.Species depletion doesn't just happen to wildlife !
A fishing boat at the wharf in Naufrage, Prince Edward Island, in Canada.
...On a recent morning, however, I collected my oysters in a slightly different fashion. Standing in the front of an 18-foot boat, I lowered a set of 12-foot tongs — what Gulliver might have used to toss salad — into the waters of a windswept bay.
The boat rocked. The tongs slipped through my hands, partly because they were heavy, mostly because I am clumsy. Gripping them tighter, I raked them over the bottom of the bay, which was loose and crunchy in a way that suggested gravel but meant something else.
Oysters. I'd made contact with oysters. And if I squeezed the tongs the right way and managed to pull them up without having them pull me down into the frigid water — restaurant critic overboard! — I might find oysters in their clutch. And I might get to taste oysters whose freshness I had verified not with my server but with my own eyes and my own wet, chapped, shaking hands.....
