Goin' Crawdaddin'

When I was a kid, we used to hunt for crawdads in the creek down the road. This was major summertime fun for 4 little girls who were more tomboys at that age than anything else. The goal of the crawdad hunt was to wade out into the creek under the bridge and find the biggest crawdads (some grew to 4 or 5 inches long), although we'd catch the smaller ones, too. Once we saw one worthy of a catch, we would sneak up on it with two fingers and try to catch it right behind the pinchers. They were hard as hell to get, and if you missed you were likely to get pinched.

I don't know what the goal of this game was. We were kids - I don't think there was much of a goal. Sometimes we would catch a few in a bucket and haul them back up the road to Shelly's driveway where we would race the little suckers down a painted racetrack. Most of the time, we just rejoiced in the catching and then threw them back in the creek. I suppose it sounds silly, but we were 10 years old. To us, sitting on the creekbed in jean shorts with our toes in the water looking across the rocks for creepy crawdads, waiting for the perfect one, was great fun.

Every time I try to tell someone else about going crawdaddin' as kids, they don't get it. I can't believe that we were the only kids doing this on hot Indiana summer days. Surely someone else out there has gone crawdaddin' before??