Sinkholes, Caves and the Devil’s Millhopper
A trip to hell and back
Glow worms and Crawdads
Warren
wandered the tunnels for hours, finding dead ends, loops that brought
him back to the same place, tunnels with a think gooey mud on the floor,
other tunnels with a fine white sand, rooms with strange formations,
places he could stand, other places he had to crawl. It had been two
days since he followed the figure into the earth, and he was starving
when he came across a pool of water which was bathed in a soft green
light emitted by glowing worms hanging from the ceiling above it. The
pool was a dozen feet across but only a few inches deep in which were
many pure white crayfish, or crawdads as they were called in the south.
He had caught crawdads before in the creeks in the Gainesville area but
they were larger and brown, these were smaller with a white slightly
translucent body. He reached into the water and grabbed a few of them
and put them in a small depression on the floor. He had had eaten
crawdads before at the Yearling Restaurant in Cross Creek where Marjorie
Kinnan Rawlings's wrote the book The Yearling. Crawdads are
actually quite good, turning bright red when cooked looking and tasting
like baby lobsters. Well, they can’t be that bad raw, he thought as he
grabbed one, hit it with a rock, peeled off the shell and ate the tail.
As hungry as he was, it actually tasted quite good, he even sucked the
juices out of the head part, tossing the empty shell into the water he
watched the remaining crawdads converge on it. After finishing off the
few more he felt better. With the soft glow of the worms hanging from
the ceiling above reminding him of stars in the sky he laid down and
slept. He awoke with a start from a dream about a three headed dog
chasing him, sitting up he at first thought it was night with stars in
the sky but soon realized where he really was. After taking a drink of
water from the pool he proceeded down another passageway hoping it would
be the way out.