The waters have been getting measurably cleaner and the levels of contamination in fish greatly reduced. Even the Gowanus Canal got a flushing system that made the water clear enough for fish to return.
William Brooks’s warning from the nineteenth century is almost forgotten, that the water system that loses its oysters loses its self-cleaning system. A healthy oyster population filters and cleans bay water, makes it clearer, and lets light penetrate so that nutrients and habitats will grow. Cathy Drew, the executive director of the River Project, said, “We project that if the oysters were here in the numbers they used to be, they would clear the water in the harbor in a few days.”
Since more and more oysters are slowly turning up, they might conceivably someday cover most of the estuary’s shorelines again. But the harbor is still a long way from that quantity of oysters. In 1999, an artificial oyster reef made of shells was placed at an old historic oyster site, just south of Liberty Island. Several other shell oyster reefs have also been started and oysters do grow on them. Environmentalists have been recruiting volunteers to “oyster garden,” that is, to grow a few oysters on private piers in various locations around the harbor and then donate these oysters to the oyster reefs. But the organizers, a group called Baykeeper, cautions that these oysters are for building up the reefs only and that there might be serious health risks for anyone who actually ate them. They state with optimistic bravado their goal that “Oysters will thrive from Sandy Hook to the Tappan Zee, and again be served on New York City restaurant tables.”
Cathy Drew said, “In our lifetime, there’s no hope we could eat them, because the water contains heavy metal. But we want them back to clean the water and to enrich the food web, which would attract other animals and birds to the area.” Oysters filter the water of organic waste but can do nothing about heavy metals and PCBs.
Jonathan Swift famously commented on the courage of the unknown original gourmet who first popped a raw oyster into his or her mouth. It is hard to explain to those who don’t do it by what strange impulse humans take these primitive creatures with their tiny hearts pounding and slide them down their throats. It certainly has been something New Yorkers did with passion. The best explanation is that a fresh oyster from a clean sea fills the palate with the taste of all the excitement and beauty—the essence—of the ocean. If the water is not pure, that, too, can be tasted in the oyster. So if someday New Yorkers can once again wander into their estuary, pluck a bivalve, and taste the estuary of the Hudson in all the “freshness and sweetness” that was once there, the cataclysm humans have unleashed on New York will have been at last undone. But that day is far off.
If we had had the ability to see deep into water, it would have all been different. New Yorkers dumped trash and sewage into the water because there it was out of sight. Suppose they could have seen it landing on the oyster beds. In the spring, the migratory fish return. Thousands of bumpy alligator-headed, primeval two-hundred-pound sturgeon; elegant silver-streaked striped bass, their stripes seemingly made for racing; and thick schools of radiant shad tear into the strong currents, while little baitfish, purposeless hangers-on caught up in all the exhilaration of the moment, struggle furiously along as best they can. They are all bumping shoulders, swatting tails, thousands and thousands of determined fish, putting their heads nose first into the same current, charging through the Narrows over to the oyster beds of Liberty and Ellis islands, while their sedentary partners, the oysters, wave their shells open and closed beneath them, pumping clean the water, the seething crowds above turning and racing toward Manhattan and the Hudson River, past the teeming and humming city, street by street to the picturesque upstate waters of their birth. Certainly anyone who could have seen that would have understood that the great and unnatural city was built at the site of a natural wonder, and that the lowly oysters working at the bottom were a treasure more precious than pearls.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Connie Rosenblum of the City section of The New York Times for asking me to write about New York City oysters for the newspaper. Researching that article opened up worlds to me.
I want to again thank my great editor, Nancy Miller, who works with such care and diligence and gives so much to my books. And to Charlotte Sheedy, my agent, who always intercedes for me with grace and humor. How lucky I am to have friends like Nancy and Charlotte and luckier yet to get to work with them.
I want to thank Deborah Copeland and Susan Birnbaum for all their hard work. Thanks to Cathy Drew for her interest and enthusiasm. And thank you, William Kennedy, who pointed me to his piece on “Jack and the Oyster,” in which he criticized an Albany columnist for being too dull to use the phrase ambivalent bivalvency. And thank you, Charles Gehring, for your generosity in sharing your research and anecdotes on the bivalvency of early Dutchmen. And thanks to Bob Wallace in Wellfleet for his molluscular insights.
A special thanks to caffeine, without which this book could never have been completed, and lots of love to Marian, the deeper shell of our bivalve, who makes us happy as oysters—no reason to think clams are any happier just because they don’t make attachments and can hop on one foot.
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