A Little Love Affair with Six Small Seas

The author demonstrates the correct technique to combine a martini and Humboldt Bay oysters. Submitted photo.

I save half my Hendrick’s martini for the oysters. This requires discipline, a virtue I prefer in small quantities. The first half prepares me for civilization. The second half permits me to leave it.

Six Kumamoto oysters arrive on their bed of ice, each lying in a little stone bathtub, each having declined to dress for dinner. I admire that. At my age, I appreciate a creature that knows when clothing contributes nothing to the occasion.

Their shells look like something excavated from a ruined cathedral. Inside, however, everything is silk.

I apply a little green wasabi roe. A squeeze of lemon. The yellow fruit releases its small electrical storm. Somewhere, a cloud over Humboldt Bay shivers without knowing why.

Then the ceremony begins. A sip of martini. A slurp of oyster. The juniper opens the door, and the ocean walks in.

For a moment I have swallowed the weather. Fog settles behind my eyes. A fishing boat passes somewhere beneath my collarbone. There is a gull standing on my tongue, considering its options. I repeat the procedure.

Some people say oysters are suspect because they filter the water around them. I understand the concern. An oyster’s address matters. Still, I find something admirable in a creature that spends its life taking the world into itself, extracting nourishment, and quietly proceeding.

I have been doing much the same thing for eighty-two years, although my shell has become considerably more expensive to maintain.

These oysters come from Humboldt Bay, whose tides enter and depart with the assurance of guests who have their own keys. I live nearby. I know its gray mornings, its mudflats, the light that can make an ordinary piling look like the last surviving column of an ancient kingdom.

Its oyster seed travels to other shores. Imagine beginning life here, smaller than a punctuation mark, then being sent abroad to continue the sentence.

The third oyster tastes faintly sweet. The fourth persuades me that sweetness was invented underwater. By the fifth, I have stopped counting everything except oysters. The newspaper can fold itself. The telephone can discuss its problems with the refrigerator. I am occupied with the delicate business of receiving the Pacific. A sip. A slurp.

The sixth waits in its shell, holding the last small portion of sea allotted to me tonight. I lift it carefully. Wasabi, lemon, the cool lip of the shell. Then it slips away, leaving that lovely briny hush.

Six empty shells remain. They resemble ears that have heard something wonderful and cannot repeat it. There is still a little martini in the glass. I planned this, though I’d rather credit providence. I raise it for the final sip. The gin follows the oysters down my throat, carrying its cucumber garden, its juniper woods, its civilized little luggage. Everything settles.

Outside, the bay goes on breathing. I sit with my empty glass and feel the tide turn gently inside me, as though my chair has come loose from shore.

John Ash pursues his special ocean diet in Eureka. Humboldt Bay is California’s largest oyster-producing area.