Our Once-Abundant Earth
When Otis Parrish was a kid in the 1940s, abalone were abundant. Each abalone grows in a single, beautiful opalescent shell, which can get as big as a dinner plate. Parrish’s father showed him how to pry the abalone off the rocky shoreline at low tide with an oak stick or the end of a sharpened leaf spring. Or, best of all, how to take the abalone unawares and grab them with his bare hands before they had time to fasten tight to the rocks. His mother’s village was called Dukašal, or “Abaloneville” in the Kashaya Pomo tribe’s language, notwithstanding its location five miles and two steep ridges inland from Stewarts Point on the California coast. The ocean gave the Kashaya people protein and ceremonial food. “We call [abalone] ‘Champion of the Sea,’” Parrish told me over coffee in nearby Windsor, California, one recent morning.
Newcomers to the state started eating abalone in far greater quantities in the mid-1800s. They went into deeper water with skiffs and long poles, and began free diving and subsequently diving from boats with air hoses to harvest the shellfish. Commercial capture passed 1 million pounds a year around 1920. Apart from a dip during World War II, abalone hauls totaled several million pounds a year for decades. When the pink-abalone population crashed in the early 1970s, people fished for more red abalone, whose decline, in turn, was compensated by increased pursuit of the green, white, and black species. They were all flatlining by the mid-1980s. In 1997, California banned commercial abalone fishing.
