The Big Oyster (35 page)

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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