ColecoVision Vs. Crayfish

(Pictures by Christina Van Singel)

I had a ColecoVision as a child. If you don’t know what a ColecoVision is, it’s one of the missing links between the Atari and the Nintendo, and its run lasted from 1982 until about 1985. I spent my fair share of hours in front of the ColecoVision, “turning over” Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong Jr., as well as classics games such as Mr. Do and War Games. “Turning it over” meant running the score out of digits, turning it over just like you do the odometer on a car, back to all zeros; it meant complete and utter mastery of those incredibly sophisticated games.

I also spent my fair share of time down by the creek (Elgersma insists on calling it a crick, that hick) as a child. In and along this creek, I came upon minnows and pheasants, ducks and even a beaver once—and crayfish.

Crayfish looked cool. With their beady eyes, many legs, stellar armor and oversized claws, they were veritable monsters of the deep. Here I was, about as landlocked in midcontinent as I could get, and in the creek in my backyard lived Leviathan.

Crayfish became my mortal enemy. I spent hours scouring the mud bottom of the crick—creek—in order to catch a blue-green crayfish on its ominous march to wherever it was going. When I spotted one, I’d prod it with a stick and get it to flip its powerful tail backwards into a net which I had positioned for just such a move, and then I’d haul them up onto shore. The crayfish, like a fish out of water (hmm, weak simile there), would go into battle mode and I would proceed to be petrified (I was 17—no, like 12). Eventually, I’d smash it to goo with my walking stick and take the claws for souvenirs, which stunk up my bedroom in a day or two and so I’d throw them out.

Fast-forward a dozen or so years. One Sunday, I walked into my mother-in-law’s kitchen, and there in a bowl were perhaps fifty bright red crayfish. Yes, you can eat crayfish, my mother-in-law and wife informed me, and then they showed me how: break off the tail, peel off the shell and you’ve got a tiny white piece of meat, sweet and pure—like lobster but in miniature.

From there, my passion for crayfish has multiplied. It turns out my wife’s cousin has a seining net. It turns out there are crayfish to be had in the Rock River, and that there are wonderful Cajun-based recipes for what’s called a seafood boil with ingredients that include corn on the cob and potatoes and andouille sausage. It turns out my wife’s cousin and I will do anything for a haul of crayfish and a seafood boil, including walking the Rock River up to our waists in mud, snagging snapping turtles in the net—my standard joke is to call this process southwest Minnesota’s somewhat dangerous catch—all to get at these Rock River lobsters. It is indeed a sort of love affair.

Robert Frost knew about love affairs with nature. His poem “Birches” pictures for us a boy who lives “too far from town to learn baseball,/ Whose only play was what he found himself.” Frost waxes nostalgic over “swinging birches” in that poem, admitting that “So was I once myself a swinger of birches;/ And so I dream of going back to be,” and ending with the benediction that “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

If my mom had held onto it, I don’t doubt the ColecoVision would fetch a modest price on ebay these days. Today, I myself have a daughter and two sons, and they already know of the wonder of video games. We have a couple of Walmart cheapies that you plug directly into the TV on which we play some throwback games: Pole Position and Dig Dug and Ms. Pacman.

But my kids also like to tag along on the seining runs, to touch minnows and to catch frogs and to see turtles and to step in cow pies and be scared of bulls. And they know how to eat crayfish, to peel the tails and get the sweet white meat. Soon, they’ll know how to catch them: to dig the poles of the net down into the mud bottom, to chase crayfish from out of the weeds along the bank, to pluck them out of the net just behind the head so they don’t pinch you with their mortally fearsome claws. Needless to say, I’m biased toward which one of these two pastimes I think is more important to their development, their sense of the world.

One could do worse than be a lover of crayfish.