Twain's Feast (21 page)

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.”

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.

Nearly a year after helping build the reefs, I meet Rena and Bud for Korean spicy chicken and vermicelli at the Emeryville food court on, appropriately enough, Shellmound Street (once site of the region’s largest mound, now a stone’s throw from Trader Joe’s, a massive multiplex, and the Pixar studios). It’s been an exciting eleven months up at Marin Rod & Gun; an average of twenty spat have settled onto each shell in the sacks. That’s an enormous number, hundreds of thousands of new oysters in all, and it’s inspired a whole new phase in the restoration project. Native oysters, it seems clear,
can
be brought back, at least sometimes and in some places. The next step is to figure out what that means for the rest of the bay.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

L
OBSTER, that prized and luxurious food, was once literally dirt cheap; in the 1850s, Canadians used the crustaceans to fertilize potato fields. Twenty years later, Nova Scotians still fed boiled lobster to their pigs and saw shells piled near a house as “signs of poverty and degradation.” Like other “trash” fish, lobsters were often used as bait; when he needed more, a cod fisherman could simply send a kid to the shore with a pronged spear, confident that he’d return with a sack. Lobster meat was less an indulgence than a common, inexpensive protein—good for a cheap meal, or for compost, or for catching more expensive and desirable fish.

Until canneries began shipping them nationwide, lobsters remained an almost entirely coastal food. This was largely because they were much more difficult to keep alive during shipment than oysters; in 1842 the first lobster sent from New York to Chicago died in Cleveland. The lack of extensive demand meant that early canneries used huge lobsters; in the 1870s it took the meat from only two average lobsters to fill a one-pound can. But within a few decades, as the larger specimens were fished out, as many as eight lobsters were needed to pack the same container. Soon they were too rare and expensive to be sold like Sunkist tuna. Lobsters grew scarce because they were an elite and desirable food, but they also became an elite and desirable food because they were scarce.

By the time I was growing up in Connecticut in the eighties, you got lobster by either paying through the nose or catching it yourself. I was lucky—my family had a small string of five traps in Long Island Sound. That meant, when everything was going well, all the lobster I could eat. It also meant that I came to see the shocked, rubber-banded creatures in seafood shops’ holding tanks as belonging nearly to a different species from the snapping, flapping, furious bugs crowded into a trap’s corners. Lobster meant dunking slick claw and robust tail meat into butter; it meant picking out tiny troves from the body and legs. But it also meant the smell of bony bunker fish strung on a coat hanger as bait and the splash as a wooden trap dropped onto a swell—an oddly plural splash, as ten slats hit the water all at once. And, regrettably, it meant the sound of lobsters clanking in the steamer as they died, a sound that drove my eight-year-old sister to two years of vegetarianism and wearing nothing but black.

Obviously, we were just hobbyists, heading out a few times a week to pull our traps on flat, safe water. There wasn’t any physical or financial peril. Still, when the lobsters were nearly wiped out—killed by the runoff from mosquito spray after an outbreak of West Nile virus—it was heartbreaking, like learning that a childhood home had burned down.

Like lobsters, diamondback terrapins began the nineteenth century as a common food; like lobsters, they ended it among its elite. And, unsurprisingly, the more expensive and rarefied terrapin became, the less likely a given eater was to know the first thing about the source of the semiaquatic turtle in his soup bowl. Twain knew prairie chickens, trout, oysters, mussels, raccoons, and possums well; he’d lived on the same land, drunk and swum the same waters, breathed the same wild air, even chased them through their forest haunts. Philadelphia terrapin soup was different. Though he loved a particular mode of cooking them, Twain, I think, was as distant from terrapins and their salt marshes as most modern Americans are from New England lobster—which is to say completely distant. Just as some people today are surprised to learn that lobsters aren’t actually bright red while crawling around the ocean bottom, I’m not sure that Twain could have picked a live diamondback terrapin out of a turtle lineup. He probably knew very little about how they lived, or were caught or shipped.

Though Twain had spent some time in Philadelphia as a printer’s apprentice in 1853, Philadelphia isn’t
of
the Chesapeake, or the salt marsh, in anything like the same way that San Francisco is
of
its bay. For Twain, terrapin soup was, in the end, a city thing. Though it was often a food of the poor, he probably ate it most often from the kinds of silver dishes that led an 1880
Washington Post
reporter to declare terrapin essential to any dinner “laying claim to being a pretentious affair” (which was, at the time, apparently a compliment).

So to me it seems totally appropriate (in a way, almost inevitable) that Mark Twain, of Hannibal, Missouri, ate stewed terrapin soup in Boston on the night he tried to join the ranks of America’s literary elite—the night that proved the most humiliating of his life.

Diamondback terrapins rule the eastern salt marshes. They have no competition at all from other turtles, which lack salt glands; the ability to purge salt from moderately salty drinking water gives terrapins exclusive title to all the prime brackish wetland real estate. They’re carnivores and will eat almost anything else that swims or scrabbles: oysters, clams, snails, shrimp, mussels, barnacles, fish. They’ll eat a crab’s leg, tearing it off from behind and fleeing from the claws. In turn, crabs raid their nests, as do foxes, crows, and eagles; the turtles are themselves eaten by raccoons.

And by men. “Terrapin” is a corruption of the Algonquin
torope,
the Abenaki
turepe,
and the Delaware
turpen,
all of which mean “edible turtle”; Native Americans, and later white colonists and enslaved Africans, defined the animal by its value as food. Terrapins have been trapped, snatched up barehanded, rutted out from the mud, caught by children with hand nets, and unceremoniously dredged from their winter hiding spots. North Carolinians tracked nesting terrapins with dogs or set fire to marsh grasses in winter in hopes the warmth would tempt them from hibernation (the
New York Times
called both methods “barbaric”). More often men waded chest-deep in the autumn Chesapeake, probing the muddy bottom with pronged poles, hoping to prod a hibernating turtle’s shell.

The same 1880
Washington Post
article that declared terrapin essential to pretentious dinners also described the most “primitive” style of cooking one: laying it on its back, alive, among the coals or in a hot oven. After it was cooked, the cook removed the gall bag and ate the rest directly from the shell, possibly with a dressing of sherry and butter. Cooking terrapin this way (without the dressing, of course) was common among Chesapeake tribes such as the Delaware, who buried turtles alive in hot embers.

Terrapin stew also has deep roots among African Americans, such as those who made Louisiana’s soupe à la tortue for French and Spanish Creole planters, or Baltimore’s best French-trained turtle cooks (many had fled to the city from the Haitian Revolution). In 1880 the
New York Times
claimed that “there is an art about making terrapin soup which a professional cook has to acquire, but which seems to come natural to a Virginian negro” and a decade later praised “the terrapin dressed by the great original bandana-crowned negro cook.” Meanwhile, New York socialite and dedicated snob Ward McAllister wrote that no Frenchman could make the soup, which “require[d] the native born culinary genius of the African.” Putting aside “bandana-crowned” and that kind of garbage, terrapin was clearly something unusual: a dish with African-American origins that were openly acknowledged by the Victorian upper class.

That’s not to say that wealthy whites were giving
all
the credit to poor or enslaved African Americans for inventing their beloved terrapin soup. It was common, for instance, to say that the turtles were “given” or “fed to” slaves—a typical example is the story that slaves once “raised their voices in loud complaint because their masters insisted on feeding them diamondback terrapin twice a week.” Though turtles were sometimes provided by slave owners, African Americans were surely also supplementing poor rations by catching terrapin, much as they did with raccoon and opossum. After they took a necessity and made it art, stewed terrapin was—in a class sense—both humble and elevated, both high and low.