Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [68]
Still, you have to start somewhere, and filtering is only one benefit of an oyster reef, which also makes a terrific habitat for herring, crabs, shrimp, and gobies (the last are a major food source for birds and fish). Plus, when oysters filter the water, they “repackage” some of the nutrients, leaving them behind as little packets that are later scavenged by crabs and other bottom feeders. And long before it affects the bay as a whole, their constant filtration does help to clean up small inlets and harbors. Clean water promotes eelgrass, which in turn transforms bare mudflats into something much more complex. Helping to restore some of the bay’s complexity is really the heart of what we’re doing—and “complexity,” here, is just another word for opulence, abundance, and life.
These volunteers understand that. That’s why they work, despite knowing that we won’t be able to eat bay oysters in our lifetime—though the old mining sludge is finally starting to work its way out to sea, there’s just too much mercury in what’s left. So the volunteers are here out of a basic sense of caring, a desire to secure the bay’s future. “The grants we got all required some social outreach,” Bud tells me later, “but we didn’t expect it to be at the heart of what we’d be doing. Quite unconsciously, we tapped into this need to get in, to get dirty, to help Mother Nature.”
We work through the morning and into the afternoon, stacking bag after bag, staking them to the mud with rebar, telling bad jokes while we wait for the boat. “I don’t consider this working,” Rena says, and after I mentally partition the searing horror of the earwigs, neither do I. The sound of the traffic recedes; we’re making a secret here, a little pocket of life that only the volunteers will know about, and that’s enough.
There’s no guarantee that the reef construction will work, or even that it’s a good idea to do it this way at all. There’s debate on every point. Would shell scatters be better? They might mirror natural conditions, but tend to vanish into the mud. And maybe dry shell isn’t a good idea at all, since it could bring in more invasive plants and animals. How about chicken wire dipped in concrete, then? The open mesh might not get buried under the silt, but it would still mean dumping more metal into the water. One thought that Bud and Rena have is to try perforated concrete domes, with the concrete made only from materials dredged or dug from the bay. They’ve already bought the mold; maybe next year.
Whatever the ideal conditions, by the end of the day there’s a new reef in San Francisco Bay. With the tide getting high, the water looks exactly like it did before we started, just a few rows of bamboo stakes projecting from the water. But who knows what’s happening down there? Who knows what might be grateful? In 1870 Twain wrote a piece in the Galaxy claiming that he’d been fired by an agricultural paper for describing oyster beds under the heading of “landscape gardening.” But really, this is a kind of gardening: the reefs are living things that need planting and tending.
Back on the pier, Rena squints through a microscope at an oyster from one of the test bags laid out the summer before. Suddenly she smiles, leans back, one hand paused in her hair. “I see larvae,” she says. “It’s working.”
TO BOIL A SHOULDER OF MUTTON WITH OYSTERS
Hang it some days, then salt it well for two days, bone it, and sprinkle it with pepper and a bit mace pounded; lay some
oysters over it, roll the meat up tight, and tie it. Stew it in a small quantity of water, with an onion and a few pepper-corns, till quite tender. Have ready a little good gravy, and some oysters stewed in it; thicken this with flour and butter, and pour over the mutton when the tape is taken off. The stew-pan should be kept close covered.
—ESTHER ALLEN HOWLAND, The New England Economical Housekeeper, 1845
Nearly a year after helping build the reefs, I meet Rena and Bud