Twain's Feast (20 page)

They’d been replaced by fattening beds far to the south.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:

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 survive, mostly herring and bay shrimp. The bay is a nursery for Dungeness crab, sole, and other fish; it still feeds the city, even if the days of eating bottom-dwelling filter feeders are gone. And healing the bay further—bringing back more birds, more salmon, more crab, more life—will mean, among a hundred other jobs, bringing back oysters: the pulsing, filtering, feeding reefs.

One of my mottos, seldom stated yet assiduously observed, is “I will not jump into a mudflat in winter.” Today I volunteered to do it.

I clamber down the rocks beneath the Marin Rod & Gun Club, which consists of a nondescript clubhouse and a pier near the northern end of the Richmond Bridge. We’re just across the peninsula from San Quentin Point, which commands a spectacular view of the city (and was once the site of some of the earliest oyster pens) but is now much to be avoided, there being a gigantic prison there and all. Marin Rod & Gun is a throwback, a place for older men to come and play checkers and have a drink or else head out on the pier to pull in a striper or bat ray. It owns twenty acres of waterfront property and forty more underwater (much to my surprise, most of the submerged bay, other than the shipping channels, is privately owned), and when I first arrived was catering to exactly three old guys playing cards.

Just north of the pier are three long, narrow grids of bamboo stakes: the site of what will become the biggest native oyster reef in modern San Francisco Bay.

My wet suit is meant for ocean diving, with a hood and two thick pieces that overlap all around my trunk, so I’m slow, clumsy, and increasingly sweaty even on such a cool and misty day. To keep me from bobbing around once I’m in deeper water, I’m wearing a twenty-pound weight belt, and it drives me better than knee-deep into the mud. Even with the bridge traffic roaring to the south, my steps are one of the loudest things out here—
Slurp . . . pop! Slurp . . . pop!
There are already a half dozen volunteers by the stakes, two more struggling out with me. More work from a dock on the other side of the main pier, handing sacks of shell into a pair of motorboats. There are eight pallets of sacks, each loaded chin-high—this could take a while.

The mud I’m in probably isn’t Gold Rush mud. That’s deeper, buried under a century of additional sediment. But whatever this is, it stinks, and is fine as dust; later I’ll try to rinse out my suit in a half dozen changes of water. In the end the silt will defeat me—the next time I dive, I imagine, I’ll look like a squid shooting ink.

Bud Abbott, a fisheries expert at the health and environmental consultancy Environ, played a big role in getting the work here started; he calls efforts like this one “the largest social movement in the world that no one saw coming.” There are, he’ll tell me later, literally thousands of nongovernmental organizations helping to defend local waterways. Friends of a creek, friends of a pond, friends of the bay. “Every mud hole has its friends now,” he says with a grin. “I mean, how in the world did we get a hundred volunteers?”

Rena Obernolte, Bud’s partner and project director, chimes in. “A hundred and fifty.”

“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 a thin ring, like a hatband, not nearly enough to keep the water really clean. For that you need acre upon acre of reefs.

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.