- Playing
- Last Chance for Oysters
- From
- Lawrence Lanahan
There are parts of American culture that our grandchildren may never experience. The Florida Everglades are submerging. Montana's Grinnell Glacier is receding. Some experts predict that well before the end of this century, most of our seafood will be farmed instead of caught wild, and the oyster industry is already getting there. In January 2007, independent producer Lawrence Lanahan headed out with a waterman who catches oysters in the Chesapeake Bay, to document a vanishing way of American life for American Public Media's Weekend America.
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Piece Description
There are parts of American culture that our grandchildren may never experience. The Florida Everglades are submerging. Montana's Grinnell Glacier is receding. Some experts predict that well before the end of this century, most of our seafood will be farmed instead of caught wild, and the oyster industry is already getting there. In January 2007, independent producer Lawrence Lanahan headed out with a waterman who catches oysters in the Chesapeake Bay, to document a vanishing way of American life for American Public Media's Weekend America.
Broadcast History
Broadcast nationally on the February 3, 2007, episode of American Public Media's Weekend America. See http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/about/list.php for stations.
Transcript
(ambi?fade up music: ?John Henry? by John Fahey)
AX, Bill Trossbach: Off on the horizon, you?re looking at Virginia.
AX, Bill Trossbach: And that over there is where my ancestors were digging the ditches: St. Ignatius Manor. My ancestors were brought here by the Jesuits from Germany as indentured servants to dig ditches for the priests. So they were brought here as hard working people.
AX: I?ve been working here on this river for 50 years. In fact, I have worked, I would say, every oyster bar in the state of Maryland at one time or another. I?ve been up the bay looking back down at Baltimore and I?ve been crab drudgin? outside the Bridge-Tunnel down in Norfolk. And I?ve worked just about everything in between.
AX, Trossbach: We?re coming up on oysters right now, see them in that depth finder? I?m gonna put the dredge overboard, and I?m gonna make a lick.
(ambi?Spinning sound as the...
Read the full transcript
Timing and Cues
This is a non-narrated piece--it's just a portrait, a day on the water with an oysterman. It includes John Fahey's rendition of John Henry.
Host intro by Bill Radke:
"The abundance of oysters is incredible. There are whole banks of them so that the ships must avoid them."
That was the report of a Swiss visitor to the Chesapeake Bay in 1701. By the 1880s, 20 million bushels a year of oysters were harvested from that bay. Today that?s down to about 100,000 bushels per year.
We hear warnings about things disappearing a lot lately?glaciers, coral reefs, polar bears. We?ve been thinking about that a lot here at Weekend America. We?re putting together a kind of time capsule. We?re capturing some of these treasures in a series called ?Last Chances? in the hopes that they don?t actually go away, that we can remember them at least.
We sent independent producer Lawrence Lanahan out to meet Bill Trossbach, one of the last oystermen of Southern Maryland.
Musical Works
| Title | Artist | Album | Label | Year | Length |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| John Henry | John Fahey | The Legend of Blind Joe Death. | Takoma | 1996 | 03:23 |
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James Reiss
Posted on May 07, 2007 at 04:07 PM | Permalink
Review of Last Chance for Oysters
Yum! For those of you who love fresh oysters on the half-shell as much as I do, this mouth-watering drop-in is irresistible. With his boat's engine humming and a guitar strumming in the background, an unidentified oysterman takes us on a workaday tour off the coast of Virginia to haul in a hatch-load of the scrumptious bivalve mollusks long prized among shellfish aficionados.
By now you've no doubt heard the bad news: over-fishing, offshore pollution, and various other inconvenient truths have resulted in dwindling seafood of all sorts. When producer Lawrence Lanahan asks his interviewee whether he thinks nobody will be eating fish in another 50 years, however, the old salt replies that this is a myth perpetrated by journalists eager to "use up paper." His forebears came to this country from Germany to dig ditches for Catholic priests, and he's not about to stop dredging the ocean's floor for oysters to return to a landlocked life of picks and shovels, no sirree.
Much of the charm of this piece derives from the interviewee's feisty optimism expressed in a Chesapeake dialect, which threatens at one point to lapse into unintelligibility. As a kind of Studs Terkel "Work" interview, Lanahan's audio portrait of the waterman becomes an homage to a way of life that may one day be gone with the waves.
You don't need to squeeze a lemon or add a dollop of cocktail sauce to savor the slurpy essence of this tasty testimonial.