If you were to ask me what Heaven looks like, I would tell you. It looks like Apalachicola, Florida.
Visit Apalch in the late afternoon when the sun is sinking. Go downtown and look at the brick storefronts. You’ll see what I mean.
Walk along the docks where trawlers are moored behind 13 Mile Seafood Market on Water Street, a place that’s been selling wild oysters since the ‘50s. Oysters are the main industry here.
At least they were.
“It’s basically like a big mill is closing down,” said an elderly local man. “Ain’t no boats out there. The bay’s empty. The oystermen are gonna be hurting.”
He is of course talking about the closing of the oyster beds. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservancy Commission recently made the decision to stop harvesting oysters in Apalach.
It was a blow to the town, but vital to the health of this brittle Floridian ecosystem. This exhausted bay is in serious trouble.
“We're not just looking at it from an oyster perspective, but from a system perspective,” said
Dr. Felicia Coleman, part of an Apalachicola Bay initiative. “How healthy is the Apalachicola Bay? And that's the problem.”
Outsiders might not care about what goes on in a podunk oystering town, they have their own lives to worry about. But a lot of sunburned oystermen just lost their livelihoods. And it hurt.
This will be Franklin County’s first non-oystering period since Apalachee and Timucua natives began gathering oysters in these waters.
A few years ago, this bay was producing about 3 million pounds of yearly oysters, a crop worth about 9 million bucks. Ninety percent of Florida’s wild oysters came from this fleck-on-the-map town.
Ninety.
And there’s a reason these bivalves are so coveted. Because they will blow your mind.
A few years ago I was in a fancy seafood joint in Saint Louis, Missouri, of all places. I was very homesick for…