Welcome back to Rachel Nederveld’s series on living on the disappearing Cajun swamp. Imagine leaving city life behind for an existence on a floating boat in the middle of nowhere. The place where living conditions—translation: no toilet or grocery stores—are simpler, the hazards are high: finding deadly cottonmouth snakes in your bed, and no access to technology or neighbors, and you’re right alongside her in the Atchafalaya Basin, if only in your mind. Enjoy.
Roy told me he was going to run his crab traps today if—and he emphasized if—it wasn’t raining. The weather was so overcast, I figured that he wasn’t going to come. Eventually, I heard the hum of the boat engine and around came Roy and Annie all bundled up, with Roy’s signature giant grin and loud “Hey!” They had already run the traps and had five or six dozen crabs even though, “someone had already run tree of dem, yeah. Dey always have an excuse ready. ‘My buddy tol’ me I coul’ run his traps n’ I tought dis was his.’”
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To my delight, they asked me over for lunch.
Roy and Annie are the last generation of the old guard of people living in the basin. Like most of the long-term residents along the levee, they are Cajun, a cultural ethnicity of Acadians: people of French origin who were exiled from Nova Scotia in the mid-eighteenth century and eventually settled in the harsh swamps of South Louisiana. “Work hard to play hard” is a common Cajun motto, and if you add “food” somewhere in there, you have an idea of what they are all about.
This is also displayed in the 2011 documentary, Happy, a film that they are part of the subjects that are featured about what makes people just that. Roy and Annie Blanchard are two of the most inspiring and amazing people I have ever known. Having primarily lived off the land their whole lives, their enduring love for the basin (and for each other) is infectious. A few years ago, I was graciously invited to their home for dinner for some squirrel gumbo. Wanting to be a good guest, I brought a fancy loaf of bread. When I offered it, it felt like I had showed up at a hipster Brooklyn supper club with squirrel as my offering instead of a bottle of wine. Polite as ever, they served my meal to me with a piece of the bread that I had brought over while they ate their soft, doughy white Evangeline Maid bread, made in nearby Lafayette, the starch that every good Cajun eats.
I never miss an opportunity to spend time with Roy and Annie, so when they invited me over for their crab boil, I grabbed my empty water jugs and my dog, Pilgrim, and hopped into their boat. Roy loves to antagonize Pilgrim, frequently calling her ugly and—my favorite—”too stupid to be a squirrel hunting dog.” Luckily, these days I can poke fun at him because he’s only gotten 66 squirrels this year, which is well below his average 100 of the furry creatures. “You only got a few weeks to get ’em. After dat, dey up in da trees and it’s too hard.” Aside from squirrel, Roy hunts anything that is legal—deer, duck, rabbit—and makes his main living as a crawfisherman. But the list goes on with what Annie grows in her garden and the other foods they catch and eat: turtle, catfish, crabs, whatever.
Roy put the water on to boil while Annie chopped up potatoes, onions, and sausage, telling me culinary tricks in her Cajun accent, “We like to put dese in, but if we don’t have ’em, we do witout. Dat’s how it always is: you use what you got.”
I brought them out to Roy once the water was ready. He dropped them into the water with a liberal baptism of salt and Zatarain’s crab boil. Ten minutes later, I helped him throw in the live blue crabs. He held up the last one with red front claws and smiled, “dats a female… you can tell by the lipstick shape on her belly!” He plopped her on top and added even more salt and crab boil, being careful to get it in the water and not on the food itself. He gently placed the the lid on and walked away. We sat around chatting and once steam started to rise he looked at the time, “See dat’s on da tirty? When it gets ta forty five dey’ll be ready.” And 15 minutes later, they were that beautiful, precise red hue. Roy poured the steaming pile of crustaceans out onto their picnic tables with a giant can of Tony Chacere’s spice mixture nearby.
We went devoured the batch. We couldn’t wait for Roy’s sister and brother-in-law, who were joining us for the boil. It’s every man for himself when it comes to cracking shells.
