The Highway-My Way

August 3, 2003

Ever so frequently, I am asked “the question.”  It comes wrapped in a few different packages, but “the question” is pretty much the same.  Well meaning souls seem compelled to hound me with this same tired inquisition.  “The question” goes something like this, “If you love to hunt ducks so much, why do you live so far away from the Mississippi Delta?”  Another common variation is, “Why don’t you move so you don’t have to drive 6 hours one way to hunt?”  Well meaning individuals also like to ask, “Why not just move to Jackson and be halfway there?”  The thing about “the question” is that the folks who ask it just are not prepared for “the answer” when I lay it out for them. 

The way I look at it, duck season is a mere 60 days. It is the 60 days that I live for all year, but its only 2 months in the grand scheme of things.  However, life goes on 365 days a year.  However inconvenient it may be during duck season, I cannot imagine living life trapped so far away from the water of the Gulf of Mexico. There is a reason that people retire to the Coast and not to the Mississippi Delta. After all, think about any hypothetical Sunday.  

You head to church at 8:00 a.m., and leave Sunday School by 10:00 a.m. By 11:00 a.m. you are tied to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, listening to the rig “pinging,” smelling like suntan lotion and winching up snapper, grouper and bull redfish from the salt water.  By 1:00 p.m., you are back at the house with fresh Amberjack on the grill in a foil pack with white wine, onion slices and lemon butter. You eat a late lunch, and take your fish heads out to bait your crab pots.  At 6:00 p.m. you run the crab pots, try not to get pinched, and head for a friend’s house to “combine crabs” for a big boil.

Nothing in the world is as fun as a big community crab boil.  I love to cut the lemons and grapefruit and squeeze them into the brine.  I always forget how the juice from the grapefruits burns through the cracks in your hands until the next time I cut them.  Then you pour in the onion powder, garlic, paprika, salt, liquid crab boil, and cayenne pepper.  There is just something perversely pleasant about the way the cayenne reaches out and bites you in the back of the nose as you pour it into the water.  Douse the mixture with a few beers and add the blue crabs and you are in business.  You know the frisky crabs are blue and tan now, but they will be glowing bright fiery red when the crab boil permeates their shells. After the crabs boil up, you pull the strainer and toss in 5 pounds of white shrimp, potatoes, snap beans, Cajun sausage, fresh mushrooms and “just shucked” corn on the cob.  You just know this is going to be fine dining, and the pungent steam is making your eyes water the entire time.  When you have done a good job, your nose stings from the spices every time that you take a deep breath. 

When everything is done you dump all the fresh seafood out on tables covered with white butcher paper and gorge yourself.  A sure sign of an excellent crab boil is when it is excruciatingly painful to remove your contact lenses after the carnage is over.  And you have to be exceedingly careful of the mushrooms.  They are insidious, those mushrooms.  You see, nothing in the world soaks up spice like a mushroom.  A properly done boil yields mushrooms that explode in your mouth like they have been slathered in nuclear waste.  So delightfully painful, so savory good to eat are those mushrooms.  

Can you do this in any other part of the great State of Mississippi? I think not.  All life is a compromise, I guess. So, as much as I live for duck season, the inconvenience of the marathon drive is not going to force me to move.  Folks keep asking me, “Why don’t you just come live up here?”  The way I look at it, that is entirely the wrong question.  The right question is, “Why the heck don’t you folks move down here?”  After all, I only have to make that obnoxious drive for 60 days.  You guys have to eat at Red Lobster all year.  So, what the heck is wrong with you folks!