The term cowbelly is used in Louisiana to mean both a kind of work shoe and soft river mud. This kind of silt has been described evocatively by writer Conger Beasley, Jr. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Cowbelly”
A new term for me that I just ran across is cowbelly, meaning soft river mud.
Have you heard that?
Cowbelly.
Nope, never have.
Yeah, particularly in Louisiana.
Cowbelly is a term for soft river mud, and cowbellies are the rough work shoes that you use to work in.
Is that also in Louisiana, the shoes?
Yes.
Oh, interesting.
Cowbellies.
Yeah, isn’t that cool?
Why do they call the shoes that?
I can kind of get the river mud, soft and maybe the texture or even color of a cowbelly.
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s because those kinds of shoes are particularly, they stay on your feet better if you’re in that kind of mud.
Right, they don’t get sucked down by the muck.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, and speaking of mud, I’ve got a great passage that describes cowbelly mud.
It’s by a Missouri writer, Conger Beasley Jr.
He writes,
It is along the banks of slow-moving creeks where the current slackens completely that the very finest particles of sediment settle out of the water.
A barefoot wader stepping tentatively into the shallows from the bank here feels no suggestion of the creek’s flow, only a change of temperature.
At the boundary where the water becomes silt, the bottom is so plush the sinking foot barely registers the new medium, only a second change of temperature.
Silt soft as a Holstein’s belly.
Oh, I know those rivers.
Right?
I know those watercourses.
Yeah.
I’m thinking of the current river where I spent several weeks when I was 13.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah, down in southern Missouri, as a matter of fact.
No kidding.
Yeah, very beautiful, very green.
But that feeling, right, of just stepping into it.
Yeah, and the change in temperature.
Yes.
