"On the complex pleasures of harvesting shellfish with the people you love."
"When I was a teenager in the mid-1990s, I had a friend whose family owned an unimproved lot on Dabob Bay, a bay off a fjord nestled deep in the southern Salish Sea, in Washington State. My group of friends, almost all of us the broke, angst-ridden, poorly supervised children of divorce, would camp there on weekends. We swam, sunbathed topless without sunscreen, smoked weed and drank liquor purloined from our parents, and danced around bonfires listening to Portishead. The rocky beach was flush with oysters, and we shucked them in situ and swallowed them alive, or else roasted them over the fire. All day we’d feed the bonfire, heating big rocks, and at night we’d drag the hot rocks into a dome of cedar branches with a tarp over the top. We’d sweat until we were dizzy, then race naked to the shore and dive into the water.
Now, decades later, we’ve scattered and grown responsible. I quit drinking and always apply sunscreen when sunbathing topless. Like my friends, I buy most of my food at Costco and Trader Joe’s. All of us are Very Busy People. We stare at our phones and we sit in traffic and we type “I apologize for the delayed response” as we endeavor to achieve inbox zero. When we get together, we talk about the outrageous cost of housing, our kids, and how our retirement accounts are looking (not great).
But the halcyon days of youth linger in the mind the way the briny taste of an oyster lingers on the palate. My friend Julia writes in the group chat one day, nostalgic, saying that she had just assumed life would always be like that—and then it wasn’t. “I’ve never again had an oyster I didn’t pay absurd amounts of money for,” she says. “I’ve never again eaten oysters until my belly was full.”"
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