Land of bivalved beauties
Washington state’s Oysterville is home to America’s largest producer of the farm-raised mollusks
OYSTERVILLE, Wash. — Usually, razor clams get all the publicity.
Last spring’s razor clam-digging opening on the 28-mile-long stretch of Long Beach Peninsula was a big deal because state fisheries honchos temporarily upped the daily limit after a long closure, which assured a good harvest. Fanatical diggers descended in droves.
But cross the 1 ¾-mile-wide peninsula to where the Pacific Ocean surf doesn’t pound and you’re in the land of the oyster. No digging required.
It’s a much quieter kind of delicious.
Here, foggy mists hang as lace curtains over sprawling Willapa Bay, where the palette is all soft greens, dusty blues and sea-grass tan. After you’ve had your fun fill of Long Beach’s go-karts, arcade games, flashy kites and Jake the Alligator Man (the star attraction of Marsh’s Free Museum), and grumped about whatever new development has caught your eye (because the beach towns of your childhood aren’t supposed to change), it’s time to head 15 miles north and visit the quiet village of Oysterville.
Ahh. Even the old-school name of the place is kind of soothing.
Near the far end of the peninsula, time seems to have paused — as if the community was clamped away in its own shell. The whole 80-acre village is a national historic district, with development limits and design standards overseen by the National Park Service. Meaning: Nothing changes much.
Founded in 1854, in its heyday Oysterville was a little boomtown, and the county seat. In those days, Willapa Bay shipped boatloads of oysters to San Francisco to feed the increasingly sophisticated tastes of gold-rushrich Californians.
Now, Oysterville is just a quiet, mostly residential community, a perfect place to be a hermit.
Strolling recently along a row of 19th-century houses, each with a placard erected by the Daughters of the Pioneers to tell when it was built and by whom (“R.H. Espy House, co-founder of Oysterville, 1871”), I chuckled to myself when a big SUV pulled up and a sunglasses-clad
tourist, perhaps in search of taffy stands and bumper cars, asked with some dismay, “So, where is Oysterville?”
“You’re in it!” I told him, looking around with a smile at the steeple of the tiny white and red church, near a towering line of ancient cypresses and around the corner from the old one-room schoolhouse, no longer used for daily classes. “You’re in it.”
Beyond the old houses the 25-mile-long bay is now America’s largest producer of farmed oysters. On your way here, drive snaking U.S. 101 along the bay’s eastern shore and you’ll cross bridge after bridge over rivers and sloughs that bring nutrients oysters feed on. At river mouths, prairie-like salt marshes bristle with reeds, capturing erosion-caused silt that might choke the bivalves. With a largely undeveloped shore, Willapa Bay has all the makings of an oyster’s Shangri-La.
Stroll the village. Step into Oysterville’s simple old church, where heat comes from a potbelly stove and the lighting is all by oil lamp. (Befitting a community by the sea, on our visit a Bible on the lectern had been left open to the Book of Jonah.) Peek through windows into the schoolhouse, which these days hosts a summertime science academy for kids and a public lecture series (recently on the schedule: a chief of the Coast Guard motor lifeboat school at Cape Disappointment).
Then it’s time to get oysters for dinner.
Follow the road to the bay and you’ll find the former oyster cannery, which claims to be the only one of its kind on the National Register of Historic Places. Today the weathered dockside buildings are home to Oysterville Sea Farms, which markets products under its “Willabay” trade name. A retail shop in a rustic waterfront shed sells oysters shucked or in the shell, along with clams, crab and shrimp.
You can buy oysters or shrimp cocktail ready to eat, along with a glass of wine, on a deck overlooking the bay. But my mission was to procure oysters in the shell for my first-ever experiment with roasting them on a charcoal grill.
On the way to the beach, I’d already picked up a dozen medium-size beauties across the bay at Goose Point Oysters, on the west side of U.S. 101 just north of the Niawiakum River, near Bay Center. This time I chose a dozen small oysters for comparison.
In-shell oysters of any size were $7 a dozen here, or three dozen for $20 if you want a real feast. A sign promised they were harvested that day.
“All our oysters come from right out here,” said counterman Mike Gibbs, nodding toward the bay where Oysterville Sea Farms stewards more than 200 acres of private tidelands. “These on the shell are hand-picked.”
Being new at barbecuing them in the shell, I asked for guidance. He suggested putting them directly on the grill, waiting for the shells to gap open slightly on their own, then prying them open with a butter knife.
“Hold the shells up first and look at them and you can usually tell which is the ‘up’ side, because you want to keep the juices to cook them in.” (Place them “cupped” side down.)
What kind of recipe might he suggest? “Garlic, butter and a fork,” Gibbs said with a smile.
I paid for the oysters and a $20 bottle of Willabay Oyster Blanc white wine, developed by Oysterville Sea Farms and produced for them by Mount Baker Vineyards. A watercolor image of the oyster shed decorates the label.
Back at our beach rental at the north end of Long Beach’s Discovery Trail, I watched in suspense as the first batch smoked and sizzled on the rental’s grill. Would they open?
At first, all they did was spew water like one of those Italian fountains with urinating cherubs. I worried that my coals would be extinguished. (This might have been for the good. If coals are too hot the shells can explode, warned a website I consulted later. Perhaps safety glasses are in order?)
Gradually, one by one, they began to gap open, and I went to work prying the shells. I daubed the oysters with minced garlic, substituted a few drops of olive oil for the suggested butter and let them bubble a bit longer before serving with a choice of red cocktail sauce from the Goose Point Oystery or my wife’s homemade tartar sauce (mayonnaise, dill pickle relish, finely minced onion and paprika).
Or we just ate them off the shell and savored the taste of sea, salt and smoke, washed down with a sip of Oyster Blanc.
To finish off? A quiet walk through grassy dunes to dip toes in the surf among scampering sandpipers.
I rarely say no to bumper cars, but this was a really good day at the beach.