A winter feast
We made a Christmas Eve junket to one of my favorite places on
Earth this year. Moss Landing long ago was dubbed by a friend as
the center of the universe, and while he was joking, he’s not far
off.
A winter feast
We made a Christmas Eve junket to one of my favorite places on Earth this year. Moss Landing long ago was dubbed by a friend as the center of the universe, and while he was joking, he’s not far off.
The town has been discovered by the Chamber of Commerce, with more and more antique shops and the like sprouting up. But it remains first and – I hope – always a broad shouldered working village, a place where making electricity and harvesting seafood pay the bills.
We were there to provision for Christmas dinner – a brimming potful of cioppino, a virtual ocean in a bowl. Live crabs, clams and mussels were accompanied by swordfish, squid, scallops and shrimp.
The memory of it still tantalizes.
Seafood – the last wild harvest most of us consume regularly – seems a particularly apt way to celebrate the advent of Christ, who Christians believe is the human embodiment of the giver of all life.
But there’s more to Moss Landing than fish. It’s location, right at the center of the huge backwards “C” that forms Monterey Bay, is remarkable. The harbor itself dates to the mid-1940s. Prior to that, the Salinas River ran northward behind a row of dunes, through what are now artichoke fields, to Moss Landing and northward from there nearly another mile before entering the bay. The harbor opened Elkhorn Slough to more direct tidal action. Farmers reclaimed rich alluvial lands and a fishing port was launched in earnest.
The tides have wrought tremendous change to the slough. This once quiet backwater now boils with a rushing ebb and flood every 13 hours. The result is that the slough has grown deeper and wider, and that wetlands that define the place are slowly reduced.
Gone are the salt evaporating ponds that once operated in the lower slough. Gone are the oyster farms. But in their stead remains a wondrously rich tapestry of life.
At low tide, we’ve watched the small geysers of geoduck clams squirting from holes in the mud. These enormous mollusks may be more than two feet into the muck, feeding through a long, leathery snorkel that reaches to the surface of the mud. The clam you may casually turn into a pot of chowder may be 100 years old.
At low tide, the mudflats are covered in shorebirds. As a dozen or more species feed side-by-side, it’s interesting to consider that they don’t appear to squabble. That’s because each species is feeding at a different layer in the sediments. Avocets, with upturned bills, sweep the very surface. Western and Least Sandpipers probe a bit deeper, and the real miners, curlews and godwits, explore several inches into the black goo, counting on sensitive nerves in their beaks to distinguish food from pebbles.
Not long ago, I counted more than 60 otters napping and preening as they floated in the harbor channel. The otters offer silent – and cute – testimony to the richness of the place. An otter eats roughly 20 percent of its body weight in seafood daily. With a few tons of otters floating in the harbor, you know you’re where the fish are.
One of the reasons is the submarine canyon that creases Monterey Bay. By sheer coincidence, the head of the canyon is found at the mouth of Moss Landing Harbor. Stand at the end of the north jetty and look down. You’re already standing above 90 feet of seawater.
The canyon is the most influential shaper of the bay. Sand drifts along the shore, eventually spilling down the canyon walls, where it gains speed and flows until it reaches a spot, deep below the Continental Shelf, and settles to the bottom. In the eternal blackness of the deep there is a tremendous alluvial fan composed of thousands of years of sand drifted around the bay.
It refreshes the shore and allows the process of erosion to continue, sometimes in the face of our best efforts to stop it. At the same time, water filled with food is pushed up from the canyon into the sunny shallows, and the result is an explosion of life.
The plankton feeds the small fish. The small fish feed bigger fish and whales. Birds go feasting. And we eat cioppino.
Happy New Year, everyone. If you resolve to do anything in 2007, resolve to go outside and to celebrate the wonders around us.
