Crawfish, Shrimp, Crab, and Oyster
GARY DWYER
In Louisiana they get the mistletoe from the oak trees with shotguns.
Crawfish, Shrimp, Crab, and Oyster A Small Taste of the Deep South
Ã…ngstrom Unit Works
GARY DWYER
Crawfish, Shrimp, Crab, and Oyster A Small Taste of the Deep South
Photographs and Text By
GARY DWYER
Published by Ångstrom Unit Works Copyright © 2019 Gary Dwyer. All rights reserved. No Part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
• Every attempt has been made to give credit to all writers quoted in this book. All Photographs and writings not annotated © 2019 Gary Dwyer. ISBN 978-0-9979054-6-5 Front Cover Photo: The Magnolia Plantation near Charleston South Carolina 2018 © Gary Dwyer Back Cover Photo: Dwyer’s Cafe, Lafayette, Louisiana and Tabasco sauce, 2018 © Gary Dwyer Gary Dwyer Photography http://www.garydwyerphotography.com http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/478911 http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/dwyergc https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/gary-dwyer/id265388372?mt=11 Other books By Gary Dwyer are available on amazon, blurb, and peecho
IT TURNS OUT, as I am fond of saying, I need something to look forward to. I have no idea where that idea comes from, but it appears to be something very deeply rooted in me. It may be linked to my basic and endless curiosity. A yearning for discovery that probably spontaneously arose when I was a little boy, saying to myself, ‘Lets take this thing apart and see what is inside’, or the idea of exploration and discovery that makes Yogi Basra’s comment spring to life: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The road indeed, has a lot to do with it because it implies direction. It is going toward somewhere or something. It is about process and about the traces that process leaves. It shares a lot with writing and image making because it is evidence that something was worth making, thinking and doing. When I was much younger, the process of going used to be at least as enjoyable as the getting there and I am sure that came from my parents as my father was a pilot and my mother a stewardess. All that has now changed. I am now destination driven. I want to be where I am going to go and it is because travel has become so cheap and the population doubling in my lifetime means that most modes of transport are loud, crowded, and uncomfortable. Big airports especially have become monuments to chaos and degradation. On a recent trip originating from LAX, while in the waiting lounge, my ear buds could not block out the hard rock coming from the adjacent bar. The seats were all full, and a lot of the floor was being used for seating too. My self-checked bag cost more than I want to remember, while I recall that the airlines are currently making gigantic profits. The unending indignities of the TSA screening made for more irritation and scrambling. The incessant loud and conflicting PA announcements. It was not even close to anything one could call a holiday or vacation period and yet, the volume of people was simply dumbfounding. After dragging more luggage than anyone might legally call a carry-on, my seat was found and as they say in dog sled racing, “If you aren’t the lead dog, the view is always the same. Getting there isn’t fun any more. {An aside: If I ever find myself in close proximity to the interior designer who specifies the waiting lounge chairs with heavy metal armrests between the seats so that exhausted travelers can not lay down, I may go to prison for ripping one of those armrests out and bludgeoning the interior designer to death with it.
Either that or I could simply chain them into one of the chairs with their arms attached to the armrests, lock the chain, and walk away. It might be good to also hang a sign around there neck saying, “I’m the one that made these chairs so you couldn’t lay down.” And yet, we still find reasons for putting up with the annoyances in order to get somewhere. The older I get, the harder it is to get rid of jet lag. Some of it is because I don’t sleep well on planes. I have slept well on trains and consequently, have occasionally missed my stop. The same goes for buses and cars. Anticipation is one of the primary reasons many people take enjoyment from the process of going. The imagination provides illusions and distractions from what is actually going on. It is one of the reasons we have sound systems in cars. The French have a marvelous saying: “The best part of an affair is climbing up the stairs.” What it leaves unsaid is, how much work it is to climb those stairs. Because of medical advances, there are some people today who are saying seventy is the new forty. And in terms of life expectancy there may be some truth in that statement, but climbing the stairs from forty to seventy often includes skin cancer, heart attacks, shingles, hepatitis, early onset alzheimers and diverticulitis. At this point in life I’d rather be standing quietly at the top of those stairs rather than being exhausted from having just climbed them. Older people have a justifiably pervasive fear about becoming irrelevant, turning into nostalgic elderly who can not understand the world around them or contribute much to it. When age places you at the top of the stairs called retirement a gigantic number of people look for more stairs to climb, (albeit slowly) for more ways to entertain themselves when they no longer have to work. The result is a vast number of aged people who hate the problems of travel as much as everyone else, but they are willing to put up with it in order to go somewhere they have never been before. It turns out that this book is a record of one of those journeys of the aged and an attempt to remember somewhere I/we have never been before. I am still looking forward to what is next.
Who would want to get an Uber at 9 PM to leave this place in order to take the red-eye across the continent?
This airport is only a few years old and very poorly designed. Notice the lovely armrest dividers on the seats. The ZĂźrich airport has leather seats with no armrests so you can lay down if you are exhausted and have a long layover. Decades ago, Narita Airport in Tokyo had darkened rooms with small single beds for sleeping. How enlightened.
31 March, 2018
Charlotte, North Carolina
The only other time I have been in this airport was also a stopover. It was on an ill-fated trip to France. Being in an airport of a city you have never even seen is like trying to remember the face of someone you knew briefly in high school. I glance out the window as we land and realize it is a city of 800,000 and a much bigger deal than I ever gave it credit for. We are here for only an hour or so as our destination on this leg is Charleston, South Carolina. Not that I know the difference between North and South Carolinas, but part of the reason for this trip was to gain a better understanding of regional differences. But now the jet lag is beginning to catch up on me and I can’t have a significant thought about much of anything.
2 April, 2018
Charleston, South Carolina
One short orientation yesterday and then sleep. Today, immediately jumped deeply into the history of Charleston. These early days are a bit of a blur because there is so much to see.
This is a real tourist trap, but the food was good and if we keep eating this much I don’t know if I will make it to the end of this trip. Staying in good hotel is a real plus and leaves so many decisions to others.
A local basket maker named Darrel gave a demonstration of the tradition of making baskets from ‘sweet grass.’ Those shown here take about two weeks to make and have commensurate prices.
This house was built in 1808 for a wealth shipping magnate. The most lucrative trade of the time was to bring slaves from Africa and then load cotton to be shipped to the mills of New York and new England. The house is equipped with an elliptical spiral staircase and consists of three floors and 9,800 square feet.
One of our dinners was at the “Low Country Bistro” and consisted of crab soup, soft shell crab and a reasonable New Zealand sauvignon blanc. Great!
2 April, 2018
Charleston, South Carolina
The Magnolia Plantation
(the same name of many other plantations as well) is outside Charleston on the Ashley river and consists of 464 acres and has been owned by the same family for fifteen generations. The plantation dates to 1676, when Thomas and Ann Drayton built a house and small formal garden on the site. Today it is a site for weddings and is visited by thousands of tourists each year. The main house was burned during the Civil War by Union troops and later reconstructed. It now serves primarily as a gift shop and tourist information center.
We will see many famous plantations during our swing through the South and also learn a great deal about the agricultural practices that made these lavish plantations and their elaborate gardens possible. Plantation is really only a fancy word for farm and these farms were able to be established because (white) merchants, traders, and shipping magnates were able to buy (black) African slaves who knew about agricultural practices in hot climates. The African slaves knew about how to clear the land, how to control the level of brackish water and how and where to plant sugar, cotton and other crops appropriate to the region. It was the expertise of the Africans and their agricultural know-how that created the wealth of the South. The white owners learned about agriculture from the Africans, not the other way around.
Charleston was the biggest slave market in the world during the 1700’s and it made possible some of the largest plantations.
Middleton Place was a 1,000 acre rice growing operation across the river from Charleston and while the main building was destroyed by fire and earthquake, much of the beautiful and extensive gardens remain as do many of the work buildings, barns and stables. Some of the residential building have been partially restored, but it is the gardens that make Middleton Place a standout location today.
Various work buildings at Middleton Place are used as demonstration locations so tourists can see how some of the facilities were utilized. Here a blacksmith is making square nails, while a water-powered rice mill is just down the walk by the river.
From 1678 until the end of the civil war, the Middleton family would amass holdings of 19 plantations consisting of 63,000 acres and owning 3,500 slaves. Sugar cane, tobacco and rice were the most common and profitable products. Of course, most of the plantations had to be nearly completely self-sustaining in terms of growing their own food, raising cattle, building buildings, constructing waterways, fishing, cooking, clearing land, cutting firewood. All of which were done by the slaves. I recently learned that The English tyrant Cromwell ordered the “Act of Settlement� resulting in 40,000 Irish being deported to work on the sugar plantations of the West Indies. There were plenty of Irish slaves during this period as well.
The gardens at Middleton Place are justifiably famous for their flowering plants which were first introduced by famous French gardeners. The camellias are a favorite with the tourists as are the more than 100,00 azaleas.
Slave quarters interiors with the same or similar furnishings that would have been used at the time.