“Instead of getting in trouble, I worked on an oyster boat. “As a young girl in a port town, a lot of bad stuff could’ve happened to me,” she says. The girls hauled as many as 800 a day, for a dollar a sack. The summer she turned 14, she and a girlfriend unloaded 100-pound sacks for aging Vietnamese oystermen. She supported her entire family, with enough left over for Girbauds jeans, Z Cavariccis high-waisted pants and white K-Swiss Classics.Īfter oyster season, she fished for mullet, shoveled ice at Wet Willie’s Seafood or worked the deck on shrimp boats that left after dark and returned at dawn. By the end of the day, she would have filled 10, earning about $100, the cash placed in an envelope with her name written on it that she picked off the hood of the foreman’s truck. She cleaned the oysters, hacking off debris and dead shells, and fed them into the sacks. When the boat was full, she climbed onto it. She bent into the water, yanked out a cluster, shook off the mud, tossed it in the boat. It wasn’t hard to find oysters then - they were everywhere. “It was just beautiful out there,” Arnesen says today. With a rope looped around her waist, she trudged through the marsh, between the mud banks and the tufts of saw grass, tugging the boat behind her. They gave her a flatboat, rubber boots, burlap sacks and a hatchet. A dredge boat ferried her to Bay Adams, where she met a crew of oystermen. At 12, after her mother lost her job, Arnesen began skipping school to walk to the harbor in Buras, a town near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Kindra Arnesen’s middle school was a plot of marsh a hundred yards off the southern coast of Louisiana. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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