The first raw oyster I ate came from the Chesapeake Bay. The shell intrigued me. I held it up to the light, turning it this way and that, the way I often do entertaining a new thought.
The shell seemed primal, as ageless as the sea, alluring like a jewel. It was grey and felt stippled and blunt to the touch like Braille. A few tiny barnacles had made their home on the shell along with a couple of sea worms. This oyster's home had provided hospitality to neighbors in the mixed neighborhood in which it once lived. I could see that the oyster's striated armor had been meticulously formed, layer upon layer, laid up like ceramic tiles on a roof. Although the shell's exterior was gnarled and beaten, the inside was decidedly uptown. The oyster's living space revealed a miniature palace, a salon, fully glazed and satin smooth. The pearl‑like patina of its walls was accented with occasional splashes of blue. The interior formed a seamless sanctuary where the oyster could rest safely ensconced as cozily as though it were royalty reclining between pillows of silk. The oyster, a marvelous creation, is over 200,000,000 years old as a species. In the last three hundred years, on America's east coast, the oyster population has greatly diminished and around New York Harbor, oysters have effectively disappeared.
I spent the summers of my boyhood roaming the beaches of Great Kills and Princes Bay on Staten Island, the 'Island' as natives call it. I swam, sunned, sailed the Lower Bay and watched ships steam languidly through the Narrows in and out of New York Harbor. I played not far from where the explorers, Verrazano and Hudson once anchored and their crews disembarked to fill casks with fresh water and receive the local oysters as gifts from the Lenape Indians. Verrazano left the Island reluctantly. He found the area, "commodious and delightful." Explorers knew the Island as the 'Watering Place.'
My family had been in the oyster trade on Staten Island and around New York harbor for at least three generations. However, until I came to Maryland to live in my late thirties I'd never seen or eaten a live oyster. By the time I was born, the oyster trade had ended in New York resulting from pollution, over harvesting and disease.
Even then, New York Harbor and the Island were ailing. Flotsam littered the high water mark along the beaches and waterfronts. I'd find colorful baubles occasionally. Mostly I saw urban and industrial waste: broken bottles, cans, crates, oil drums, clotted oil, detached pilings, and also the casualties of pollution like dead horseshoe crabs, muscles, and fish. The sight disturbed me. I dreamt once that I saw the Island's waters clear and clean and the hills uncluttered and treed. It was like dreams I would have later in life. Loved ones would occasionally appear in them smiling and looking fit long after they had died of lingering illnesses.
I enjoyed visiting my grandmother. She lived in Mariners Harbor, an old Island enclave where people in the Maritime trades once built grand Victorian homes. She told me stories about Great‑Grandfather John's market on Fulton Street in Manhattan and how small sloops sailed up the East River from Princes Bay to deliver Island oysters on the piers nearby. In the early eighteen hundreds, as the Island's oyster harvests began failing, Great‑grandfather John sailed down to the Chesapeake Bay to purchase oyster 'seeds' for planting in the depleted beds of Raritan Bay. How marvelous, I thought, that oysters which looked and felt like rocks could grow from seeds like daisies.
Sometimes I'd play with the two decorative pieces that sat on her parlor table: a starfish and an oyster shell, a curious combination. Next to man, the starfish is the oyster's most destructive predator. It can decimate entire oyster beds. My grandmother told me that if you break the leg off one starfish, the next thing you know, you've got two starfish. Starfish reproduce exponentially and with frightening tenacity, like malignant cells.
In 1963, I returned home to the Island. I'd been away for some years and went to visit my mother. One day we drove to Fort Wadsworth to shop at the Post Exchange. The historic Fort is situated on a small rise on the Island's northeast corner along the Narrows overlooking Brooklyn. I remember that day watching my mother, her hair blowing in the offshore breeze as she pointed across the open expanse of the Narrows toward Bay Ridge. A year later, near where we'd stood, the construction of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge had been completed and the bridge was officially opened. Soon the Island was inundated with traffic and glutted by overdevelopment, obliterating the verdant landscape by leveling trees, filling open spaces with tract housing, shopping malls and throughways. The following summer my mother died of cancer. Like overdevelopment, malignant cells are unable to contain their own growth.
Oysters thrive in tidal estuaries such as New York Harbor and the Chesapeake Bay. The muddy bottoms and the delicate balance these estuaries strike between fresh and brackish waters create the optimum conditions for an oyster's growth. The Island's bays and creeks contained some of the richest beds in the country. The world had once been New York's oyster, in that its world wide oyster trade netted New York, millions. But as early as 1737 laws had begun to be enacted to stave off the diminishing oyster population caused by over harvesting. In 1884 it was clear that New York City's waters were polluted by excessive sewage and industrial wastes. In 1916 typhus cases were traced back to Island oysters and the health department condemned the beds, ending the great oyster era in New York.
I moved to St. Michaels, Maryland, nineteen years ago. I came here still mourning the Island's devastation by pollution and overdevelopment. I hoped to find in this idyllic tidewater region an Eden I felt had been lost to me. There is evidence that in the tidewater of the Eastern Shore, the kind of sprawl, pollution and over fishing that devastated the Island is also taking place here. In combating diseases, medical experts tell us that early detection and active intervention can make a life and death difference. It's also a sound prescription, ecologically.
In the late fall, off the Chesapeake Bay on Broad Creek where I live, I frequently hear the muted growl of a marine engine idling nearby. From my window I watch a waterman on his workboat tonging for oysters. He finds fewer each year. There's a dinghy astern his workboat. The waterman takes the dinghy, rows it to shore and walks the low water line, foraging for the few oysters that remain in the mud. He has the dinghy's painter in his hand and pulls the dinghy along the shore with him. I think of a dog on a leash. The waterman throws the oysters in the dinghy as though tossing the dog bones. There are not many oysters left.
On the Eastern Shore, as on the Island, creeks and marshes course through the body of the landscape like capillaries. There is a sleepy sensuality to marshes. They're the cradle of life. The sultry summer mornings of the marshes drip with moisture and haze. They welcome the Blue Heron. His guttural squawks protest against only heaven knows what. With deafening honks, migrating geese settle in on the creeks for the night, trumpeting their arrival from the north like princes announcing themselves to the palace. Buffleheads and mergansers soar, dip, dive, bob and weave on the winter creeks as they woo and feed. Marshes nurture all living things, some seen, others invisible, critters that slither, creep, fly, drill, crawl, swim, buzz and some, like oysters, that are simply content to lie stuck in the mud. Marshes are wet, intimate, serving as both womb and sepulcher to the life which, beginning and ending there, is reborn.
I have read descriptions of early New York Harbor and the Chesapeake Bay's abundance of life, including oysters which covered the floors of these respective bays, shore to shore, like carpet. Such abundance amazed some early European settlers. They frequently described the New World as “Eden.” Adriaen van der Donk was stunned by the sheer generosity of the land. He innocently wrote in his mid seventeenth century Description of the New Netherlands: “There are some persons who imagine that the animals of the country will be destroyed in time, but this is an unnecessary anxiety.” Adriaen, alas, underestimated his progenitors.
Some of Adriaen's contemporaries included my ancestors who once lived by the marshes of the Island. They fished the waters and farmed the land. I have often wondered whether my own affinity for marshes is not hereditary. Practicing a way of life, as my ancestors did, is to perform the daily tasks it requires. This practice heightens one's sense of a place. The place soon insinuates itself into one’s fabric and the psyche becomes partially fused with the landscape. A sense of place is, in part, our sense of self. Perhaps this sense is transmitted generationally, in the way the residue of our day’s activities shape the images which appear to us much later at night in our dreams. It's the subliminal way by which we unknowingly know things or, as the saying goes, we just have feel for a place. This is why, I believe, as elusive as its images can be, I occasionally glean images of an Eden.
Romantics, poets and artists work with these latent images in their dreaming, composing or painting. I was sure that sensible people thought such things total nonsense. Not so. I read recently in our local paper that ten million baby oysters were planted in the Miles River off St. Michaels, “in hopes of cleaning the river and restoring the oyster population.” The effort consisted of a highly unlikely coalition of scientific, governmental, military and historical interests. Even stolid folk like scientists, politicians and soldiers may sense this hint of Eden and become moved by it to heal old planetary wounds. I find that hopeful.
My mother lies buried on the Island in the old Moravian cemetery, near Todt Hill, the highest point on the east coast between Maine and Florida. The cemetery is located alongside a line of hill formations which extend the Island's entire length, rising high in the north and sloping as they drop south. This is why the Island looks like a whale when you approach it from the sea. The cemetery hosts ancient beech trees, magnificent oaks and mottled sycamores. Their thick foliage luxuriates here uncluttered by tarmac and convenience stores. The dead enjoy some of the loveliest land left on the Island. I've been there on days when the wind blows from the southeast. Everything seems still but the leaves which shimmer slightly and I can smell the brine of an ocean breeze off the Atlantic. In the summer and fall it ushers in a thin haze which blankets the Island in the way it does here on the Chesapeake Bay. I like the thought that Verrazano had once been on the Chesapeake, too, and seen it as he'd once seen the Island, "commodious and delightful," marveling at all its extravagant fecundity.
