Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [82]
Marguerite’s head-starting project has its opponents. Among the watermen, of course (though they have less of a stake one way or the other now that harvesting terrapin has been banned—I left several messages at the Maryland Watermen’s Society office and never heard back), but also among state wildlife officials. She defends herself fiercely, though; she thinks that there’s too much bureaucratic territoriality, too many people wanting to study instead of move forward with genuine preservation efforts. When she’s accused of releasing turtles in the wrong places, mixing historically distinct populations, she scoffs: “Where are these pristine populations supposed to be? Hotels would release their extras, going way back. Just recently some Buddhists in New York let a bunch go in the wetlands there. It’s frustrating, like it’s more important to do a genetic study than to actually help the species survive.”
Marguerite started taking the protection of terrapin personally when eight of the animals she’d bought, tagged, and released turned up in a Chinese market in Albany.13 “This was back when I was just getting started,” she says. “I didn’t even have my number on the tags. The only reason I heard about the turtles was that someone I’d recently met saw them and called to see if they might be mine. So I called the market and said, ‘Those are my animals. I paid for them, I expect them back.’ They started arguing, and I said ‘Look, it’s real simple. I have a bill of sale for the animals, and I’m claiming ownership. It’s no different than if my dog walked across state lines—it’s still my dog. I paid for these turtles. That’s how they’ve made their contribution to the economy, and now they’re mine.’ But it’s hard. There’s no gentleman’s agreement, no rules people are willing to follow. If someone wants to take tagged animals out of the wild, and out of my research, all I can say is shame on them.”
Albany seems like one of the last places you’d look for live terrapin being sold as food; it’s like finding raw oysters at a hot-dog stand (or a good hot dog at a raw bar). But long-distance transport of terrapin is nothing new. When packed into well-aerated, straw-lined barrels, hibernating turtles can live for weeks or even months, long enough that in 1897 one Maryland woman could lay confident plans to send them to Italy’s Queen Margaret. And the sad truth is that the Chesapeake population was eventually hunted to near extinction, to the point that even restaurants in Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia—cities with easy access to the bay, the nation’s greatest natural incubator of turtles—usually served terrapin from hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Eventually the names of the various recipes were often the most local thing about them.
I’ve been talking about diamondback terrapin as if there’s only a single homogeneous species from Cape Cod all the way to Texas. But of course that’s not true; there are six distinct subspecies, defined by genetics or behavior or both. Admittedly, if you’re like me, the list of their individual characteristics (northern diamondbacks lack knobs on the median keel; the posterior margins of Carolina diamondback shells curl upward; the median keel of the ornate terrapin has bulbous knobs) can make your eyes glaze a bit. They seem sort of trifling, only worth the attention of serious turtle junkies.
But the differences matter. In Twain’s day terrapin eaters thought that they mattered a great deal—as much, certainly, as the difference between San Francisco’s coppery native oysters and the fat, delicious, doomed shellfish of Blue Point. The best-tasting, most expensive turtles were northern diamondbacks; among them, aficionados would call for Long Islands, Delawares, or, most commonly, Chesapeakes. In 1897 one reporter wrote that northern diamondbacks had the “only flesh known which one can crush in his mouth with his tongue without the aid of his teeth.” Since northern diamondbacks hibernate for longer than their southern cousins, he thought, their meat was naturally more tender and delicate.