Garden Tending your own (sea)

The sky was egg blue and large pillow-like clouds reflected the sunlight down on the water. I was loading oyster bushels into the boat —Hammersley Inlet shimmered and the wind was cool and the water along the shore had not been disturbed by waves or swell so you could see the seaweeds and the crabs and the oysters. Their view was distorted by the water’s rippled surface but the sunlight brought out the pinks of starfish and the greens of the algae, the bay was clear today. The tide had turned and it began to cover the warm sand and its dried surface. The tide is a blessing and a curse, it tells us when work on the beach begins and when it ends.

The work was over for the day. I loaded the oysters and took the boat to the dock. We tie the oyster bags with rope and hang them several feet deep to keep them in cool water and store them away from the heat of the sun. This is a safe farm practice for product harvested for the raw market and it helps lessen the mortality of the shellfish. After tying off market sacks of oysters and clams I started to clean up the dock and I rinsed the boat and checked to see the anchor lines of the dock were in good condition.

A local osprey chirped near the shore— it was flying from a nest near the farm, it often dives on fish harbored amongst the oyster rack—and an older couple walked along the beach. The sound of outboard engines, ospreys, and voices travels well on the water and I could hear the couples’ conversation.

They stopped on their walk in the middle of my family’s beach and commented something like ‘I really don’t like any of this, it ruins the entire beach.’

She gestured towards my father’s tumble farm, a somewhat unimpressive structure of pipe and mesh bags that float with the incoming tides and fall with the outgoing ones. The couple stared at the farm for a moment, expressing their dislike for its aesthetic, and continued their walk. I was not far from them and I am sure they saw me, so I considered raising my voice to start a conversation.

I wanted to explain to them—while they stood on my property and showed disrespect to my way of life—why this ‘ugly’ farm is important. I wanted to tell them how I had built this farm with my father, that over the years we have changed its design and the way we farm shellfish. New methods to improve the oysters we sell, increase our seed volume and density, and make shellfish farming less labor intensive. I wanted to ask them where they were from, and if they ever worked in aquaculture. I wanted to know if they ate shellfish, specifically oysters. I stopped myself and realized their impudent, uninformed preconception of the way something looks allowed them the audacity to pronounce, while occupying the owner’s land whom they insult, their opinion. I shrugged off the comment and went back to work.

That couple left with their words but the false preconceptions they have on aquaculture is carried on in their innate ability to speak where they have no place speaking—to vote where they have no right voting.

My family’s shellfish farm is in front of my home and we act on our right as property owners to cultivate the sea. We tend the soil for clams and cultivate the gravel and sand and clay to stop the beds from fallowing. We build submersible vineyards of rope and pipe and we wait patiently for the oysters in the spring to ripen, shucking them straight from the grow bag and tasting the merroir. A respected farmer told me they are like grapes of the sea.

These people who walk our beaches and take a yearly boat ride down the inlet will scoff at the barnacle covered farms, but they have it wrong. Someone worked during the frigid winter tides, their fingers numb and their gloves icy. Someone sweated during the middle of the heat wave trying to save the harvest from the summer lows, scrapping barnacles and repairing brackets. These ugly, unnatural creations are hard fought for. Perhaps opponents to mariculture should realize there is more to a pristine waterway than a bare, muddy beach; a beach that lacks biodiversity and habitat, where the mud is black and slick and smells like rot.

Oyster and clam farmers of the South Sound are your best advocates for the environment. Clean water and sustainability, two ideals often dominated by virtue signaling environmentalists, are values farmers hold dear for their own self-interest. Polluted water kills shellfish, it sickens the customers, and it closes harvest areas. Putting the environmental argument aside, consider the morality of the stance you make when assert your values over another’s way of life. Take away a man’s work and business because you think a tumble farm ruins nature; tell him his way of life is unnecessary while you dine on steamer clams and slurp raw oysters with your twenty dollar glass of wine.

Remember, you know better than these uneducated farmers, your waterfront deck offers you a heightened understanding over their lives and you’ve spent so much time watching them work. As you cry that profit hungry corporations are killing nature and soiling its virginity, perhaps you should also demolish your house on the beach and plant your property in salal and trees. Just as a cattle farmer defends his land from development, his rivers from pollution, and his herd from wolves, the shellfish farmer cleans up his beach of garbage, advocates against the dumping of waster water, and grows a sustainable food source.

Go to an oyster farm and see the structures teaming with life. See the habitat mussels create with their long lines of sponges and crabs and perch and watch the harbor seals bob between floating oyster bags, hunting for fish feeding in the shade of the farm. The marine ecosystem is vaster than our imagination, and that the presence as farmers, although substantial to our lives and community, is laughable to that old soul of the Pacific Northwest.

Taste the tender meat of a Pacific and steam manilas in lemongrass and wine and dine on the Northwest’s prime bounty. I don’t want to force an oyster farm on anyone. Do what you wish with your waterfront, but tend your own garden and respect the lives that toil for a different purpose but equally significant.