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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Mike Osinski was an acquaintance, someone I saw every now and then in the elevator of the Manhattan apartment building we'd both lived in for nearly ten years. Although I never knew what he did exactly (something in finance; he was always wearing a suit), he seemed different from the others--affable in a way I associate with people from the Southern states, less formal, with an unpretentious good-ol'-boyness. One day, I spotted Osinski walking his dog and realized I hadn't seen him for some time. He'd grown a graying goatee and was wearing baggy jeans and muddy work boots.
"I've left the city," he said. "I've given up the rat race!" He seemed giddy and made big gestures with his hands. He was now living in Greenport, a town on one of the far tines of Long Island's North Fork. "I'm working on the water! I'm a bayman!" (Baymen are the region's traditional seafood hunter-gatherers.) He motioned for me to step closer. "And I've lost thirty pounds." Osinski slapped himself to show off his abs. "Oysters did this. I harvest oysters. I'm a new man. The differences between men and women? Now I understand them. Do you know what I mean? I am a maaaaaaan!" He said the word "man" as though it should always have twelve syllables.
Osinski was born in 1954, and grew up in Mobile, Alabama, with a barefoot taste for the bounty of the intertidal beaches. (He was a youthful advocate of the Southerner's unspoken principle that, in the Gulf states, your identity is fed by what you pull out of the warm waters for dinner.) But Long Island isn't anything like the Gulf. I stared at my neighbor and thought, Oysters. Is that what happens when we get older--we take up hobbies?
I didn't see Osinski for another year, when I ran into him and his dog after a morning of deliveries. Gramercy Tavern had taken his oysters--"The chef says they're the best he's eaten in his life"--and other restaurants had followed: Esca, the Four Seasons, BLT Fish, Le Bernardin. These were some of the most respected eateries in the city. Le Bernardin was regarded by many as the best fish place in America. "And they love my oysters," Osinski said.
Greenport is a hundred miles from Manhattan, on the upper reaches of Peconic Bay, a fast-moving body of water squeezing between Shelter Island and the raggedy narrow end of New York on its way to the open sea. Osinski's home, built in the eighteen-thirties, probably by a whaling captain, sits on a sandy isthmus with views of water in two directions: in front, the Peconic; in back, a brackish inlet, fed by a creek and the bay's tides, called Widow's Hole, after one Margaret Leverage, the wife of the whaler. (He went to sea after completing the house, and never returned.) It was a mournful legacy, but one that Osinski nervously ended up drawing from.
On the East Coast, oysters derive their names from where they're found--they might be called a thousand things, but there is only one species, Crassostrea virginica. The names, therefore, can seem a little arbitrary, which was illustrated by a story told to me by Sandy Ingber, the chef at Grand Central's Oyster Bar, of the Pemaquid. "This Pemaquid--it was a good oyster," Ingber said. "But it didn't sell." Who knows why? The name had no magic or was difficult to pronounce. "So I started calling it a Bristol." Pemaquid is near Bristol, Maine. "I couldn't keep it on the menu." (Ingber has since gone back to calling it a Pemaquid.) By this logic, Osinski's oysters could be Peconics or Greenports, but he decided to invoke the pond behind his house and call them Widow's Holes, even though the name had some unwieldy implications: no eager, neo-oysterman really wants his shellfish to invoke mortality (Here, eat my raw shellfish and you, too, can make your wife a widow). On the other hand, what exactly is a widow's hole? "It sounds pornographic, doesn't it?" Osinski asked, as though it were the punch line to a dirty joke, not an entirely unhappy association for the world's most famous aphrodisiac. "Osinski's oysters are perfectly good," Ingber told me, "but my job is to move shellfish. Widow's Holes--that's a name I can move."
The view from Osinski's home meets just about everyone's definition of picturesque, but on a cold December morning it was remarkably uninviting. The bay was gray. The sky was gray. The trees were black and bare. There seemed to be no horizon. Out on the water, an empty ferry was leaving for Shelter Island. Overhead, and in all directions, were formations of geese--they made me think of sergeants' stripes in Second World War movies--on their way to somewhere else. In the shallow water where Osinski kept a boat, skim ice had formed. I had offered to help out, and was given oyster gear...
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