Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [62]
If any food ever truly affronted Twain, leaving him stammering with agitation, groping about for a properly demeaning insult, it was watery European hotel coffee. “After a few months’ acquaintance with European ‘coffee,’” he wrote, “one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it is not a mere dream, after all, and a thing which never existed.” He had found that ideal cup in San Francisco. By the summer of 1863, riding out to the grand Cliff and Ocean houses before dawn had become a minor fad; Twain did it exactly once and swore never to do it again—the cold fog, he said, was so thick that he could scarcely see his horse. Afterward he wrote that
we could scarcely see the sportive seals out on the rocks, writhing and squirming like exaggerated maggots, and there was nothing soothing in their discordant barking, to a spirit so depressed as mine was. . . .
We were human icicles when we reached the Ocean House, and there was no fire there, either. I banished all hope, then, and succumbed to despair; I went back on my religion, and sought surcease of sorrow in soothing blasphemy. I am sorry I did it, now, but it was a great comfort to me, then. We could have had breakfast at the Ocean House, but we did not want it; can statues of ice feel hunger? But we adjourned to a private room and ordered red-hot coffee, and it was a sort of balm to my troubled mind to observe that the man who brought it was as cold, and as silent, and as solemn as the grave itself.
Then, the Miracle:
That coffee did the business for us. It was made by a master-artist, and it had not a fault; and the cream that came with it was so rich and thick that you could hardly have strained it through a wire fence. As the generous beverage flowed down our frigid throats, our blood grew warm again, our muscles relaxed, our torpid bodies awoke to life and feeling, anger and uncharitableness departed from us and we were cheerful once more. We got good cigars, also, at the Ocean House, and drove into town over a smooth road lighted by sun and unclouded by fog.
Coffee so good that the earth seemed to smile. And at that moment, all along the coast, mussels were gorging.
San Francisco’s cold summer fogs and its abundant ocean life are both gifts of offshore upwelling. As the California Current—a gigantic, six-mile-wide, invisible river in the sea—flows from Alaska to Mexico, the turning of the earth draws it steadily, constantly offshore. All this water is replaced by a gigantic upwelling from thousands of feet below, much as hot smoke rising through a chimney can pull a cold draft of air through an open door. And when this cold water touches warm summer air, the ocean breathes fog thick as a wet, gray blanket, the kind that Twain rode through cursing, swearing that he could “not see the horse at all, and [was] obliged to steer by his ears, which stood up dimly out of the dense white mist that enveloped him.”
The cold, upwelled water that makes the fogs is full of detritus, decomposed fish, rotted plankton, and whatever else has drifted to the ocean bottom—all now broken down into particles fine enough to billow back to the surface on a rising current. When these nutrients combine with sunlight, the ocean explodes with plankton; if you scuba dive in the upper reaches of an upwelling zone, you can barely see your hand through the green, almost greasy water. And plankton is everything—plankton is it. Upwelled nutrients, and the plankton they support, are the foundation of all California marine life, from fish to whales to the Farallon Islands murres whose nests were once so busily robbed.
And mussels, for sure. Mussels spin strong thread, knitting themselves to rock in beds up to fifteen inches thick. The waves that break on the beds carry upwelled nutrients; as each wave draws, foaming, back, the mussels filter and feed. Mussels live on surfaces the ocean wants to shear clean—it’s a triumph of life. And though the beds look pretty monotonous—just