It happened fast. “For most of the twentieth century, most people in town were involved in shellfish,” the mayor of Greenport, Dave Kapell, told me when I called him looking for explanations. “There were a dozen canneries, plus shuckers and washers and packers and a barrel-making factory for the daily shipments to Fulton Fish Market. Discarded shells were everywhere, some in piles forty feet high, and always the stench of oyster tissue decomposing.” According to Kapell, most of the waterfront was given over to shellfish. So was most of the water in front of the waterfront, a concept I didn’t understand until I was shown a map from the fifties, a familiar enough graphic—small lots, big lots, a network of right angles—but unusual in this respect: the property was at the bottom of the bay. It is likely that Greenport underwater was more valuable than the town on land.
Today, the town is framed by the remains of two giant canneries—Lester & Toner Company, near Osinski’s home, and the Long Island Oyster Company, on the other side of the bay, a gleaming white monster with what looked like Hellenic pillars. Both businesses went bankrupt in the sixties. Lester & Toner is now condominiums; the Hellenic pile is empty. What happened?
Overharvesting, according to Dave Relyea, an owner of Frank M. Flower & Sons, in Oyster Bay (started in 1887, “the last of the big boys”): people didn’t know how to replace what they were taking out. And then pestilence (Dermo and MSX, parasites that mysteriously appeared in the fifties—no one knows from where). And predators (starfish, mainly, which arrived in the thirties and then again in the sixties, devouring whole bays). But people, principally. And pollution and the pervasive unease raised by the prospect of diseased shellfish. Oysters eat by filtering nutrients through their gills—a single oyster cleans about two gallons of water an hour—but their health corresponds to that of the water passing through them. Good water: good oysters. Bad water: bad oysters. Bad oysters: bad tummy ache, unless your oysters are really bad, in which case you have a really bad tummy ache. In Louisiana, where the fecund Gulf and the warm Mississippi encourage all kinds of growth—including the unique Vibrio vulnificus, a cousin of cholera—someone dies from oysters every year.
There were other factors. Osinski blames the Catholic Church (“If only everyone still ate fish on Fridays, I’d be rich”), an unlikely explanation but not without merit: people stopped eating oysters because they stopped knowing them. My Louisiana grandfather, for instance, a boomingly affable man (who also believed that if you’re from the Gulf you eat the Gulf), had loved oysters—along with crawfish and shrimp, plus swamp items like catfish and possum—and devoured them with a voracious zeal, somehow finding something in the shellfish that confirmed his Southernness. My father, a more selective eater, didn’t confuse identity with diet, and thought oysters were repellent. It takes only one generation to turn against a thing, and the next generation (mine) has no idea what it’s missing. As a result, oysters today are mainly a nostalgia food, rarely eaten at home but served in restaurants by members of a staff we’d like to believe won’t poison us. They are the very people Osinski sells to. Which was why I was accompanying him out into the freezing Peconic. Le Bernardin needed another two hundred.
Osinski’s boat had dents and scratches, and was aggressively secondhand. The front was a mess. The sight conveyed disorder and reeked of dead seaweed and rotting fish. There were bags, plastic containers, pieces of wire, buckets, a proliferation of desiccated shells, and, somewhere, an anchor, which I eventually discovered when I was ordered to find it. (I waddled forward with great difficulty—I can’t begin to describe the tidal pull that occurred when I bent over.) In the back, built up against the stern, were two platforms, like tables. This was where Osinski sorted his oysters. Le Bernardin insists on small oysters, no larger than three inches. “Women don’t like the big ones,” Osinski explained. “A frog waiter told me. It makes them uncomfortable.”
Osinski learned that the land underwater could be owned when he took a course in oystering five years ago in nearby Southold. (It was taught by Kim Tetrault, a marine biologist of a highly romantic disposition, who seems determined single-handedly to revive the shellfish of the Peconic.) Most of the bay’s underwater land now belongs to the state: you paid taxes on it like any other piece of property, but most people didn’t. The previous owners of Osinski’s property, though, had paid theirs, and Osinski turned out to own acres of underwater land. This was where we were now, about three hundred feet out, bobbing up and down in a higgledy-piggledy scattering of buoys.
Osinski grabbed one, wrapped the rope around a winch, and started cranking. Slowly, what looked like a giant chest emerged from the dark-gray bay, magnified by the water, getting bigger and bigger until it broke the surface, seaweed and sea creatures cascading off the sides. The boat tipped. It was a steel cage, about four feet in length and three feet high, and weighed nearly four hundred pounds. I helped Osinski pull it in and bring it to rest on the sorting table. He unlatched a hatch and pulled out a “purse,” a mesh bag filled with oysters that spilled out like marbles, along with flip-floppy bluefish, many different kinds of crabs, and what looked like muddy seaweed (sea squirts, in fact, which obstruct the flow of water, an oyster’s source of food, and need to be ripped out, a task I undertook with great vigor, trying to be useful, whereupon I discovered the origins of the name: my contact lenses browned over, the bay went momentarily opaque, and it was only on blinking, scratchily, that I saw how I had been covered with sea squirt). In the event, this wasn’t the cage Osinski was hoping to find—the oysters had been there only since last spring and were two inches in length. By next September, they’d be “market size.” (An oyster can grow two inches a year.)
He hooked another buoy. This cage wasn’t one he wanted, either. We pulled out another. He was looking for oysters from the previous year, two-year-olds, which should be Le Bernardin size.
“I know they’re here somewhere.” Osinski was muttering. He hooked another buoy, but the rope was tangled. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Who in the hell did that?” He yanked and pulled. Several cages appeared to have been stacked on top of each other. “Oh, I guess I did, didn’t I?” And of course he had, because he was the only one working this patch of the Peconic.
The year before, Osinski had been out on Christmas Day. Le Bernardin was a new account, and he wasn’t finding three-inch oysters for the busy New Year’s week ahead. The inlet froze, and he had to keep plowing his boat through it, breaking the surface, to ensure he could get back in. (Everyone, I learned, respects the mortal cold of this bay in the winter.) Even on the Peconic, ice formed. When Osinski returned, with thirty oysters for his efforts, his children—Susanna (then six) and Mercator (five)—were waiting for him, jumping up and down, oblivious of the implications that Daddy was not walking up from the dock with a festive bounce. It was late afternoon, and they wanted to know what Santa Claus had brought them.
“Oh, shut up. There is no goddam Santa Claus. Leave me alone.” Osinski then went to bed. Later that week, he clandestinely bought someone else’s oysters (a great lapse of conviction, as if, in his exhaustion, he’d lost his raison d’être and concluded that an oyster was an oyster was an oyster, after all). A chef phoned: “We don’t know what happened, but these oysters are not what we thought we were buying. We’re throwing them away.”
This time, Osinski eventually found a cage of the appropriate-sized shellfish and sorted through the purse’s take, filling up a sack for Le Bernardin, saving the larger ones for other restaurants, and putting the smaller ones back for next year—provided he could find them again. We’d been on the water five hours. The day had yielded 170 oysters. Osinski gets seventy cents an oyster. That’s $119.
Until recently, Osinski had been making much more money, hundreds of thousands a year (“I can’t tell you—my neighbors hate me as it is”), but hadn’t been doing what he wanted. His secret ambition had always been to be a writer—that, and to live by the sea. (His website includes poems about the Peconic, but nothing about the pr
ice of an oyster.) When he graduated from college (English literature at Florida State University), he got a job on a shrimping boat, seeming to realize one of his ambitions, but quit after the boat almost went under in a storm. Then he was hired as a reporter for a Florida newspaper called Today, near Cape Canaveral, but was, by his own self-denigrating account, too sloppy to be a journalist. In a story about a white sheriff, Osinski confused the name of a white community with the name of a black one. He was fired. He seemed always to be getting fired, owing to what I’m tempted to describe as his congenital messiness. In this respect, his disordered oyster boat was like his life. “I know, I know, soon you’ll find me with a Coke machine in the garage and my pickup sitting out on bricks and a yard full of children.” (In fact, the yard is full of the detritus of his new profession—cages and purses drying out in the sun—as well as a rusted red wagon, a broken broom, a basket of sweet potatoes, a stroller with a wheel missing, a giant plastic duck, a torn pink blanket, a traffic cone, a tricycle parked inside a shrub.) A career breakthrough came when, urgently needing money, he took a job as a computer programmer. He got fired from that one, too, but not before discovering that his affinity for numbers was protected by a computer’s ability to self-correct. When I first met Osinski, he and a partner were writing a program affectionately called “the money tree” (it enabled banks to trade mortgages quickly and with a calculated risk). He made a lot of money for a lot of people, until he realized he didn’t have to be in an office and got someone to buy the program. Then he was fired (“I don’t know why—most people just don’t like me”). He is now writing a novel of his new life—his life on the water.
My second trip to Greenport was the first day of winter. It was windy and cold—twenty-two degrees—but also bright and clear. This time, I had a horizon to look out onto—my mind, liberated by the sight, seemed to expand to the very edge—as well as a capacious pair of bib pants, also liberating. “It’s the winter solstice!” I cried out. This big sky, the salty air. “What an ecstatic way to start a season!”
For Osinski, it was just another day on the bay. Dates didn’t matter to him anymore, he said. “I don’t pay attention. I know tide tables. I live by the phases of the moon and by watching the sea.” I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I recognized the philosophical point. He killed the engine, and we pulled up a cage. Once again, there weren’t many oysters that were market size, although enough for an impromptu breakfast.
There was a shucking knife on a bench, like a butter knife with more edge. Osinski grabbed a towel to hold an oyster in place, so the liquid wouldn’t tip out—the “liquor” is regarded by many as the most important ingredient in the experience of a shellfish—and gently pressed the blade against the hinge. Nothing happened. He pressed again: nothing. Typically, what I’d have done at this point was increase the pressure; rebuffed, I’d respond by raising the level of attack, but the result was never pretty. For Osinski, the operation was a negotiation. The blade in position, he wiggled it up and down gently. He seemed not to be prizing open the shells but massaging the muscle that kept them closed. I thought, At any moment he’s going to sing some soothing thing to coax the little fellow out. Then the muscle simply relaxed, and the shells separated.
“You don’t chew, do you?” I asked. I was confirming what I knew to be the received practice. (“It’s all about the mouth feel,” Sandy Ingber had told me. “Slurp, never chew.” But he admitted that he took a discreet bite when testing a new product.)
“You tease it,” Osinski said, “you work it with your tongue. But you’d never sink your teeth into it. Goodness, no!” I watched. He slurped, swished, his cheek puffing out as the oyster, denuded of its shell only a few seconds before, was knocked around inside his mouth until it went down, and I found myself marveling at the speed with which a creature can be transported from ocean to stomach, dispatched from the dark and deep to—well, the dark and deep. Osinski emitted a sigh of pleasure. “I feel so elemental when I eat oysters. All primitive cultures ate them. The prehistory of man is in the shells they left behind.” He was alluding to what archeologists call middens, piles of shells, sometimes several acres across, believed to be thousands of years old, stacked up like dirty dishes (which in effect they were). They are described by Mark Kurlansky in his elegant history of New York, The Big Oyster: the inside of an oyster shell is white like ivory, and piles of them, gleaming in the sun, were visible from great distances. “When I eat an oyster,” Osinski declared, “I feel I’m connecting to something primordial.”
It was my turn. I slurped and, before swallowing, remembered the instruction to play with my oyster-creature, and was then struck by an unexpected affinity between where I found myself and what was in my mouth. It was the briny intensity of what had crossed my palate: the food equivalent of the salty air. Whatever I was doing (I couldn’t bring myself to call it eating) tasted absolutely of here—this spot on the Peconic.
Osinski opened more oysters. We ate them—or swallowed them, anyway—and sat studying the water and the million ways that a winter morning’s sun was reflected on it. (“When I’m out here, I actually get quite metaphysical.”) But I was left wondering: Is an oyster a primordial meal?
I asked Eric Ripert, the chef of Le Bernardin. I’d been intending to get in touch, ever since helping Osinski to eliminate three-and-a-half-inch shellfish in order to fill Le Bernardin’s uniformly dimensioned order. (“No, no, bigger is not correct,” Ripert told me. “It doesn’t work. To have a huge chunk of something so slimy in the mouth, this mass of meat—no, no, it’s disgusting.”) It turns out that Ripert had thought hard about oysters and valued their primordial qualities. For a start, he was an unapologetic head-tipping slurper and a connoisseur of the liquor (“I want to say it tastes of the sea transformed—can you say that in English? It is seawater but no longer seawater”), and an enthusiast of the Long Island crop. (“I come from France and did not expect to find edible oysters here. It was the water. I feared pollution. To my surprise, the water was wonderfully fresh, and the oysters have a briny quality I associate with Normandy.”) But when I asked Ripert if he chewed he surprised me.
He paused, deliberating. “Yes,” he said, finally.
“How many times?”
“Well…” He projected an imaginary bivalve into his mouth. “A couple of times. Actually, may I make a confession? I chew once. My parents taught me this. They told me, ‘Eric, you must always bite an oyster, firmly, once. Otherwise, it will be alive in your stomach.’”
I phoned Kim Tetrault, the marine biologist.
“You need to understand what happens when an oyster closes its shell,” he explained. “That liquor is not just seawater. It’s also part oyster. We call it extrapallial fluid. It’s like the blood that bathes an oyster’s tissues. When oysters close their shells, they are sealing themselves in their own environment—the world is their oyster—and they will survive as long as the extrapallial fluid doesn’t dehydrate.” The Romans used to ship their oysters from Britain, a journey that must have taken weeks. Tetrault confirmed that, under certain conditions, an oyster can live that long out of the water. He described his students dissecting shellfish. “If you’ve shucked an oyster carefully, you haven’t killed it. In my classes, we continue feeding it—the gills keep working—and its heart beats for another fifteen minutes.”
Maybe Osinski was right. Many foods are eaten raw. Many foods are swallowed whole. But how many raw foods are also still alive?
On my third trip to Greenport, our first cage yielded seven hundred oysters. Osinski was thrilled. “Whoopee! I knew I had some around here, I just knew it!” A second cage yielded almost as many, and by the time we pulled up a third Osinski had nearly two thousand oysters. “Oh, Daddy did well today.” He was giddy—downright hot-diggety-dog kick-ass happy—as though we’d just caught something wild and rare and managed to pull it in. But we hadn’t, had we? We’d merely relocated parcels that he had dropped in the water himself. (Most hunter-gatherer
s would call that cheating.) Of course Osinski would have no system for organizing. One of the benefits of being a messy person is that your life, in a condition of irretrievable disorder, is full of surprises.
Osinski was an underwater farmer. I’d been so caught up in his adventure—the open air, the water, the struggles to find three-inchers—that I hadn’t registered what I’d been seeing. Cages don’t occur in the wild. Today, you can eat a flavorless pink thing called “salmon,” which arrives at its mealy texture by a form of intensive farming that didn’t seem all that different from what I seemed to be witnessing here.
But an oyster is different. The commonplace (among tissue eaters) is that wild is better than farmed because a wild animal is more exercised, more oxygenated, more organically its natural self than anything grown in confinement. An oyster is not active in this wild way. Once oysters find a hard spot to settle on, they’re not going anywhere: they eat and exude (having, as Osinski believes, “no brain, just a stomach and an anus—therefore it’s okay to eat them while they’re alive”). According to William K. Brooks, whose 1891 masterpiece, The Oyster, is still regarded as one of the best accounts of the life of a bivalve, “the adult oyster makes no efforts to obtain its food, it has no way to escape from danger, and after its shell is entered it is perfectly helpless and at the mercy of the smallest enemy…. It is almost as inert and inanimate as a plant.” (Left alone, oysters live for fifteen years and grow very big; Tetrault has a shell that’s a foot long. I looked at it and thought, Ha! Imagine swallowing that one without chewing.)
Today, Brooks’s study is interesting for its doomsday predictions. Frightened by the terrible decline of the oysters in Chesapeake Bay, he urged his colleagues to raise shellfish in hatcheries and plant them—like so many acres of potatoes. The Romans knew how to do it; so did the French. Even Colonial Americans did transplanting: by 1775, the Wellfleet, from Cape Cod, was virtually extinct; what you eat today might actually be descended from Chesapeakes.
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