It’s amazing what peer pressure will do to motivate you. The water was cool and all in all we had a fairly nice time floating around. I was a little concerned that the smell of the pond would never come off of my skin though. Soon “lunch” was called and we all scampered back onto solid ground and converged around a makeshift table with handmade falafel sandwiches symmetrically laid out for us.
The sandwiches tasted great—that or we were starving—not sure which. That’s when things started going down hill. Halfway through my sandwich, I saw movement from the corner of my right eye … somewhere in the pond something was moving. Derek, one of the guides, saw my scowling expression and happily said with a smile, “Crawdads man, there’s hundreds of them in there.” This got everyone’s attention, especially Danny’s, who has a fear of anything that crawls. Looking closer through the murky water, we could now see a blanket of marching, black creatures, some at least a foot long—pincher’s all raised in unison. At this point Derek (not sure what the other guide’s name was), said “This is my favorite part of the lunch festivities,” and at that point he flopped a big piece of lunchmeat (I think it was a turkey slice), into the pond. One of the larger crawdads was apparently ready for it and was onto the lunch meat in seconds, pulling it away with its claws and disappearing into the dark depth to enjoy his own lunch feast. A stillness came over the crowd as Derek and his partner, proceeded to fling all the uneaten lunchmeat into the water.
It was really quite a sight seeing all these floating pieces of lunchmeat being plucked from the surface of the water like shark bait in a Jaws movie. As we all watched in a dumb stupor, we came to the same realization, that this was far from the first time this fun lunch activity had taken place—how many unsuspecting others had spent their afternoons swimming around in this disgusting pool of half-eaten lunch meat and overfed crawdads???
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