Teachings from an Oyster
by Adlai Richman
Winner of Zinc’s Second College Essay Contest
At dawn, the sky and the water are the same silver color.
I cut through the bay in my rubber waders pulling two canoes filled with oyster bags. I step around crabs and shells as I make my way to the dozens of metal racks revealed by the outgoing tide. I’m bleary-eyed, but there’s no place I’d rather be than here.
When I applied for the job, Jim asked why a high school girl from New York City wanted to work on his oyster farm. I explained my family’s yearly ritual of transitioning from a 600-square-foot apartment in the East Village to a 100-year-old oyster shack in the woods of Cape Cod. As a kid, I couldn’t wait to become a mermaid swimming in the ocean and practicing my magic.
“I love any chance to be out on the water,” I told him.
“It's hard work,” he said. “And some 4 AM tides.”
“That’s no problem.”
Out on the flats, as my coworkers and I rake clam beds and shake the oyster bags to stimulate their shells so they grow deeper, our conversations drift from the surf report to what life may look like on habitable exoplanets. Jim unties a bag to show us how to cull the adult oysters from the juveniles. “These are the ocean’s filters,” he says. “They take in everything and spit out clean water.” He leaves us to our work and the discussions take off. I talk about the Billion Oyster Project that’s cleaning up the East River near where I live. James, who studied aquaculture, steers us toward polluted water systems' impact on climate change. Mack, who loves to laugh and discuss psychology, says, “We should learn from these oysters, you know... turning garbage into a delicacy.”
When Jim returns, he shares one of his random seeds of knowledge. Today's concept: “imaginary time.” After we take turns guessing what it means, Jim smiles, telling us, “If you don’t know something, learn it.”
With that, the seed was planted.
That’s how my nightly ritual of rinsing out muddy clothes began to include going down internet rabbit holes of concepts from the day. “Imaginary time,” I learned, is Stephen Hawking’s theory which proposes time can be understood as a dimension of physical space. I thought about moving through time the way I walk around the bay. I began to wonder what time even was. As a racer in swim and track, I knew a millisecond could be the difference between 1st and 10th place. Then, I stumbled on Planck Time, which is the shortest unit of measurement at 10 to the -44 seconds before time becomes “meaningless." This concept led me to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which then brought me to time entanglement. I fell asleep with 30 tabs of quantum mechanics open, excited to drop new knowledge bombs on the farm the next day.
As the summer went on, I felt like I was at the meeting place of science and magic.
Knee-deep in water, Jim was teaching us that Coriolis acceleration is how tides and particles experience the rotation of the Earth. It felt natural to segue into a conversation about how CERN’s particle accelerator may be the key to time travel. My learning felt intellectual, experiential, and alive.
On the bay, time felt limitless, and so did I.
This fall, I'm conducting a research project on how advancements in astronomy shifted spiritual and philosophical beliefs during the Renaissance era. In many ways, I’m investigating the relationship between the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. I’m learning that during the Copernican Revolution, as people realized the Earth was not the center of the universe, philosophers began to voice more questions about our place and purpose in the world. New discoveries led to new questions.
This is the very same lesson I learned this summer on the bay: the more I know, the more I wonder.