Ralph Atkins has a theory about how it all ends. He’ll still be selling seafood on the Mobile waterfront, just like always. But instead of red snapper, wild Gulf shrimp and Mobile Bay oysters, it’ll be anything left that’s edible: hardhead catfish, stingray fillets, sea turtles, whatever a desperate clientele will take.
"Oh yeah, I'm going to have porpoises out there, manatees," he says, imagining a future where even environmentalists will be lining up to buy endangered species by the pound.
Atkins, you should know up front, is a character and his Southern Fish & Oyster on Eslava Street is a landmark. He’s tenacious and he’s got a sense of humor. The Southern Fish market used to be one weathered warehouse among many; now it looks out of place in the shadow of Mobile’s cruise terminal. Years ago, Atkins offered a deal for his property: He’d sell it for $10 million, so the government could build a bridge over the Mobile River right there. Or he’d sell it for $5 million, if the government also named the billion-dollar bridge for him.
Atkins has spent a lifetime in the space between the dock and the cash register. At one, he's been witness to what the waters provide: What's plentiful, what's not, how far boats have to go to find it. At the other, he's confronted the cold hard economics of what people want and what they're willing to pay for it.
He is, in many ways, a man of another era. Take oyster farming, for example. He's watched the rise of the industry with some interest. He's knowledgeable about its use of oyster spawn engineered to be sterile, so that they waste no energy on reproduction and grow fatter faster.
The industry calls them triploid oysters. "That's a nice book name for them," Atkins says. He calls them "Liberace oysters," referring to the famously flamboyant pianist.
He'll talk as long as you'll listen. He snorts and puffs when describing anything he finds ridiculous or suspicious, which is often. He's got stories and an oratorical flair. He's got anecdotes. He's got conspiracy theories. The thread that runs through them all is the bounty of coastal waters.
The big dig
Atkins doesn't seem like a big science-fiction fan, so it's disconcerting that his vision of the future sounds like something out of a "Mad Max" movie. But that's what he sees, when he looks at plans to enlarge the ship channel up Mobile Bay.
Most everyone seems to expect the channel will be enlarged; mighty economic forces are driving it and powerful political forces are backing it. It's more a question of how exactly it'll be done and how its impacts, if any, will be mitigated.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, motivated by a request from the Alabama State Port Authority, has expended several years and millions of dollars studying those points. In July, it presented an almost-final draft of its plan, calling for the channel to be deepened generally from 45 feet to 50 feet, along with widening of some sections, at a projected cost of $388 million.
This was followed by a public comment period, in case anybody had anything to say about it. Some advocates of Dauphin Island maintain that the ship channel already starves the fragile barrier island of a natural westward flow of replenishing sand. Enlarging it will only make that problem worse, they say, unless the Corps commits to beneficial deployment of its dredge spoil, the silt and sand that it takes up from the bay bottom.
The Corps study asserts that making the biggest manmade feature of the bay even bigger basically won't have any ecological impact. Other than temporary effects during the work, says an executive summary, the project will cause "no substantial impacts in aquatic resources."
It's all moot to Atkins. To him the project is just the final insult, following other catastrophes such as the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, not to mention what he sees as misguided regulatory efforts cooked up by "post-hole diggers" – Ph.Ds -- impotent environmentalists and ineffective conservationists.
"Our whole area is just being destroyed," he says. "That's it in a nutshell."
Atkins is a man of many theories, in fact. One is that the Corps has choked off "mother reefs" of wild oysters in the upper bay with what it calls open-water dispersal. That's spreading the spoil from channel maintenance in open water. He says this has buried fertile expanses of the bay floor and had a cascading effect, cutting off the flow of oyster spawn from the upper bay to reefs in the lower bay.
He believes that some seafood species, such as shrimp and crabs, still are struggling in the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon and the terrible oil spill. (Speaking of which, he's willing to bet you it was done on purpose.)
He thinks that dredging changes the pH factor of the bay, making it more acidic. He agrees that the creation of Gaillard Island at the end of the '70s was a great success as far as saving endangered pelicans, but he maintains that the pelicans' voracious appetite takes its toll and that their tons of droppings, washed off the island in heavy rains, are just as big a source of contamination as overflowing sewers in Mobile, Prichard and the Eastern Shore.
"A pelican, he eats a pound of fish a day," Atkins says.
Normal journalistic procedure would call for sober analysis of, and the solicitation of expert opinion on, such theories. This writer hardly knows where to start. The Corps of Engineers justifies its actions with seemingly rigorous studies and surveys, like the 328-page main report (plus hundreds more in supporting documents) on the channel enlargement. It has repeatedly stated that its methods, such as open-water dispersal, are sound. And for what it's worth, an inquiry to the Mobile County Health Department found no institutional memory of water-quality warnings prompted by pelican poop.
To delve into the scientific details of each of Atkins’ theories would be to miss the forest for the trees. Atkins was a boy on the bay before he became a man hawking the catch to all comers. These are his attempts to explain the decline he's seen with his own two eyes.
The old man and the seafood
As the nation ramped up for World War II, opportunities in the shipyards of Mobile drew Atkins' forebears south from Chattanooga. Somewhere at the tail end of the Depression, Atkins' father and uncle went out in a skiff the dead of winter and cast their nets. They didn't really know what they were doing, Atkins says, but they came upon an unsuspected trove of speckled trout. Over the course of 36 hours they hauled in 5,000 pounds of fish, worth $750 -- more than the price of a new truck, Atkins says. That turned their heads from shipbuilding to seafood.
Another businessman had opened Southern Fish & Oyster in 1934 on a piece of waterfront where an oyster cannery had operated. In 1952, the Atkins family bought it.
"I came to work at 13 up here," says Atkins, now 75. "I call it the seafood bar mitzvah. If yo' daddy's in the seafood business, at 13 your ass is going to get on the boat or you're going to get in the shop."
And so for six decades, he's been part of an industry that has provided a hard-earned living for many. Take gill-netters, for example: "If they work hard and go after it, and it's a lot of physical work, it's hard, but you can make $100,000 or $150,000 a year," he says. "But you've got to put a lot of money back into it, equipment, boats, nets, all the stuff you have to do."
That's all fading away. Whether through new laws (such as a clampdown on gill-netting a few years back) or through decreasing harvests, there are fewer jobs out there -- and for Atkins, fewer suppliers. He spends his weekdays making calls and roaming from Pascagoula to Milton, Florida, buying whatever doesn't come to his dock.
And that dock is quieter these days. So is the cash register. On a recent Saturday afternoon, Atkins spent an hour and a half talking to a reporter, in the booth overlooking what might be called the showroom, a wood-timbered, cement-floored space smelling of ice and fish and bleach.
True, the Crimson Tide was playing and it was a little late in the afternoon to be pulling together ingredients for a shrimp boil or a fish fry. But in that 90-minute span, not a single customer appeared. The phone didn't ring until about 10 minutes before closing time, when a few callers wanted to know whether they still had time to get there.
"I used to sell 5,000 pounds of shrimp on a Saturday," he says. "If I sell 100 now, it's a good day."
Cheap imported shrimp drove down the prices he could charge, which drove down the profit margins for his suppliers. That increased their motivation to sell directly to consumers, which led customers to expect still lower prices.
With things so quiet, Atkins has time for a long story about why cod are called cod. He spins a yarn about a circle of trade that developed in America's early days. In return for shipments of molasses and rum from the Caribbean, East Coast ports sent vast quantities of salt fish to England, in barrels marked "Cash On Delivery." From C.O.D. fish came codfish.
If you want to be all boring and look into the etymology of it, there's evidence that the term codfish had been around for a couple of centuries by that point. But it's entertaining and it brings Atkins to his master theory.
"Anything that comes out of that water can be sold for cash," Atkins says, sticking a thumb in the direction of Mobile Bay. "That's what the government hates about us to this day."
'I keep my stuff straight'
A wild-caught fish doesn't have a barcode, Atkins says. A box of frozen fish coming in from China does. To him, that's all there is to it: The government prefers the fish that can be tracked, taxed and regulated, to the one that might change hands without all that. Enlarging the ship channel is just one more way, as he sees it, to promote the former and marginalize the latter.
Ralph Atkins Jr., owner of Southern Fish & Oyster in Mobile, Ala. spends much of his time in his office, but more on the road hunting for fresh seafood for his customers. (Joe Songer | jsonger@al.com). al.comal.com
Atkins reckons he may be one of the last of a dying breed. And he thinks regulators aren’t content to wait for his retirement. He describes an incident in which someone called him with a too-good-to-be-true deal on some snapper, as his workers simultaneously noticed a drone hovering around overhead.
Snapper is subject to particularly strong regulations about its sourcing and labeling. People go to jail sometimes, over deals that were too good to be true. He rejected the offer. The drone buzzed off.
"You better believe I keep my stuff straight," he says. "I've been tried to be set up 6-7 times."
"I can get in more trouble over a snapper than I could running cocaine," he says. "And there's millions of 'em out there."
He reckons -- in a statement sure to raise any marine biologist's blood pressure -- that there are enough redfish in coastal waters to pay off the national debt, if somebody just went out there and hauled them in.
Affluent voters have driven regulations of snapper and speckled trout that make them more of a hassle to handle commercially, he says. Those fish belong to the "plantation owners" now, is his take.
On the health of the bay, it's hard to get any optimism out of him.
"Production on crabs are down to about 10 percent of what they used to be," he says. As for shrimp, he says, they’re “little bitty tiny shrimp.“ He says, “There's no food out there for them."
Flounder are way down, but maybe showing signs of a rebound. He expects regulations are coming. Mullet are out there, he says, but there's no market. And the oysters, he says, are pretty much gone.
The decline and crash of Mobile Bay's oyster ecosystem is a long story involving decades of short-sighted and self-destructive practices. But Atkins isn't wrong about where things stand. Other observers bear it out.
Chris Nelson is the vice president of Bon Secour Fisheries and a member of the Alabama Seafood Marketing Commission. His family has been in the business since his great-grandfather started harvesting oysters in Bon Secour Bay, a big pocket where Mobile Bay bulges southeast toward Gulf Shores. What's been passed down to him over the generations is the sense that it isn't one big thing -- like a ship channel enlargement -- that has damaged Mobile Bay's oyster ecology. It's a long accumulation of developments that have altered the exchange of river and gulf water, changing the Bay's complex balance of salt and oxygen.
Nelson says his grandfather told his father that the bay changed from being a very good place for oysters in the 1950s to one that wasn't so good for oysters by the '60s. In the mid to late '60s, the family business basically stopped relying on the Mobile Bay harvest.
"We don't have a viable oyster reef complex out in the bay," he says. Wild oysters hitting the market now mostly come from Louisiana waters, Nelson says. He doesn't like to think about where we'll be if a hurricane hammers those reefs.
"The oyster harvest is down to a negligible level," says Scott Bannon, director of the Marine Resources Division of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. "It is dismal."
Bannon says the state isn't giving up on oysters. Next year, he says, there'll be an experiment to see if raised oyster beds can help spat survive by getting them out of low oxygen zones on the bottom.
"A healthy waterway has to have oysters," he says.
Bannon reiterated those points at a Nov. 7 meeting with oystermen in Coden. But the real purpose of that meeting was to break some bad news: Exploratory dives showed so few wild oysters in Alabama waters that the state wasn’t going to open an oyster in the year ahead.
Bannon isn't quite as down on the rest of the harvest as Atkins. His most recent numbers for crab and shrimp show ups and downs but no crash. All the same, he respects Atkins' perspective.
"Ralph's been around a long time," Bannon says. "He's seen tremendous change over the course of his life."
Three years
Atkins is presented with a what-if: What if the channel enlargement was stopped, what if the sewer overflows were stopped and the pelican problem solved, what if absolutely everything magically went right for Mobile Bay? How long would it take for the Bay to rebound?
He offers that it takes a wild oyster three years to grow to harvest size. But that is a long way from saying that everything could be put right in three years.
Maybe this'll end Mad Max-style. He brings up economic turmoil in Venezuela, as proof it can happen, and in the same breath goes from that to a young Hispanic lady having some electoral success in New York as a democratic socialist. In his mind, the two phenomena are so close you couldn't fit an oyster knife between them.
Maybe it'll end with him taking some David-vs.-Goliath shot, some legal angle that changes the whole game. Or maybe he'll just decide the time has come to close the doors at Southern Fish & Oyster, take a nice chunk of change for his property and put it all behind him.
In the meantime, he'll keep making the rounds.
"I've been in it so long, I know people, and I get fish when there is no other fish … You just can't get it anymore. Snapper is so restricted, it's just unbelievable. But I know people, and I make my tracks, I cross t's and I dot i's."
But the “real ticket,” he says, is plain honesty. That’s what keeps customers coming back for 50 or 60 years.
Says Atkins, “You buy a snapper from me, you get snapper."