Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [59]
Now, San Francisco Bay isn’t actually a bay. It’s an estuary. And though this might seem semantic, it actually makes all the difference in the world. A bay simply holds water; an estuary mixes it. It’s the difference between a glass of neat gin and a dry martini—gin is well and good, but dry martinis are holy, and though bays are useful, estuaries are explosive creators of life. In an estuary, fresh and salt waters come together, mixing and churning, creating a state of change and utter confusion that is one of the most literally lively conditions on the planet.
It’s a situation as rare as it is precious, at least on the scale of the San Francisco estuary. Think, for a moment, of a hopeful ’49er taking a ship around Cape Horn (maybe he was worried enough about malaria to avoid the land crossing at Panama). He’d sail north past Chile, and Peru, and Ecuador, and Colombia, and past the Darien gap and along the sweeping curve of Mexico and then the whole lower California coast, and after all that time and distance his first encounter with a major estuary would be when he sailed through the nearly invisible narrow mouth of the Golden Gate and into the tidal maze beyond.
You tell the story of an estuary through water flow—where it comes from, how long it stays, what it carries, where it goes. In the San Francisco Bay, the story was complex and ever-changing. Every day the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers carried some 24 billion gallons of fresh water to meet the more than 200 billion gallons of cold, salty, ocean water sluicing in and out the Golden Gate. More streams, creeks, and winter rivulets ran through three hundred square miles of brackish bay wetlands, as well as the Sacramento Delta’s five hundred square miles of “reeds and rivers.” Leaves, reeds, and dead wetland plants drifted downstream, rotting into rich nutrients; plankton fed on them, bloomed, and in turn died and sank to the bottom of the bay. There, in the mud, the filter feeders waited, oysters and mussels and clams ready for the slow, steady rain of nutrients.
Call it a bay or an estuary, it suffused San Francisco. Sand dunes loomed above the “old-fashioned” frame houses; below them piers probed the bright water like fingers. People bathed in the bay, at least until (or so Twain claimed) the owner of a new North Beach bathing house fed pork to a shark, cut it open on the dock, and exclaimed in horror that the fiendish beast had eaten human flesh.9 Twain could walk to the docks, passing Abe Warner’s Cobweb Palace with its mounds of scrimshaw and New England-style clam and crab dishes; there he could watch fishermen sail in with salmon and flatfish, and eggers unload baskets of murre eggs from the shark-haunted Farallons. Afterward he sometimes boarded a touring sailboat for a cruise to Oakland, or San Leandro, or Alameda. Along the way he doubtless saw wide beds of eelgrass hissing under the incoming tide, and flanking reefs of native oysters. There’d have been trawlers, feluccas with brightly colored square sails, even Chinese junks heading for the shrimping beds. Flights of pelicans tracing long lines in the water with their wing tips. Sea otters. Maybe a whale.
And he’d have seen, along with native oyster reefs, the sticks and stakes of submerged oyster holding pens. It’s hugely surprising how few of the oysters eaten in San Francisco in Twain’s day were true bay natives; hundreds of shell mounds flank the bay, after all. Oysters have fed people here for centuries. Still, within a few years into the Gold Rush, the great majority of oysters eaten in San Francisco came from somewhere else. Specifically, they came from Shoalwater Bay, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula—came in such quantities that San Franciscans soon called all native western oysters “Olys” (they’re still called Olympias—the scientific name is Ostrea conchaphila).
The main complaint about native San Francisco oysters was their size. Clarence Edwords’s 1914 restaurant guide and cookbook Bohemian San Francisco has a recipe for oyster omelets, calling for six eggs . .