The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine by Steven Rinella

Author:Steven Rinella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

I WAS STANDING UP TO MY WAIST in the swampy muck of Lake Dubonnet, about ten miles outside of Traverse City, Michigan. The lake is, by anyone’s definition, a swamp. I had an annoying little guppy or leech or something trapped between my left foot and the sole of my sandal. It was wedged in the pocket formed by my foot’s arch, right where you’d tickle your girlfriend for maximum effect. No amount of wiggling my toes could get the bastard out of there, and the water was too deep for me to be able to reach down and extract it by hand. Every time I tried to lift my afflicted foot to loosen my sandal, the increased weight on my other foot would cause it to punch through the lake’s false bottom, which was composed of the interwoven roots of aquatic plants. Whenever my foot broke through, an eruption of methane gas bubbles and supercooled water would percolate past my scrotum as I plunged eighteen inches down to the real bottom. My dad always called this type of muck “loon shit.”

Standing there, I couldn’t help but think about how much less of a man I’d become since I was a kid. Sure, I had improved in some respects: I’m a much better shot with a rifle. I’m more open to criticism. I’m more adept at following complicated instructions. I’m more likely to take the little piece for myself and let someone else have the big piece. But standing in Lake Dubonnet rendered all of that inconsequential; in terms of frog catching, I had become a total loser.

“Man, this sucks,” I yelled to Drost, my frogging partner. I wanted to make him feel guilty. He was standing in the woods on the shore of the swamp. He had on the same pair of camouflage cutoff shorts that I swear he’s owned since we were kids, and they were perfectly dry. At that moment I resented him horribly.

Drost teaches high school biology in Traverse City, about 140 miles up the Lake Michigan shoreline from where we grew up. After finishing college in the U.P., he moved to Seattle for six years and struggled his ass off to make a living. Then he moved back to Michigan to take this job. Because he’s a schoolteacher, Drost continues to have schoolkid notions about how summer is supposed to be utterly relaxing. For his summer vacation footwear, he had opted for a pair of cushioned, rubbery slip-on sandals, forgoing the practical versatility of strap-ons, which I myself prefer. When we arrived at Lake Dubonnet and shone our flashlights into the water, it was obvious that the muck would strip those brand-new slippers right off his feet.

To be honest, though, there was little point in his wading into the swamp, because, sadly, we were unarmed. Our initial hunting scheme was to gig for frogs. Frog gigging involves a three-tined spear, called a gig, and a flashlight. Gigging was the tried-and-true method of our childhood and is still practiced by frogging enthusiasts from Massachusetts to California.

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