THE SUMMER I spent as a reporter covering the war between the oysters and the wilderness, every night was a foggy one. The long days ended with a relief that arrived in two stages. The first came when the outstretched arm of Tomales Bay began to fill again in the late afternoons, submerging the gasping mud flats and exposed estuarine grasses as the little waves came lapping in, reaching high tide just as darkness fell. The second came when the fog made its way over the forested ridge from the sea, rolling wetly down hillsides, across meadows and into valleys. Still, as the clock ticked towards midnight, and then one, and then two, as I sat hunched over my desk night after night in the little newspaper office by the coast, I often wondered how it was that I found myself in the middle of all this.
It was a mess. There was no other word for it. The two camps had split the community, and it seemed that nearly everyone was passionately in favor of one side or the other. Lifelong neighbors stopped speaking. Family members who found themselves on opposite sides of the divide had finally, after much debate, agreed not to raise the topic at all. By the time I arrived, there had been so many scientific studies, and rebuttals and counter-rebuttals that even I, whose job it had become to know what was going on, had a hard time keeping everything straight. Some people would only meet with me about it in secret, too scared to email or talk about it on the phone. They squeezed clues and unsigned notes bearing unsolicited advice through the windows of my beater car if I left them rolled down a crack. Accusations were hurled from every direction, of fraud, scientific misconduct, environmental felony, lies, even “Tea Party Republicanism” and “Koch brothers’ support”—grave insults to many in that largely liberal neck of the woods. Things were tense enough, and then the “hidden cameras” were discovered and then everything pretty much went to hell.
This isn’t my story, and the part I play in it personally is small. Still, some things I can only tell through my own eyes, and for that I ask your indulgence. As far as sides go, I have tried my best to stay neutral. I was introduced to the conflict when I was hired by the Point Reyes Light, the rural weekly that has not been quiet about making its own position known. It was and remains staunchly in favor of the oyster farm. As my own research deepened, it was clear my approach and that of the Light were not in alignment, and we parted ways in September of 2012. Since then I have worked independently, funded by no one but myself, my modest book advance, and $3,541 raised on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. I say that I have tried to stay neutral, but when presented with the facts, it’s hard not to come to a conclusion. I’ll let you decide for yourself. To those who have already taken a side, from you I would urge patience. Basically: Hear me out.
At least from a logistical perspective, the answer to how I found myself wedged between the National Park Service, wilderness advocates and their defenders on the one hand, and the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, the local agriculture community and their supporters on the other, was a fairly simple one. At the beginning of 2012 I realized I was tired of living in New York City and decided to move back to the rural Northern California coast for a while. I’d been working since 2008 with the United Nations Department of Public Information, writing about the environment, decolonization, disarmament or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. I’d sit in a grand but windowless room all day while various Arab diplomats raised their voices about alleged human rights abuses, and then the Israeli delegates would raise their voices back, and I’d write down a condensed version of it all. I liked the work quite a bit (in fact I still do) but as a country girl I was growing weary of the concrete and the New York weather, which seemed either torturously hot or criminally cold. One winter night after a mammoth day at the UN, while trudging home from the subway in the middle of a snowstorm, I thought to myself, This is how Charles Dickens characters die.
I grew up in the villages that border the Point Reyes National Seashore, just an hour north of San Francisco. But although it is one of the most visited national parks in the country, while playing in its surf or walking its beaches, camping in its forests or traipsing across its fields, I never thought much about any of that. To me it was just outside. It was where I belonged. And when I decided to move back, I didn’t know I was about to find myself in the middle of a political and ecological battle, although that is exactly what happened.
During a gap between UN contracts I decided to pitch a freelance article to my old hometown newspaper, the Light. In a cursory online search I noticed that it had changed hands a few years back, but I didn’t think too much of it. The paper was generally well-respected and had won a Pulitzer Prize the year that I was born for exposing a militant local cult. When the new editor, a woman about my age, offered me a full-time job as staff reporter, I accepted. Instead of refugees and lines of demarcation, I’d be writing about escaped dairy cows, local environmental issues and crop yields. This suited me just fine. New York colleagues commented that this sounded like the start of a romantic comedy. They imagined run-ins with old high school flames and hilarious hijinks involving livestock. But it didn’t turn out that way.
Real wars have been fought over oysters, and I don’t mean to diminish those by employing the language of battle here. From Chesapeake Bay to the Potomac, violent disputes flared between naval police and oyster pirates beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the last recorded incidence of bloodshed there was as recent as 1959. But while there was no literal carnage over the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, calling what happening a “war” is truly the best way to describe it. Besides, gun-wielding oyster pirates do appear in these pages, after all.
The story of The Oyster War wound up being both bigger and smaller than I expected. I wanted to solve a specific scientific mystery, but found myself asking much broader questions instead. To answer them, I was obliged to set out on a journey that took me through the halls of Congress, Nixon’s White House, the lawless oyster beds of Gold Rush San Francisco, the radical environmental activism of the 1970s to 1990s, and—of course—over the fog-soaked hills and into the misty forests of beautiful Point Reyes. Again and again I encountered two riddles. One, for a world that is in constant motion and overlap, how do we decide who belongs or doesn’t belong? And two, when humanity has touched and changed every corner of the earth, what does it mean to be wild?
For much of the time I spent researching this story, if you asked me which side I believed and which I didn’t, I honestly couldn’t tell you. Who was telling the truth? That was what I was there to find out.
Newly back in town after almost ten years spent mostly away, it took a while to get my bearings. My life in the big city had been frenetic, and it was jarring to suddenly find myself one foggy spring night in Vladimir’s, a dark Czechoslovakian pub on the edge of Tomales Bay, eating fish and chips with septuagenarian cowboys. Wild mustard was still growing tall along the roadsides, clustered white and purple against the weathered wood of old barns. Evenings came on blue and heavy from out over the Pacific. Some friends were skeptical of my decision to abandon the city, even if only temporarily. But outside, beyond the glow of Vlad’s lanterns, the air was thick and wet and quiet, and it felt good to be home.