Personally
Speaking
Scenes of my childhood How dear to my heart are the scenes of my
childhood It all came back in full living color in my mind’s eye while reading Jay Huner’s article (Endangered cranes having trouble in Louisiana; The Piney Woods Journal, December 2011) and a second piece, Birdwatchers observe yellow rail in South LA; same edition). Wind the clock back to somewhere around summer, 1939. My father has just completed his Master’s degree at the old Baptist Bible Institute seminary in New Orleans. I’m eight years old, not far from nine, standing by with grandparents in Dodson with Mama and my younger brother and sister while Dad lines up a job. It is the tenth year of the Great Depression, and he is happy to accept a teaching post at the old Acadia Baptist Academy in rural Acadia parish in the rice and cattle country midway between Crowley and Eunice. With a wife and three kids, the deal is $95 a month, with campus housing and adjacent garden space included. Dad’s job is teaching high school subjects to late-blooming family men planning to seek careers in the ministry, and single men, women, and boys in dormitories. It was interesting integrating into the Cajun French atmosphere at the Richard community school, about a mile from the Academy. During weekends, after school, and in the summer between school days my barefoot buddies and I patrolled the sluggish stream that meandered through the rice fields and cattle pastures, splashing away water moccasins and long black snakes to make a little swimming hole in a wide bend of the creek. On a few occasions we made for a special swim at one of the pumping sheds where huge sluices of cool pure clear white water from underground sources was dumped into a holding pond to be directed through a system of ditches to irrigate the rice fields, which was the big thing going in that part of the state. Rice is to Southwest Louisiana as the pine forest is to North Louisiana. Everyone is involved, one way or the other. And just as the crosscut saws and mules of the early years of the pine tree harvest have long since given way to diesel-powered harvesting machines and their accessories in a totally different industry, the rice farming of today likewise is “agribusiness,” with similar investment in high-productivity machinery. What is there about this that has to do with birds? Sit down, Cammie; I’m coming to that. Since rice plants live much of their life prior to harvest standing in water, fields need to be as nearly flat and level as possible to maintain equal depth on the plants. Southwest Louisiana between the Atchafalaya basin and Calcasieu river defines flat. Standing water in the coastal region attracts crawfish and other critters that make a living smooshing around in the soft waterlogged soil eating bugs and things that are smaller than themselves. And the crawfish and other crawly critters in the water attract birds that eat them. In the days before the all-in-one harvester-thresher machinery, harvesting rice was a two or three step operation. First, when the rice was about ripe, the water was released. When the field dried sufficiently, a mowing machine started at the outer edges of the field, cutting the rice stalks much like hay is mowed, and left to dry. Then another machine ran through the field picking up the dried stalks, which were tied into shocks and left to dry more. When the rice grains were dry, the shocks were hauled to a big stationary thresher which separated the grain from the straw, poured the grain into burlap sacks, and blew the straw out a large pipe where it collected into a large haystack that furnished forage for the cattle . When the mowing machine entered the field to cut the stalks, working around the field in a concentric circle from the outer edge toward the center, there were birds, known then as blue hens, hiding in the rice, eating bugs and what not. As the mowing machine moved around toward the center, the birds schooched down and moved in, staying hidden in the tall stalks. Until, well, until the birds had been pushed into a much smaller herd, whereupon the mowing stopped and men waded into the patch of standing rice knocking birds down and stuffing them into sacks. And then, somehow those birds wound up de-feathered, gutted, and cooked into a massive blue hen gumbo, made with fresh rice, and everyone came to the feast around the field after the harvest. I asked Jay Huner if there were any blue hens around today. He said he thought they were probably coots, which were featured in a piece a few months ago. I don’t recall them being recommended as gumbo makings. Pity. |