I walked into the co-op on Monday for the usual — kelp flakes, a half-pound of dulse, the shaved bonito Cleo will only eat if I tell her it’s “ocean confetti” — and Pamela was just standing behind the seaweed counter with both hands flat on the glass, looking at the tray like she was saying goodbye to a pet. She didn’t say hi. She said, “Did you see what he signed.” And then she clicked the little brass lock on the cooler and walked into the back.
I had not, in fact, seen what he signed. I learned in the parking lot, sitting in the Subaru with a paper bag of chaga mushrooms on my knees, that the President had expanded offshore drilling leases. More coast. More platforms. More of whatever it is they do down there with the drills and the steel and the ancient pressurized things that are not supposed to be touched. I read the article twice. Then I drove straight to Marlene’s because Marlene, as always, was already three steps ahead of me.
Marlene had her dehydrator going and a Costco-sized box of sea moss capsules on the counter, and she said, without looking up from her label-maker, “The fish know. They’ve known since Friday.” Marlene believes — and her source on this is a marine herbalist she follows on a podcast called Brine Witch Hour — that fish carry generational memory in their fat, and that any new drilling event “imprints” on the next four years of catch. She bought out the co-op’s sea moss at 4 p.m. yesterday. She left two jars on my porch with a note that just said before the imprint.
I called my sister-in-law Renee, who works the front desk at a pediatric office and is basically a nurse, and she confirmed what I was already feeling, which is that iodine “absorbs differently” once a coast has been disturbed. She said the body can tell. She said you can sometimes taste it in canned tuna within forty-eight hours. I don’t fully understand the mechanism and Renee admits she doesn’t either, but she said her chiropractor’s wife has a chart.
The Facebook group I’m in — Seafloor Memory & The Fish That Remember, about 14,000 of us, mostly moms, very kind, occasionally a retired oceanographer who keeps trying to correct everyone and gets put on a 24-hour mute — lit up overnight. A woman in Mobile posted a photo of her shrimp “looking tired.” Someone in Ventura said her son’s pediatrician (an MD, she stressed, twice) recommended switching to Baltic sources “until the Atlantic settles.” There was a long thread about whether scallops can grieve. The consensus was: a little.
So I’m pivoting the pantry. We are out of Atlantic sardines, effective Tuesday. I found a small Lithuanian brand at the Polish grocery in West Asheville that a coach’s newsletter recommended last spring, packed in unrefined sunflower oil, which is technically a seed oil but the woman who runs the newsletter says cold-pressed Lithuanian sunflower “behaves like an olive,” so we are making an exception. Cleo will not notice. Cleo cannot tell a sardine from a key on a keychain.
My husband, who is a wonderful man and also a structural engineer who thinks I’m being a lot right now, asked me at dinner whether I really believed a lease signed in Washington could change the chemistry of a fish in three days. I told him I didn’t think it. I knew it. He asked how. I said the same way you know when one of the kids has a fever before you touch them. He chewed his rice.
The salt is fine, by the way. I want to be clear about that. Himalayan pink salt is sealed-in ancient ocean — it’s basically a time capsule, the drilling cannot reach it, it’s been waiting under a mountain for 250 million years and a man with a pen in the Oval Office is not its problem. Same for our Redmond Real Salt. Same, Marlene insists, for the gray Brittany flakes, although I’m watching those.
I went back to the co-op this morning to apologize to Pamela for not knowing on Monday. She’d unlocked the cooler. The tray was half-empty. She slid me a packet of dulse over the counter, didn’t ring it up, and said, very softly, “Tell Cleo it’s the last clean batch.” I nodded like I understood, which I did, completely, and I drove home with it on the passenger seat like a person.