Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [69]
If there’s one kind of seafood that brings out the protective Mama Bear in Northern Californians, it’s salmon, with Dungeness crab a close second. Both salmon and crab depend on the bay, the former as a road to a spawning ground, the latter as the spawning ground itself. Bud and Rena are taking advantage of that, piggybacking on a salmon-monitoring project upstream. They plan to monitor the fish as they pass through the bay, thus discovering whether the oyster reefs can help to feed and support the shrinking population.
“The problem now,” Bud says, “is that when salmon leave the bay, there’s nothing in their stomachs. There used to be all kinds of channels through the flats, and they’d stay there, feeding. Now they still stay for a good while, poking around, trying to find food, but their body-fat content goes way down.”
“So we’re putting monitors out there,” Rena says. “A control monitor near the eelgrass, another close to the oyster reefs, just to see how long the fish stay in each place.”
What’s the perfect result? Bud drums his fingers. “Ideally, we’d be able to salmon-tag steelhead, sturgeon, and sharks. You’d see them come to the mudflats, but just in and out—bing, bing, gone. But if you saw them stay near the reefs for hours . . .”
“Even six or seven minutes would be great!” Rena says.
Bud chuckles and nods. “Yeah, six, seven minutes . . . man, that’s when I’d be jumping up and down.”
It’s a hugely expensive proposition (the tags are hundreds of dollars, the monitors fifteen hundred), especially given that they’re going to strap most of the equipment to fish and toss the fish into a river. But it’s also a hugely exciting one. When Twain was in San Francisco, oysters were an end in themselves, a food to be gathered or farmed, then served by the bushel on the city’s tables. Now bay oysters are a tool, a means to restoring the healthy bay that San Franciscans once took for granted. Oysters mean cleaner water, and more eelgrass, and food, and all of that means birds—migrating birds by the millions. It could mean more salmon, before they’re gone for good.
And the new efforts might be happening at just the right moment; for the first time since the Gold Rush, the bay is getting deeper. “It was only in 1999, or maybe 2000, that more sediment started leaving the bay than entering,” Rena says. “It’s that recent. And it was right then that we started seeing more eelgrass, more oysters. . . . Something’s happening out there. It is. I just can’t say what.”
After some early Christmas shopping, I drive home on the highway alongside the bay. The sun is setting behind San Francisco; orange light plays through broken clouds onto the swells. I think of the light slanting down through the water—dying in the murk before it reaches the bottom, where bat rays cruise past tunicates clustered on glass bottles, discarded iron, and dumped brick. Before, all I would see out there was water, sunlight, and waves. Now I imagine necks and narrows, a play of salt and fresh water. I see invisible currents and millions of microscopic creatures riding them. The currents are there, and the plankton, and the birds and fish that come to feed. I’ve lived near the bay for a decade, but I’m only just now starting to see it.
Five
DINNER WAS LEISURELY SERVED
Philadelphia Terrapin
LOBSTER, that prized and luxurious food, was once literally dirt cheap; in the 1850s, Canadians used