North Carolina (not Mountain) oysters
He’s the subject of an interesting piece in the current issue of the Oxford American, in which writer Sam Stephenson visits Fairmont, a small town down east of Raleigh, in search of the ghosts of Mitchell’s past. Mitchell was an obsessive collector of odd little things, which he packaged carefully with typewritten notes to himself. The OA article offers up nice photography of a number of these tokens: ornate knobs, wrought iron hooks, handmade nails and so forth.
Mitchell wrote with similar attention to detail, spending days, weeks and months with the subjects of his profiles until he knew them just so, then capturing their essence in print.
One lengthy stretch of Stephenson’s story delves into Mitchell’s 1956 story “Mr. Hunter’s Grave”, which discusses in some detail the community of Sandy Ground, Staten Island. This community was formed in the mid 1800′s by freed slaves, and the town fathers worked for white oystermen to begin with, before saving the money to buy their own boats.
Some sixty years later, though, the waters of New York Harbor were so polluted that the oyster beds were dying, and finally the New York Department of Public Health traced typhoid to the oysters and condemned the beds altogether. The community faded away.
Hunter, the subject of Mitchell’s story, was one of the final few who could remember the heyday of oystering off Staten Island.
I read the final words of Stephenson’s piece, which cite the inscription on Mitchell’s grave (from Shakespeare): “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sing.”
I then picked up another nearby magazine and it fell open to a short Business North Carolina profile of Martin Posey, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
Dr. Posey’s field of study, it so happens, is oysters. He’s working to restore North Carolina’s oyster population, which has dwindled by some 90 to 95% in the past 110 years.
Oysters, the article points out, have a value far beyond culinary. It reads:
… Each mollusk can filter pollutants from up to 50 gallons of water a day, and they grow in formations that provide shelter for young marine life and prevent coastal erosion.
These two quotes are from Posey himself:
“You have the direct fishing industry, but virtually everyone agrees that the economic value is far, far more for habitat and water quality. Oysters increase water clarity, increasing the aesthetic value of the coastal areas. Anyone who knows coastal realty or coastal tourism knows that’s a huge economic benefit that’s hard to categorize.”
“I think we can still bring the native species back. N.C. is still in a position where larvae are present, where we can work with the system. I think it’s just going to take concerted efforts of restoration, putting out shell mounds in the right configurations in the right locations and reducing destruction to the areas where some of those oysters are.”
Tags: Business North Carolina, Oxford American Magazine, The New Yorker
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