Crayfish craziness

When I was about ten years old, we moved across US Highway 29 and into the house that had belonged to my great-grandparents.  My father and his brothers had built that house for their grandparents back in the late 50′s.  It clung tentatively to a steep bank just above an even steeper drop-off down to White Thorn Creek.  To this day nobody really knows why my great-grandfather decided to build it there rather than on the top of the hill, which also lay within his property.

Perhaps it was the availability of water.  An ancient and apparently natural spring bubbled silently among surrounding small trees just below the chosen site.  Its waters, filtered down through the massive hillside, were extremely clear and ice-cold, even in summer.  They rose in a little pool about three feet wide and a couple of feet deep, and ran off the downhill edge through a tiny rivulet down to the creek far below.

To bring this delicious water into the house, my great-grandfather put in a well about twenty feet downhill from the spring.  No sooner had it started pumping than the spring went dry, and dry it stayed.  My father tried digging it out deeper hoping to find more water, but to no avail.  Finally he concluded that even if he were to reach water, it would be so deep down in the ground that they would have nothing more than a second well — not the beautiful little spring that once graced this grove with its silent, almost sacred pool.

By the time we moved there after my great-grandparents died, a dozen years or so had passed and the hollow shell of the spring had become overgrown and almost impossible to find.  My father often told us children about how beautiful it had once been, and maybe once or twice he might have stretched the original story just a bit to add that he had warned his grandfather not to drill the well so near the spring.  Anyway, we weren’t about to try to move the well, and even if we did there wasn’t any way to know whether the spring would come back or not after all that time.

One day my sister and I were exploring a different piece of property: our grandparents’ 90-some acre farm (on which Uncle Dan’s cabin was located).  Near the road, we suddenly discovered something we had never seen before: an old spring, with beautiful, clear water.  Obviously we were not the first to discover this font, because it had a concrete structure around it — but we were excited nonetheless.  We thought we had known everything about that farm.  So we ran back to the big farmhouse with the news of our discovery.

“Oh yes, that’s where we used to draw our water, before the well,” said our grandmother.

Naturally this led my sister and I to relate, in minute detail, the story of the spring and the well on our property.

“… and Daddy says that the spring will never run again,”  we concluded.

Our aunt (our mother’s sister) had been listening.  She was a diagnosed schizophrenic who was known for sudden outbursts of nonsense, art, religion, and nudity.

“I’ll get you some crawdads — they’ll find the water,” she said.  “Next time you come, I’ll give ‘em to you.”

We wrote this off as another one of her wild ideas and empty promises, but the next week when we were over to visit she produced a bucket — within which were two of the biggest, blackest crayfish I have ever imagined.  I had seen plenty of crawdads before, but none even close to these– they looked more like big, black lobsters.  I would have thought of the movie Alien if it had been produced by then, but it wasn’t.

We took these monsters home and rushed in to show our Dad.  “Ann says they’ll find the water in the spring,” we excitedly told him.  “We’ll go put them in it and see!”

“Don’t listen to your crazy aunt,” he replied without looking up from his book, “All you’re gonna do is kill them damn crawdads.  The water’s nowhere near the surface.  Better off to boil them things up for dinner instead.”

That took the stiffness out of my exoskeleton – Dad was usually right about such things.  But my sister was determined to give it a try.  So down we ventured, through the thick foliage, until we found the spot where the undergrowth dipped down into a little cup in the earth — the skeleton of the ancient spring.  We dumped the two crayfish right in the middle.  Immediately, they began to dig — within 30 seconds they were nowhere to be seen.  My sister cheered them on, but I secretly bade them goodbye.

The next morning my sister shook me awake, “C’mon Chip!  Let’s go check the spring!”

“Oh, go away!  They’re not going to find it, and even if they did it would be too deep for us to see.”

But she persisted until I had to go along anyway.  I reluctantly followed her down to the site.  She slowly parted the bushes and weeds, then said in a low voice, “Chip, you’re not going to believe this.”

I looked in over her shoulder, and I knew she was right — I didn’t believe it.  The old pool was full to the brim with clear, cold water running out the rivulet and all the way down to the creek.  The crawdads had brought the spring back.

When my father saw it, he said, “Well I’ll be damned” and grinned.  He set about clearing away just enough of the underbrush to make it easier to get to the spring.  Then he whittled a wooden ladle to drink from, attached a piece of rawhide to it, and hung it on a tree branch by the pool.  For the rest of our years there, we enjoyed an icy cold drink of mineral-laden water on hot summer days.  And every time I took a sip, I thought about those crawdads and how our “crazy aunt”, who couldn’t even be trusted with the care of her own body, had known better about that.