Twain's Feast (19 page)

As to the charges that Twain had feigned illness to avoid paying the bill . . . well, you couldn’t really expect him to come up with the money. After all, Amigo concluded, the man was a bohemian.

Mussels are less controversial than oysters—less prone to lead to violence. This may be because they’re eaten raw far less often; Twain, specifying steaming, was firmly among the majority. When you steam something in wine, then dip it in butter (and Lord knows I’m in favor of doing both), you’re getting a ways away from the immediate and pure experience of eating it raw. There are better mussels and worse mussels, for sure, but the differences simply don’t inspire the same kind of intense, nearly bloody debate as with oysters.

Still, all mussels are very much of a particular place. In Twain’s day, in fact, they were even more so than oysters—thin-shelled mussels didn’t ship nearly as well and couldn’t live as long without ice. In the waters around San Francisco, their huge beds caked any available substrate, growing even on oyster reefs. Beyond the Golden Gate, they colonized ocean rocks where nothing else could take hold. They thrived in the cold summer waters that welled up from the deep sea—waters that gave San Francisco its famous fogs, like the one that chilled Twain on the day he drank what may have been the greatest cup of coffee of his life.

If any food ever truly affronted Twain, leaving him stammering with agitation, groping about for a properly demeaning insult, it was watery European hotel coffee. “After a few months’ acquaintance with European ‘coffee,’” he wrote, “one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it is not a mere dream, after all, and a thing which never existed.” He had found that ideal cup in San Francisco. By the summer of 1863, riding out to the grand Cliff and Ocean houses before dawn had become a minor fad; Twain did it exactly once and swore never to do it again—the cold fog, he said, was so thick that he could scarcely see his horse. Afterward he wrote that

Coffee so good that the earth seemed to smile. And at that moment, all along the coast, mussels were gorging.

San Francisco’s cold summer fogs and its abundant ocean life are both gifts of offshore upwelling. As the California Current—a gigantic, six-mile-wide, invisible river in the sea—flows from Alaska to Mexico, the turning of the earth draws it steadily, constantly offshore. All this water is replaced by a gigantic upwelling from thousands of feet below, much as hot smoke rising through a chimney can pull a cold draft of air through an open door. And when this cold water touches warm summer air, the ocean breathes fog thick as a wet, gray blanket, the kind that Twain rode through cursing, swearing that he could “not see the horse at all, and [was] obliged to steer by his ears, which stood up dimly out of the dense white mist that enveloped him.”

The cold, upwelled water that makes the fogs is full of detritus, decomposed fish, rotted plankton, and whatever else has drifted to the ocean bottom—all now broken down into particles fine enough to billow back to the surface on a rising current. When these nutrients combine with sunlight, the ocean explodes with plankton; if you scuba dive in the upper reaches of an upwelling zone, you can barely see your hand through the green, almost greasy water. And plankton is everything—plankton is it. Upwelled nutrients, and the plankton they support, are the foundation of all California marine life, from fish to whales to the Farallon Islands murres whose nests were once so busily robbed.

And mussels, for sure. Mussels spin strong thread, knitting themselves to rock in beds up to fifteen inches thick. The waves that break on the beds carry upwelled nutrients; as each wave draws, foaming, back, the mussels filter and feed. Mussels live on surfaces the ocean wants to shear clean—it’s a triumph of life. And though the beds look pretty monotonous—just wads of sharp black shell slathered on rocks—they also allow other animals to live on wave-crushed stone. They shelter worms, anemones, crabs, and brittle stars, expanding the territory of dozens of species. What’s more, the threads that bind the mussels down also act as spiderwebs, trapping tiny bits of detritus that feed the hidden hangers-on. Prairie chickens depend on grass for their habitat—but mussels
are
habitat, letting a kaleidoscope of life hold to what would otherwise be bare rock. Twain’s mussels made their own forest, netting sustenance for an entire subtidal ecosystem, until they ended in city restaurants—in bowls rich with butter, heady with wine.

The parking lot marking the old Berkeley shoreline belongs to Spenger’s, a venerable, much beloved, extremely crappy fish restaurant (the onion rings used to be good; other than that, drink or go home). Beneath the parking lot lie remnants of a monumental mound of millions of oyster and mussel and abalone shells left by generations of Ohlone Native Americans. Four hundred such shell mounds once circled the bay, some of them forty feet tall and the size of a football field at the base; the Ohlone valued the sites for spiritual as well as physical sustenance, with one site including five hundred nearby burials. Shellfish gave the Ohlone stability in a world of change, allowing them to stay as a community year round, rather than dispersing into the hills when the fresh waters of winter dwindled and died.

But then, and for centuries after, oysters and mussels were only one part of the bay’s grand treasury of fish. A day’s haul at Fisherman’s Wharf could include “fine, fat” crabs, sand dabs “but an hour or two from the water,” smelt, herring, flounder, sole, shrimp sold “alive and active,” crayfish, clams, squid, and more. Fishermen cooked breakfasts of fish and coffee on charcoal braziers set out on the decks while passersby bought fish straight from the boats. Into at least the 1870s, the catch sold so quickly that fishermen never used ice; the Vesuvius Italian restaurant was just one that would send a cook’s helper to the Clay Street Market for a “still flapping” fish as soon as it was ordered. Sometimes the abundance bordered on parody: once, when a fishing boat was hauled into dry dock, some fifty large anchovies were found dangling underneath. The fish had gone pecking for algae among the mussels that encrusted the hull and been trapped when the shells snapped down tight (this sounds like an exaggeration, but mussels have been known to take off the toes of passing clapper rails). The bay was chock-full of life, everything eating everything else.

For many decades San Francisco was not only a city
by
the bay, it was a city
of
the bay and of the ocean beyond. The abundance that Twain knew, much of which lasted until midway into the twentieth century, was a pulsing expression of the water that gave the city its name (originally called Yerba Buena, the city was renamed after the San Francisco Bay, not the other way around). There may have been no better place in America to experience the blend of wild and domestic foods that distinguished his menu; a lavish testimonial dinner in the city might include venison, bear, and five varieties of duck, alongside veal tartare, calves’ head, ice cream, nuts, raisins, and cake—things from both the vast nearby wetlands and quickly expanding tilled fields.

But even in Twain’s day, the filling of the bay had already begun. As he sailed south past holding tanks and reefs of native oysters and beds of eelgrass, he must also have seen the hulks of abandoned ships littering the bay, teetering or foundered in the muck; some were burned to the waterline, others beginning to rot. The boats were the face of the early Gold Rush, when gold fever was so intense that a newly arrived crew would often walk off the job and head for the Sierras—it would have been a huge problem for captains and shipowners, if they weren’t just as likely to have called it quits.

And so, until swift new California Clippers began winging gold hunters around the tip of South America, Yerba Buena Cove (the city’s major anchorage) filled up with the hulks of unwanted ships. As early as 1851, a majority of the nearly eight hundred ships in the cove were derelicts. The abandoned ships were so thick, in fact, that when the city really began pushing at the boundaries, stretching out over the bay on increasingly elaborate platforms, nobody bothered to move the abandoned boats—they just poured in sand until the hulls were effectively sitting on dry land. Later someone might build a superstructure on the deck and call it a hotel, or throw in an oven and open a restaurant. Ships became jails, theaters, homes.
¹⁰
Today the five blocks of infill between the bay and the old San Francisco shoreline still hold the remains of dozens of Gold Rush-era ships; sometimes a transit tunnel or the foundation of a new office building will run smack into one, and the world gets to look again at the
Rome
or the
Lydia
or the
William Gray.

Still, beyond the city the old shoreline more or less held. Though farmers had begun diking the upper freshwater marshes, wetlands still spread for hundreds of square miles. The immediate problem was not yet infill, but silt that was beginning to smother the oyster holding pens—silt sent down to the bay by the very prospectors who thought that a plate of fried bay oysters with bacon and eggs was the height of luxury.

Much of the Gold Rush consisted of guys figuring out increasingly efficient (and increasingly destructive) ways of washing gold out of riverside gravel and dirt. Though the typical image of a ’49er is that of a rugged individualist kneeling beside a stream with a wide pan, that’s really accurate only for the first months of the rush. Squatting on the stream banks soon gave the prospectors ruggedly thrown-out backs and individually blasted knees; most detested their pans, and ditched them as soon as they could. By the time Twain came to California, they were using cast-iron nozzles to blast away entire hillsides—undercutting bluffs by as much as three hundred feet, then sluicing out the collapsed gravel and sand. When it came to tearing up the landscape, the move from washbasins to hydraulic mining was like switching from trained ants to giant, angry boars. And the unromantic truth is that there were a lot more of the boars, for a lot longer.

But the hills, of course, did not simply vanish. They washed downstream. All in all, the prospectors blasted out some 1.5
billion
cubic yards of sand and gravel and soil. To put it in perspective, the largest Egyptian pyramid is about 2.5 million cubic yards; if you made a pyramid out of all the washed-out Gold Rush dirt, it would be a mile on every side and another mile to the top, utterly dwarfing the ones at Giza.

Much of this enormous pile of sludge was full of mercury, which prospectors used to separate gold from earth (mercury could be made into an amalgam with the specks of gold, then separated out at leisure). Today the mercury might charitably be termed a problem. Back then, although the phrase “mad as a hatter” had been coined to describe people losing their minds from the mercury used to make hats, prospectors used the metal blithely and without much fear of consequence (Twain himself got sick during his short week in the quartz mill, possibly from exposure to the “quantity of quicksilver” kept on hand).

But at the time people worried less about mercury than about the hyperspeed erosion destroying all the waterways downstream. Erosion so damaged local agriculture that an 1884 lawsuit finally stopped hydraulic mining altogether. The suit came too late, however, to stop that monster pyramid of toxic sediment from poisoning and burying many of the shellfish; by the time of the court decision, the once omnipresent oyster holding pens around the city were gone.