Ice Storms, Dismal Oyster Market and Frost’s Birches

Stubborn ice it is, too, given the sub-freezing forecast for the next several days.

Waxy green magnolia leaves gleam and pout in ice, drooping with little of their typical southern swagger. Shimmering holly berries dare icicles to even think about diminishing the joy and sauciness of their brazen red joie de vivre.

Poking along the shoreline, with a walking stick for balance and progging, I search for new patterns of light brought on by this extreme weather.

Grace Creek oyster fleet quiet in January with ice.

Across the creek, graceful boats of tongers and dredgers rest motionless and quiet in the thickening and gripping ice.  The market for this year’s wild oyster season, as noted by many veteran watermen, is the worst they’ve ever seen.  

In the windows of their buyers’ offices, they are too often seeing hand-scrawled NO MARKET TODAY signs. Blame the economy, blame over-supply coming from southern waters, or simply a declining overall taste for the succulent bivalves that have long been a mainstay for the Chesapeake’s winter watermen. Whatever, it’s real, and it’s negative.

Buyer PT Hambleton’s admonition that the only two things a waterman has to worry about are January and February is no truer than this year.  And that despite the high quality, color, and taste of oysters being harvested from local waters in this thickness of winter. They’re yellow and fat and full of flavor.

Ironically, the market has improved in recent days due to the weather.  “That’s because there are fewer people harvesting now,” one waterman told me, on his way to shovel snow and ice off his boat. Lower supply.

Joe Spurry’s Friday night oyster buffets at Chesapeake Landing restaurant west of St. Michaels are one of the few bright spots for this  year’s season. That’s because locals know January and February oysters–shucked on the half shell, fried, stewed, frittered, broiled with butter and garlic, Rockefellered or Casinoed–are the best of the year.

“This year’s overall oyster harvest numbers in the Chesapeake will definitely be down,” he said, “not because there aren’t many oysters out there, but because the market is so soft and there’s fewer days when watermen can sell their catch. I’ve never seen it this bad, and I’ve been at this since the mid-1980s.”

Winter’s natural shoreline architecture.

So get out and help the watermen who enrich our Eastern Shore culture.  Eat some of the best oysters of the year and celebrate artists like Robert Frost, who remind us of the beauty of nature even in the depths of winter.

Seeing ice crusting so many branches put me in mind of Frost’s Birches poem.  It’s too good not to include the whole poem here, especially his sentiments about love, which can warm the heart on even the coldest days in the depth of winter.

Dennis Forney has been a publisher, journalist, and columnist on the Delmarva Peninsula since 1972.  He writes from his home on Grace Creek in Bozman.

Birches
By Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.