The pure oyster industry in one of America’s most productive and threatened marine bay ecosystems.
“Be careful with those shells,” Rusty says. “You cut yourself and get oyster mud in there and you won’t ever leave, stay here for good.”
The allure of Apalachicola, Florida can feel that strong. Somehow Apalachicola Bay did not go the way of Pensacola Bay, Tampa Bay, and East Bay. Rather than towering condos, designer “traditional neighborhood developments,” and more second-homeowners than actual residents, Apalachicola remains just a little town on a big bay that’s more geared to working fisherman than golfing vacationers. The roots run deep here but like the cypress trees lining blackwater creeks, they show themselves proudly, knobby knees and all. Rusty’s family has been working the bay for generations; he’s been at it for 18 years. In a white t-shirt and white workpants spattered gray with oyster shell and mud flecks, a sunbeaten Got Jesus hat over the tanned, handsome face, Rusty’s baptism in this water, culture, and industry came long ago.
The United States oyster industry ranks in the top five of world producers. Two species exist in our waters, the Crassostrea virginica (Atlantic or Eastern oyster) and the non-native Crassostrea giga (Pacific oyster). Eastern oysters account for roughly 75 percent of the national harvest, pulled from the Chesapeake and Gulf Coast waters. However, over the last half of the 20th Century, Chesapeake numbers have plummeted from as many as four million annual bushels in Virginia in the mid-century to 20,000 bushels recently. Pollution, over-fishing, and two deadly bacteria outbreaks contributed to this decline. But the Gulf Coast oyster has remained strong aside from the destruction of hundreds of Louisiana beds following Hurricane Katrina. Oyster beds in the Gulf Coast are both public and private with harvesters leasing acreage for a small annual fee. Apalachicola Bay has provided as much as 13 percent of the total oyster production in the US and 90 percent of Florida’s production.
Like the bivalve itself, the oyster business is crusty and raw and salty. It’s also pure. Oystermen like Rusty motor their hand-built wooden skiffs into the bay at dawn. The handmade ($1,200 to build) boats anchor to the shallow oyster bed. You get a boat and a motor, you got a business. No company logos, no managers, no timesheets, just a few dozen 18’ boats with men swinging wide wooden Vs against the blue sky. Pure industry.
They fill as many sacks as they want (up to a state-imposed limit), they listen to music, make jokes with oystermen working the same bed, then pack it up and head in mid-afternoon. Or whenever they want to. The oyster house buys each boat’s harvest, assuming there are orders from restaurants. The men get paid ($15 per 60lb bag) and go home: contract workers, not migrant workers. Just as pollution corrupts the oyster’s delicate bacteria-fed diet, large-scale corporate machines would wreck the oyster industry and a way of life measured more in generations than decades.
The efficiency, simplicity, and accessibility of it all distinguish this business from the mega-corporations producing the majority of our food. As Michael Pollen, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, discovers at Polyface Farms, the true test of a food source’s credibility is access. Here in Apalachicola, the entire process is as wide open as the bay. Oysters grow in the waters a mile away. Men use their backs and tongs made by hand in Apalachicola to pull them from the water. Only full oysters, properly sized, go into the sacks, the rest gets pushed back into the water to keep growing. By mid-afternoon boats return to the house, unload, weigh, stack, rinse, box, and leave, ready to eat at restaurants from Charleston to Birmingham. No chemicals, one middle-man, no waste (shells are replanted by the state to create new beds, like compost). Everyone involved is present. Tommy and TJ Ward, owners of Buddy Ward & Sons Seafood, work the dock and the packing house with everyone else – TJ boxing the rinsed oysters, Tommy moving pallets. No CEOs in a distant city watching the bottom line. Just people in Atlanta and Pensacola willing to pay $10 for a dozen oysters on the half shell and men in East Point and Apalachicola happy to be out on the water all day raking oysters, making good money, and being free.
Wednesday we met Bruce at the boat put-in. Bruce’s family has ridden the rise-and-fall of Apalachicola’s natural resource industry (cotton then timber the sponges and now seafood) for five generations. He’s made some money now and does this and that, invested in various businesses. He drove us among the oyster-tongers at Hagen’s bar. He knows many of them. Everyone wants to talk about freshwater and what the current drought and tri-state “water war” will mean to Apalachicola oysters and the fisherman way of life. “Damn Georgia, but they gotta drink, too.”
Looking out over the glistening, blindingly bright surface broken by three dozen silhouettes of boats and men making oyster-tong V’s, one gets the sense they are floating at the edge of another fall, this time that of the oyster.
Bruce has an idea and some of the oystermen we spoke to over the bow of the boat agree. If the Corps of Engineers can build a levee at the man-made “cut” the freshwater balance can be managed within the bay – during drought, the levee closes, locking in the freshwater flowing in from the Apalachicola River. During the floods, the levee opens, flushing the pollutants carried down in heavy run-off. Commercial and recreational boats can still move in and out of the bay when the levee opens.
The water-war talk courses through the Apalachicola watershed from the oyster boats all the way to the state capitols of Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. The water begins as a mountain stream near Helen, GA, a few hours north of Atlanta. It flows southwest, stopping at the Lake Lanier reservoir, a major water source for Atlanta, then passes directly through Atlanta and into other reservoirs along the Georgia-Alabama border before meeting the Flint River. The Flint begins south of Atlanta and passes through the agricultural counties of central and southwest Georgia. At the confluence of the Flint and Chattahoochee, the Apalachicola River begins. Andrew Jubal Smith, Executive Director of the Apalachicola Riverkeeper alliance, hears everybody.
“When we talk about the issues between the states of the Apalachicola,” Andrew says, “We look at Atlanta often and say that there’s almost an unlimited capacity to use the water in the Chattahoochee River because it’s such a huge population base who’s economic engine is growth. In these twenty years of litigation over the use of the system, water conservation and limits on withdrawal have never been on the table. The beautiful thing about the current drought is that it has the potential to make our leaders in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and the federal government (Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife) really examine all the issues that need to be managed so that this river system can support the human and economic needs and also, for us here in Apalachicola, it can sustain the healthy ecosystem that sustains our economy.”
Sunset at 13 Mile oyster house illuminates a half-dozen guys bringing in their yield. Rusty and Zach are the manliest team yet, beefcake guys with nice, macho demeanors. They bring in a big boat – forty-seven 60lb bags ($705) – but they aren’t going out to celebrate. Wednesday night church service at 6pm. They’d have gone out years before, now they’re saved. And, as long as they can work the tongs and oysters cling to the Bay’s beds, they’re free.
