Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [65]
They’d been replaced by fattening beds far to the south. Though people had tried for decades to bring big, light, mild eastern oysters to California, none ever survived the long ocean voyage. So when the transcontinental railroad was completed, oystermen wasted no time. The rails were finished in May 1869; the first shipment of easterns arrived in October (about as early as possible, given the summer spawning season). The new arrivals had some big advantages as aquaculture stock, among them a thin ostium tube that made them hugely efficient feeders, allowing them to grow four inches in four years, compared to an Olympia’s two. Besides, San Francisco was a city of newcomers, many of them eager to eat oysters they remembered from Long Island or the Gulf of Mexico or the Carolina Tidewater. By 1875 the growers were ready to invest in earnest, ordering 167 train-car loads of inch-long seed oysters from the beds of New York and northern New Jersey.
Oysters thrived in the briny water of the southern bay, which received only 10 percent as much fresh water as the north. In the peak year of 1899, San Francisco Bay would produce 2.5 million pounds of oyster meat—nearly 80 percent of all oyster meat produced on the West Coast (in 1995, California produced about 1.5 million pounds). But having the farms far from the worst of the sediment left them vulnerable to a new threat: oyster pirates.
Most of the beds were separated from dry ground by a wide wetland; a quiet boatload of desperate poachers (balanced, I like to think, on peg legs and trying to clutch long knives between their teeth as they simultaneously rolled their r’s) could steal a load of oysters and be gone long before anyone suspected. Jack London’s “A Raid on the Oyster Pirates” in Tales of the Fish Patrol gives a vivid picture of the South Bay beds and of the extent of the surrounding wetlands as late as 1906:
Mr. Taft’s beds were three miles away, and for a long time we rowed silently, . . . once in a while grounding and our oar blades constantly striking bottom. At last we came upon soft mud covered with not more than two inches of water—not enough to float the boats. But the pirates at once were over the side, and pushing and pulling on the flat-bottomed skiffs, we moved steadily along.
After half a mile of the mud, we came upon a deep channel, up which we rowed, with dead oyster shoals looming high and dry on either side. At last we reached the picking grounds. . . . We hauled the noses of the boats up on the shore side of a big shoal, and all hands, with sacks, spread out and began picking.
Broad wetlands, shallow waters, old reefs, deep channels; the South Bay remained part of San Francisco’s harvest horn for centuries. Eventually, though, sedimentation and pollution destroyed the beds there as well, just as the true Washington Olympias would one day fail during the advent of pulp mills on Puget Sound.
The bad news is that we’re never going to get back a bay as clean as the one Twain knew, one bursting with an active shellfish fishery. We’ll never eat oysters or mussels from the bay in any quantity; the mercury just lasts too long. And there are no longer salmon in anything like the numbers that supported a catch of two hundred thousand fish in 1857. The bay fishery for crabs was in trouble by 1890, sturgeon by 1901; market hunters stopped going for ducks and geese by 1917. When you consider that nearly half the land area of California (and whatever oils and chemicals are dumped on it) drains into the estuary, it’s easy to despair. Maybe the bay will always be what it looks like from the air: postcard pretty in the middle, ringed by pavement and salt ponds the color of rust.
But some fisheries do