Ask me to name the best oyster in America, and I’ll respond that the best is the freshest, the one most grounded in place. After all, why eat oysters? Not to fill the belly or to satisfy the sweet tooth. We eat oysters because, like the best wines, they have a somewhereness to them.

More than any other food, oysters taste like the sea. But not just any sea. Oysters are creatures of the coasts, of that line where land meets water. Because they are filter-feeders, their flavor is the essence of their environment. You can grow an oyster in the open sea, and it will have a simple salt taste. Grow it in an estuary, however, enriched by the land’s nutrients, minerals, and phytoplankton, and you get the dazzling flavors that make people crave oysters. That’s why to know an oyster, you need to know its territory.

Hood Canal is the only true fjord in the continental U.S. It owes its unique geography to the Little Ice Age, when glaciers gouged a cut into Washington’s Olympic Mountains, allowing a long saltwater tongue of the Pacific to lick deep into the rock. Far up the canal lies the Hamma Hamma River delta, an amazing jumble of surf and turf where the water of rainy Olympic National Park surges out of the high peaks and pours into the gap opened by the fjord. And that collision of mineral-sweet meltwater and savory seawater is a magical formula for great oysters.

Hamma Hamma means “stinky, stinky” in the parlance of the local Skokomish tribe and refers to the reek of decaying salmon carcasses after the fall run. But those decaying salmon are rich in nutrients, which feed algae, and those algae get happily slurped up by three million oysters down at the river mouth. A Hama Hama oyster tastes salmon sweet. (Note the single “m”: The Hama Hama Oyster Company uses the alternate spelling for the river, stemming from the era before road signs standardized the double “m.”) That sweetness mixes with the salt of the fjord and an unmistakable cucumber note, tinged with anise. Imagine the fresh and slippery crunch of a cucumber sandwich rolled in nori. It’s a frontier oyster, its gnarly, gray-green shell mirroring the misty fir forests that shroud the river all the way down to Hood Canal.

Adam James is the only oyster farmer I know who has been chased by a mountain lion. There aren’t too many places on earth where this could happen, but for Adam it’s not astonishing. His family has been stewarding the Hamma Hamma since 1922, when it began managing the upper river for timber. In 1957, the family started cultivating the oysters down at the river mouth. The wild oysters thrive on the hard-packed, brackish delta, so the Hama Hama Company simply assists the process by moving them around to prevent overcrowding, then harvesting the big ones by hand at low tide. It’s a nice symbiosis: The oysters depend on excellent water quality, which encourages careful management of the forests, and the oyster harvest takes the economic pressure off the forests to produce. And where else in America can you hear elk bugling as you gather oysters?

From Hood Canal, draw a line 2,500 miles due east and you’ll find the Cote d’Or of Atlantic oysters: Maine’s Damariscotta River, a world of pine islands, redbrick villages, and gray-shingled capes. Different landscape, different oyster. While Hama Hamas, with their big, ridged shells and untamed, sweet, green flavors capture the Pacific Northwest, the Damariscotta’s Glidden Points are pure New England, as reserved and salty as a Camden sea captain, a buttoned-down package of intense brine, delightful crunch, and the transparent minerality of the sea.

Barbara Scully has been growing Glidden Points for 20 years. She chose the Damariscotta for its unspoiled charm and deep basin. That basin allows her to grow some oysters 40 feet down in some of the coldest year-round oyster beds on the East Coast. A cold-water oyster is a slow-growing one; Glidden Points are usually harvested when they’re four years old (more than twice the age of most oysters) and have an unmatched heft and depth of flavor.

When your oysters are 40 feet down in a Maine estuary, you can’t simply grab them at low tide, as the Hama Hama Company does. Scully is one of the only oyster growers in the world to harvest primarily by diving and handpicking them off the bottom. It’s labor-intensive, but less disturbing to the bottom ecology than dredging. Scully used to harvest year-round, until one January when an ice sheet swept away her boat while she was underwater. Now she takes off January to March.

After I visited Glidden Point, I traveled upriver to try to find the Glidden Middens. I’d read about this mound of oyster shells left by Native Americans 2,000 years ago. For an hour I wandered the hills that line the Damariscotta, searching in vain for the middens. Then, at a spot where the bank had given way, the answer became clear: I was standing on them. All those hills were the middens, uncountable millions of shells piled over acres and acres, a forest growing atop them. The renowned productivity of the Damariscotta was nothing new. Its oysters had been helping humans become grounded in place for a long, long time.

Where to Find Them:

Glidden Points and Hama Hamas are mainstays in many oyster bars. Also, both growers ship them in ice-packed coolers—a great way to ensure that your oysters were in the sea the day before they go into your mouth.

Glidden Point
Oyster Sea Farm
Edgecomb, ME
207/633-3599
www.oysterfarm.com

Hama Hama
Oyster Company
Lilliwaup, WA
360/877-5811
www.hamahamaoysters.com

"Bicoastal Bivalves" comes to ARTINFO from the October/November 2007 issue of Culture + Travel magazine.