the best


Maybe it's natural, part of our makeup, that we humans have a way of always needing to place blame. To find out who's responsible so they can be disciplined. Both as punishment, penance, I suppose, And as an example to others not to commit the same sin, crime, wrong, error, or see what will happen to you as well. This morning I'm grieving the inevitable, necessary and essential closure of Apalachicola Bay to oyster harvesting for the next five years.


When I was a boy and we were in the seafood business (and of course at the Time I thought it had always been the rule), oysters were only available during "months with an R", only during cool months. The Bay was closed to oyster harvesting all summer, closed during hot weather. It always seemed wise. When we lived there decades later, oysters were harvested year round, which seemed greedy, foolish, like a farmer never giving his fields a season to lie fallow. Predictably, the Bay was over-harvested, never left to recover and regenerate as a way of managing sustainability. 

Once I heard an oysterman say the Bay was God's gift to them and it was their right to harvest, as if God suffers ignorance and folly without consequence. At some point there was a rule against harvesting oysters less than three inches long, but after the BP oil spill that rule apparently was withdrawn and harvesting allowed to the last oyster. And there's been the ongoing struggle between Florida and Georgia about the flow of fresh water into the Bay.

My memory may be off-season, but my recollection is of summer oysters being puffy and spongy with unappetizing fat anyway. But I feel sad for Nature that we so abuse the Earth, sad that when one is eighty-five, five years may mean a lifetime without Apalachicola oysters, and I feel sad for a community like East Point so dependent on oyster harvesting to pay their rent and make payments on their pickup trucks. But little to no sympathy for a culture of greed, folly and ignorance.