It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  “When the apocalypse hits, remember: the closer to the Golden Gate Bridge and points west, the better the water,” he said. “The inner harbor, it’s pretty horrid what goes on in there. You got people cleaning their decks with Pine-Sol or dumping raw feces. There are regs against both, but they’re pretty hard to enforce. This is your bay, folks. Don’t think what happens here doesn’t affect you.”

  Within two minutes, I realized that Kirk was charismatic and eccentric. He was a live wire, a loose cannon. If Feral Kevin saw a world on the brink of apocalypse and despaired, Lombard saw the same thing with a glint in his eye. Sure, he seemed to say, it’s a drag we fucked it all up, but the good news is that there are going to be some awesome visuals before the lights go out. Kirk had the enthusiasm of an eleven-year-old boy, paired with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bay area’s marine life and its fishing history. But his real passion was chasing the buzz he got when directly connected to the natural world via a fish or any other sea creature. He confessed to being a lousy fisherman but didn’t let that get in the way. (Shades of my own niche at Field & Stream!) Like Paula, he seemed incapable of editing his profanity-laden speech. Unlike Paula, he seemed incapable of embarrassment. I was captivated by the guy. As was everyone else. You couldn’t help it. Before you were even aware of it, you were already living vicariously through him. Like all of us, Kirk was a walking collection of drives and impulses. Unlike most of us, he had no intention of inhibiting them. On the contrary, he was all about feeding them, keeping them satisfied, happy, and engaged. And if that entailed occasionally looking like a fool, who the hell cared?

  The contradictions were glorious. He told us he was a lifelong city boy, the child of theater actors in New York City, and had grown up living in subsidized artists’ housing in Manhattan. He had also been an obsessed angler since childhood. Seeing the looks on our faces as we grappled with a city boy and fishing addict, he turned the question back on us. “What’s the surprise?” he asked rhetorically. Nature, after all, was the champ when it came to being resilient, resourceful, and “very, very sneaky.” Sure, much had been lost. “But don’t be fooled by all the concrete, cars, and people around you,” he half-shouted as a fire truck blew down Marina Boulevard behind us. “There’s still a lot of nature left in the city. You just have to know where to look.” Kirk, of course, knew where. He told us he knew places where you could pull fish up through city sewer drains. If we didn’t believe it, we could see videos of him doing exactly that on his website. (I looked that night. There were three such videos, all of them hilarious.)

  His background was exactly what one would expect of an urban outdoorsman and naturalist. He’d worked as an art teacher with troubled teens, a street performer, a puppeteer, and a founding member of Rube Waddell, a band whose nearly unclassifiable mix of punk, rockabilly, Americana, and blues had earned it a cult following in San Francisco. (The group performed every Friday for years on the sidewalk outside Leeds Shoe Store, a gig known as “Live at Leeds.”) For the last seven years, he’d worked for the Department of Fish and Game as a “catch monitor,” doing surveys of recreational anglers. This job involved doing one of the things Kirk did best: talk. He interviewed thousands of anglers a year about their catch, and as a result he’d become familiar with every ethnic fishing subculture in this polyglot city. He began ticking the groups off. I scribbled, “Chinese, Korean, Cambodian, Mexican, Salvadoran, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Portuguese” before I fell behind, but he named twice that number. He had even compiled two fish identification charts—“Common Baitfishes of Northern California” and “Common Surfperches of California”—that the department still published and distributed to the fishing public. And—get this—he’d done these on his own time. Talk about a fish nerd. Then, the previous Christmas day, he had received notice that the department, hard hit by budget cuts, was offering him a choice: take a 50 percent pay cut or quit. He quit.

  Kirk spent a good bit of time writing addictively eclectic, stream-of-consciousness entries for his blog, The Monkeyface News, named after a local species of eel. The monkeyface eel was—like Kirk himself—a wild beast that thrived in urban environments. In fact, it was not a true eel at all but something called a “prickleback,” a distinction he explained using scientific terms that lost all of us instantly. I did glean that the creature’s genus, Cebidicthys, derived from the Greek word for the capuchin monkey. And this apparently suited it because, unlike most eels and eel-like creatures, the monkeyface has close-set, forward-facing eyes, very like our own. “Personally,” Kirk said, “I think the average monkeyface looks more like Joseph Stalin than a monkey. But who gives a shit—sorry—what I think?”

  “They’re a locavore’s dream,” he said, ticking off the monkeyface’s qualifications. “They’re native, sustainable, abundant, underappreciated, and tasty, especially flash-fried or simmered in a pot with garlic and tomato sauce.”

  Monkeyface eels remained obscure, he said, because, even though they spent their lives just yards away from shore-dwelling humans, they holed up deep beneath the rocks of the intertidal zone. Thus, they were rarely seen, much more rarely caught, and even more rarely eaten. “They can breathe air for days if deprived of water,” he told us. “And to kill one you basically pound on its head with a hammer until you feel you are an evil, evil man. Five minutes later, you look and the thing has jumped out of your bucket and is humping its way across the sidewalk toward the water.” He smiled, as if to ask how anyone could fail to love a creature so devoted to life.

  Somehow, there had never been a commercial monkeyface market. Even if you knew what the hell they were, because of their behavior and where they lived, large-scale fishing for them was impossible. They could be taken only singly. And the only practical way Kirk knew of to catch them was with a pokepole, an implement of aboriginal simplicity. He likened it to “fishing with a pool cue.”

  (Kirk was shortly to create a market for monkeyface eels almost single-handedly. He even supplied some for one of Chez Panisse’s fortieth anniversary celebrations.)

  Kirk’s pokepole epiphany had come courtesy of a gentleman he referred to only as “Cambodian Stan.” One day, he said, he’d been fishing from shore, as was his wont. More specifically, he’d been casting from atop a boulder at Muir Beach. After several hours, he had only a single small green rockfish to show for his efforts. “If you’re a shore fisherman, you have this idea that the big fish are always just a little farther out than you can cast,” he said. “So you live in a state of constant frustration.” A man in a tattered wet suit appeared. He was carrying a satchel full of fish in one hand and some kind of stick in the other. The stick was a five-foot length of bamboo cane with fourteen inches of coat hanger wire duct-taped to the end. Attached to the wire was a three-inch length of heavy fishing line and a 2/0 octopus hook, baited with a small piece of squid. “So he sticks this thing under the very rock I’ve been standing on all day, and ten seconds later he’s pulled out this fucking—sorry—huge eel! From right under my feet.” Kirk, naturally, asked about the implement. The man, who told Kirk his name, Cambodian Stan, said it was a pokepole. Kirk converted on the spot to this unorthodox manner of fishing and begged his new hero to teach him. Cambodian Stan assented, telling him to come back the next day. Kirk did. The lesson took all of two minutes. You inserted the baited hook into the rocks, probing the crevices for the holes in which monkeyface eels make their lairs. The flexible coat hanger wire was essential for this. It and it alone let you snake the bait deep into the rocks. When the eel took the bait, it was a tug-of-war, man against eel-like prickleback. His work done, like the Lone Ranger, Cambodian Stan then vanished. For keeps. Kirk knew every fishing spot in the Bay area and all of the regular anglers at each by sight if not by name. And he never saw Cambodian Stan again. You got the impression that he found the man’s appearance and disappearance inexplicable, wondrous, and—somehow—apt.

  In the meantime, he’d become a maniac
for both the pokepole and the quarry it seemed to have been designed for, the monkeyface eel. “The books say that they’re vegetarians, surviving primarily on sixty different species of algae, mostly reds and greens,” Kirk told us. “Cut one open and that’s what you find inside. Algae. Every time. And nothing else. But you know what? When you put a piece of squid in front of them, dude, they’re going to nail it.” He leaned forward and, in a stage whisper, continued, “Just like half of the vegetarians in San Francisco, monkeyface eels are closet carnivores.”

  “Shit!” he exclaimed, smacking his forehead. “I forgot!” He jogged back to the fishing rod he’d been holding before the class began and began reeling in furiously. Whatever he had thrown out had gone a long way, because he was at it for a while. I found myself thinking that there was something winning about Lombard, something that suggested a very intelligent child trapped in the body of an adult. He was part John Belushi, part Huck Finn, and part Tom Waits. And you couldn’t take your eyes off him. You had no idea what was coming next, but you sure as hell didn’t want to miss it.

  At last, Lombard must have seen the end of his line, because he stopped reeling and exulted, “Goddamn! Am I good or what?” And then he held in his hand a small steel cage that bristled with little loops of clear fishing line. It looked like some up-armored soap dish. Dangling from cinched-down loops of the fishing line were two big crabs, roughly equal in size, one with creamy-colored claws, the other’s almost black. They hung there, apparently relaxed, as if awaiting the start a one-claw pull-up contest. The steel soap dish was actually a crab snare, Lombard explained. “You put your bait—I use squid but most people take a can of cat food and just punch holes in it—inside the cage. Close it up, throw it out. The crabs come to the bait, catch a claw in the loops as they go after it, and then the loop cinches down and snares them. And the beauty of the thing is that it’s eco-friendly. It catches crabs but not fish.”

  The two types of crab, he said, were a lesson in the Bay’s ecology and economy as well as the arbitrary nature of human food preferences. The creamy-clawed creature was a Dungeness crab, the aristocrat of local crustaceans, sold daily and dearly in nearby fish markets and restaurants. Dungeys were heavily fished, he said. They were strictly off-limits in the Bay itself, and you could keep a maximum of only six to ten per day (depending on where you were) in the areas where they were legal. “Get caught with a Dungey here and you’re subject to a fine ranging from $350 to $1,500.” He deftly unhooked and tossed the Dungeness back into the drink. “And you will get caught. I know most of the wardens around here. They like to watch through binoculars, wait until you’ve loaded the car and are about to head home. That’s when they nail you.”

  For Kirk the main attraction was never the obvious one. It was the other crab that he wanted us to consider. The lowly dark-clawed one was a rock crab, a species ignored by nearly everyone. Most crabbers saw it as a nuisance, eating bait from the traps set for Dungeys. As a result, you could keep up to thirty-five rock crabs of legal size per day, even from where we were standing. They were, however, rarely eaten. “Ask anyone which crab they prefer,” Kirk told us, “and the response is invariably, ‘Dungeness.’” Lombard, naturally, questioned that preference, wondering whether it was grounded in fact or received knowledge. So, on a day when he was in possession of just-caught crabs of both types, he conducted a blind taste test among his friends. “And every person liked the rock crab better.” He let his words hang in the air for a while, something that didn’t happen frequently. Rock crabs’ shells were a little thicker, he continued, so they were a bit more work to process. They didn’t yield quite as much meat per pound of crab as Dungeness crabs. “But they’re abundant, local, sustainable, and tasty. So the question is, Why don’t we eat more of them?” He shrugged, tossed the rock crab back, and looked out to sea.

  It was hard to say what the shrug meant, but I wanted to know. It could go either way. Either most people were such blind and gullible consumers that we wanted only what we’d been told we like, or maybe people could wake up to underappreciated resources and start enjoying them. He didn’t say.

  Instead, he led us down the seawall until we arrived at a place where the water gave way to a few feet of rocky beach. He swung a leg over the seawall and disappeared. A moment later he climbed back up holding a few dark shells which he had pried off the rocks. “California mussels,” he said. “Go to any archaeological site around here and you’ll see lots of these. Some anthropologists estimate that they made up to half of the diet of Native American tribes in this area. Mussels get big, but this size, three to five inches, is my favorite.” He’d eat these, he said, but where we were standing was about as far down the Bay as he recommended going. “Raw shellfish from the Bay can contain fecal coloform bacteria,” he says. “So you want to chuck any that open before you get home, because they’re dead. But, generally, you’ll be fine as long as you cook these fuckers. Sorry.” He passed the shellfish around, then made sure all were returned to the beach intact.

  “By the way,” he said, “You can forget all that crap about eating shellfish only during the ‘r’ months. That rule dated back to ­seventeenth-century England and only applied to oysters anyway. But it was a tidy little rule, so we adopted it.” What the modern mollusk collector in the Bay area should look for instead were cold water and the absence of algal blooms, aka “red tides.” The thing about algal blooms was that they could release very nasty biotoxins, which were absorbed by filter-feeding shellfish like mussels. “You can get amnesiac shellfish poisoning from mussels. It basically wipes your hard drive clean. Or paralytic shellfish poisoning, which kills you.” Kirk hastened to say that he didn’t meant to scare us. In fact, the only shellfish-related fatality that he knew of happened nearly twenty years ago. This was reassuring. “The guy, a diver I think, ate a scallop. And ten minutes later he was dead.” This was less so.

  This was all interesting stuff, but we were standing on the shore of San Francisco Bay. Take a left and in one mile you’d be in the Pacific Ocean. Some impressive fish, big suckers, everything from salmon and rockfish to halibut and great white sharks, could be found nearby. I was wondering when we would hear about those guys. What came next was instead one of those moments when something you’ve always known but never stopped to think about suddenly bitch-slaps you.

  “Life as a hunter-gatherer for me didn’t start until I embraced small fish,” he said. “I was just like everybody else. I wanted to eat big fish. There are four ‘rock star’ fish in the Bay, as far as recreational fishing: California halibut, stripers, salmon, and sturgeon. And, yes, you can keep up to three sturgeon a year, although I strongly recommend that you don’t.” For one thing, he said, local sturgeon spent the majority of their lives in the delta of the Sacramento River, a severely compromised ecosystem. “It’s full of dioxin, PAHs, mercury, all kinds of good stuff. And sturgeon are basically bottom-feeders that can live up to a hundred twenty-six years. That’s a long time to be bioaccumulating all that shit. Sorry.”

  “But the real point,” he continued, lapsing into uncharacteristic sincerity, “is that we didn’t evolve to eat only those fish. They’re all apex predators, the top of the food chain. Eating them is like being a hunter and only eating mountain lions, bears, and eagles. It makes no sense, either for our personal health or for the health of the planet.” And although ordering up a hunk of swordfish or tuna was something we did routinely, it was unprecedented in our history as a species. It was only with the relatively recent technologies of fast ships and refrigeration that we could catch and sell such fish.

  “The Indians who lived here and our own ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years sure as hell didn’t eat many of those fish. We all fed much further down the food chain.”

  As large predators ourselves, we ought to take a lesson from large predator fish. Instead of eating those apex predators, we might think about eating what they ate—little fish. The ave
rage apex predator fish, he explained, took a decade or more—if it survived that long—just to reach spawning age. Once it did, it reproduced only sporadically. Female sturgeon, for example, were thought to wait somewhere between two and nine years between spawnings. And—again assuming it hadn’t been caught, stripped of its caviar, and cut into steaks—a sturgeon produced comparatively few offspring. In case we had ever wondered why the severely overfished populations of these big fish took so long to rebound, now we knew. They matured slowly and had few offspring. They were just like, well, us.

  Now, he said, consider the little guys, the baitfish, which were very nearly the opposite: short-lived, usually hell-bent on spawning within a year of their birth, and reproducing in stupendous numbers. “Nature designed them to withstand massive predation and bounce back quickly. It’s why they’re called baitfish.” He ticked off the advantages of consuming them: easy to catch, plentiful, nutritious, and—­because they aren’t around long enough to bio-accumulate toxins—better for you. “Gee,” he asked rhetorically, “you think nature’s trying to tell us something?”

  He admitted that his was anything but an easy conversion. “Look, I didn’t want to eat sardines and smelt. You ever see a top smelt? Or a jack smelt? They’re not even true smelt! They’re in the Atherinidae family, silversides, more like a grunion.” It was clear that he detested jack smelt on a personal level. “They’re long, sticky, stinky, and chock-full of worms and larval nematodes.” His voice rose as he named each thing he hated about them. And he clearly wanted us to share his hatred of the fish. “I mean—Jesus!—just a horrifying fish to clean. Talk about a god-awful mess! You got black gunk dripping out of their guts, you got scales flying everywhere—it takes three days just to get them outta your hair—worms crawling all over you. And the meat! Jesus! Mealy, fishy-tasting, nasty, nasty stuff. And everybody says their grandmother knows some secret way of making them palatable. But you know what? That’s bullshit! Never again, man. That and leopard shark ceviche. Count me out.” He actually had to pause and catch his breath.