Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [67]
“A hundred fifty, right. They’re eager to get in there. It’s dirty work, but they all want to help Mother Nature. Everyone’s looking to help. Some come once, some are real fixtures—we see them every time we put out a call.”
“It’s a real community-based organization,” Rena says. “That’s the only way we can do it, with volunteers helping to put out mounds of shell, bagging up new shell, monitoring, all of that.” It’s clear what she means. This seems a large-scale project, especially after the slow, quiet, individual monitoring at the stations circling the bay, but in the end it’s the accumulation of small acts by individuals. That’s how the project started in the first place: Todd Mayer of Marin Rod & Gun gave Bud a call, Bud took a look at the site, Save the Bay started monitoring, grad students from San Francisco State and other schools joined in, Natalie Cosentino-Manning from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration got involved, the call went out for community help—lots of people deserve credit, but in the end there isn’t an easy story to tell, or any kind of fixed hierarchy. It’s a bunch of concerned people with a common goal, doing what they can to heal the water they live beside.
We gather by the bamboo stakes, shin-deep in mud, chest-deep in water, as the first boat churns toward us. When it arrives, those on board hand down mesh bags of oyster shell contributed by Drake’s Bay Oyster Farm. Each bag is a few feet long, maybe a foot across. We drop ten bags around each stake, holding them in mounds with our legs as we pin them with a piece of rebar through the mesh and into the mud. It’s simple but clumsy work.
I blink away chips of oyster shell, soon learning not to look straight up at the bag I’m reaching for. The smells of salt and powdered shell and bare tidal mud overwhelm the bridge-traffic exhaust; the bags splash into the water like crab pots. Something is tickling my scalp, and I brush it from my hair into the water. Ah. An earwig. I’m about to ignore it when I feel more in my hair. When I shake my head, two more fall out. There are like two dozen of the earwigs twisting on the water, all around me—looking, I imagine, for a nice, cozy ear to dig into. Around them are all these bubbles, hundreds of minuscule yellow bubbles and . . .
Jesus. Are those earwig eggs?
Twain liked hot toddies. Dan De Quille even quoted him about it: “Methinks a toddy, piping hot, would rid this breast of the woes planted by our skulking enemies!” I could go for a toddy right about now. Instead I stop standing under the bags when I take them and generally try not to think about ears or wigs or anything but building the reefs.
The work is surprisingly straightforward, surprisingly mechanical. When we retrofitted our house against earthquakes, it was odd to realize how basic the work was. You bolt the house to the foundations. You hammer in some plywood. You clip the tops of the crawl space’s beams to the floorboards. This feels something like that: after all the monitoring, the questions about where the oysters were, what happened to them, and where they are today, in the end the restoration comes down to stuffing bags of shell together in what seems a likely pattern—open enough for spat to drift through, dense enough for them to take hold—and hoping a reef starts to form. It’s systematic and deliberate, but there’s no real secret sauce here, just a groping, silent dialogue with the oysters to find out what the best shape for substrate might be.
If a large number of oysters do grow, the benefits could be huge. Mussels filter a lot of water—thirty liters per animal per day. But in the same time, an oyster can filter between twenty and fifty gallons. True, a reef like this one might not mean much for the bay as a whole—over 200 billion gallons, remember, sweep in and out with the tides every twenty-four hours. Even in the sailing lake near Shoreline Amphitheatre, where Rena found as many as 10 million native oysters—the largest known population in North America—they form only