting tentatively, greed for this tasty tidbit drove our speed and dexterity with head and tail; after our second drink, we no longer minded the drip of briny liquid running down from our fingers to elbows.

The midden of red shells — black beady eyes, antennae, pincers, legs, abdomen — was irrevocable evidence of our bayou-sized appetite. We had busted our gut and budget.

Elite Café, San Francisco Chronicle

Fast forward thirty-five years. Tromping around Felt Lake in Portola Valley, California, carrying camera apparatus for a nature photography field trip, I did not initially share my group’s enthusiasm for the place. Felt Lake should be called Felt Reservoir, an entirely human-made site with the remnants of a concrete slab dam and water tower. Closed to the public, empty beer cans attest to trespassing fishing parties. Mustard-yellow grassland and green live oak surround this body of water. I follow the smart weed patch that descends to water’s edge. A cartoon caption for this wet zone all around the “lake” could be “Build and they will come.” Finger-wide trails of burrows and plugs of mud indicate busy littoral life forms. I squat on my haunches and wait for something to move.

Felt Lake, S. Park, 2021

The red swamp crayfish is a curious thing. Thought of as a pesky invader species, it’s favored as fishing bait and considered good eating by herons, egrets, raccoons, and, oh yes, humans. Rustling the leaves of smart weed, my crayfish looks cute, smaller than a toy action figure. Through the Canon T6i macro lens, this same “toy” looks like Ebirah, Monster of the Deep. (In a 1966 Japanese sci-fi movie, there is a climactic face-off between Godzilla and Ebirah, an outsized crayfish mutated by radioactive waste. Godzilla wins, ripping off Ebirah’s front claws.) The defense mechanism of Procambarus clarkii is to rear up its body, waving its front claws as it retreats into its hiding place among plant cover. Amazed at its iconic gesture to Ebirah, I forgot to focus in order to capture its menacing claws. Instead, I end up with a tame picture of a thumb-sized crayfish just before it retreats and burrows back into its mud channel.

Red swamp crayfish, California waterblog

Godzilla v. Ebirah, letterbxed.com

At home, gumming up my keyboard with continuous snacking, I learn that my toy crayfish is a native of the Gulf states, especially Louisiana — popularly known as a good-eating crawdaddy. Along with the signal crayfish, P. leniusculusklamathensis, these invader species have caused the extinction of the native sooty crayfish, Pacifastacus nigrescens, and threaten the native Shasta or placid crayfish, P. fortis. The Shasta species is a peaceable creature, lacking the defense mechanism of waving outsized front claws. Its palette is reddish-brown with white and blue hues. Its species status is “critically threatened.” The aforementioned signal crayfish is an especially aggressive invader species that is firmly established at Lake Tahoe. The question arises, when does a non-native invader become a naturalized part of the California landscape? Eucalyptus trees, introduced by Australians during the Gold Rush, are now considered part of our expected landscape in the city and surrounding countryside — to most people, as “natural” as a native coastal redwood.

On Sunday, April 21, 2019, the Elite Café closed after 38 years in the cool, gray city of love. Although I have fond memories of that night at the Elite, gorging on a mountain of crawdaddy, I have not since dined on such. And now that I’ve met my toy-sized, fierce creature in the shallows of smart weed at Felt Lake, my appetite has been chastened by a “nature moment” with a red swamp crayfish. Maybe my appetite will roar back if whetted by a Sazerac.

For now, I’ll adopt one red swamp crayfish, mine, as an emblem of life at the water’s edge. After all, a pile of Louisiana crawfish on a platter is not quite the same as one lone creature waving its claws, retreating into its leaf cover, burrowing back into soft mud.

Notes:

1 Crayfish, crawfish, crawdaddy — regional names for the same edible crustacean.

2 Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. New York: Little, Brown, 2005.

“Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”Assigned by Gourmet Magazine to cover the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival, this essay morphed into an examination of boiling lobster alive, how its sensory neurons register pain. Readers of Gourmet overwhelmed Letters to the Editor, possibly the single most controversial article ever published by Gourmet. David Foster Wallace reading this essay, 1 hr, 10 min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkXDJYe3-i8

3 Fisher, M. F. K. Consider the Oyster. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941.

“An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life. Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion and danger.” M. F. K. Fisher recommends eating an oyster raw, unchilled, slurping it with its juices in the shell, followed by a crisp white wine.

4 “Ebirah, Monster of the Deep” is a 1966 Japanese sci-fi movie. In a climactic face-off with Godzilla, Ebirah gets its front claws ripped off and retreats into the sea. Ebirah looks like a crayfish magnified to outsized proportions, its monstrosity attributed to contamination from nuclear waste. The plot’s turning point is when Earth Defense Forces work together to vanquish Ebirah once and for all; and yet, Red Bamboo terrorists lurk in the background with their nuclear arsenal intact.