Crawfishing Ethnographic Essay
ENGL102_3T
Final Draft
Crawfishing in South Louisiana The splashes of the freezing spillway mixed with the cold wind coming off the water sent chills down my back. I yawned, the loud purr of the tugboat next to us made it impossible to hear my uncle ask if I was tired. We were passing the train of barges right after we left the launch and were headed into the woods. I have done all this before. It was all familiar to me. The only difference was that I had never been out here this early. The eerie white light of the moon was the only thing that let us see right now. Luckily for us the moon was huge and full tonight. It was about 4:30 in the morning and we were speeding into the swamps of the spillway. I looked at my uncle and I saw him standing up, driving the boat, with a smile on his face. This was his job and he loved it. When you love the wilderness, being out in the woods for eight hours a day was a treat. Especially when it ended with picking up a paycheck of about a thousand dollars at the end of each of those days. What we were doing was a part of history. A part of history that has been going on for hundreds of years up until now, and will continue to go on for as long as people want to keep eating these little brown mudbugs. Crawfish were a significant part of the diet of Native Americans of the south. They still hold a large status among the Cajuns of South Louisiana. There is an old legend that after the Acadians (now known as Cajuns) were exiled from Nova Scotia, the lobsters from up north missed them. The lobsters traveled down south but the journey was so long and hard that it had a huge toll on the lobsters. This made them shrink and size and they no longer resembled lobsters. The Acadians held a festival for the lobsters and began calling them crawfish. Crawfishing became a way of life for the Cajuns of South Louisiana. It was the man of the households duty to go out and crawfish to put food on the table for his family.
Final Draft
Crawfishing in South Louisiana The splashes of the freezing spillway mixed with the cold wind coming off the water sent chills down my back. I yawned, the loud purr of the tugboat next to us made it impossible to hear my uncle ask if I was tired. We were passing the train of barges right after we left the launch and were headed into the woods. I have done all this before. It was all familiar to me. The only difference was that I had never been out here this early. The eerie white light of the moon was the only thing that let us see right now. Luckily for us the moon was huge and full tonight. It was about 4:30 in the morning and we were speeding into the swamps of the spillway. I looked at my uncle and I saw him standing up, driving the boat, with a smile on his face. This was his job and he loved it. When you love the wilderness, being out in the woods for eight hours a day was a treat. Especially when it ended with picking up a paycheck of about a thousand dollars at the end of each of those days. What we were doing was a part of history. A part of history that has been going on for hundreds of years up until now, and will continue to go on for as long as people want to keep eating these little brown mudbugs. Crawfish were a significant part of the diet of Native Americans of the south. They still hold a large status among the Cajuns of South Louisiana. There is an old legend that after the Acadians (now known as Cajuns) were exiled from Nova Scotia, the lobsters from up north missed them. The lobsters traveled down south but the journey was so long and hard that it had a huge toll on the lobsters. This made them shrink and size and they no longer resembled lobsters. The Acadians held a festival for the lobsters and began calling them crawfish. Crawfishing became a way of life for the Cajuns of South Louisiana. It was the man of the households duty to go out and crawfish to put food on the table for his family.