What an Oyster Hears

In Oyster, Virginia, mailboxes and their posts are covered in oyster shells. Oyster shells have been tossed in the sandy dirt along driveways and piled around the bases of the pines. One can imagine the dirt is composed largely of the shells, made brittle and whitened by the sun and wind over time, crushed underfoot into a fine powder.

I was there at the end of August, and the heat was stunning. Oyster lies on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, the southernmost portion of the Delmarva peninsula: a substantial spit of coastal plain that juts down from Delaware and Maryland, hugs the Chesapeake Bay like a thick arm.

The brackish oyster would hear the rhythm of the tides like breath, or a heartbeat.

I walked under shortleaf pines, my breath slowing to echo the sighing waves. On the ground lay a still-whole oyster shell that had, uncannily, the exact shape of an ear. The indentation where the adductor muscle had been looked like the ear’s opening. Each curve of the shell’s margin resembled the way an ear flowers outward: a concavity that seems to want to hold the world within it, to cradle it somehow.

Upon a spit of land, surrounded by the rising sea, I listened.

In ocean lives the ancient Greek Okeanos: a great river encircling the earth, a god. “When the sea is worked into anger, it possesses equal energy across the entire audible spectrum; it is full-frequencied white noise,” writes the soundscape ecologist R. Murray Schafer in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. “The impression is one of immense and oppressive power expressed as a continuous flow of acoustic energy.”

But then there is the shore. Schafer continues:

The sea symbolizes brute power; the land, safety and comfort. … Thus, as we move back to the shoreline, power gives way to regular beating and, in a miraculous manner, the sea begins to suggest its opposite—the discrete side of its signature—rhythmic order. Rhythm replaces chaos as the sea becomes benign.

This is what the brackish oyster would hear, the rhythm of the tides like breath or a heartbeat at the edge of the sea. Oysters don’t have auditory organs, but with at the edge of their fleshy mantle, they are able to sense light, the salinity and temperature of the water—and vibration. In this way, they “listen” to the conditions of