The Bluff Oyster Festival

Last weekend, we drove about 250-km south-west to Bluff, on the southernmost tip of the south island. Every year around this time, Bluff holds its annual oyster festival. We drove for about three hours in steady rain. It was like driving through a white tunnel, under a gray blanket. South. Farther south. To the end. The next stop, as this Google Earth image shows, is Antarctica. Bluff is marked with a little gray box in this image. In this hemisphere, only Tierra del Fuego is closer to the south pole.

Every autumn and winter the fishing fleets head out from Bluff to dredge oysters from the impossibly deep and cold sea floor of the Foveaux Strait. The oysters: they grow slowly down there, and come up looking like sharp-edged, barnacle-encrusted little rocks. Something about the conditions makes them taste very good, and the meat is hard and flavorful. One of these guys told me that they'd shucked 500,000 oysters in three hours. They were selling them for $2 each, so they'd managed to shift a million dollars of oysters in a morning.



In a crowded waterproof marquee, there's an oyster shucking contest, with several different categories: Men, women, blindfolded, relay, etc. There are trophies. It's sponsored by The Southland Times.

Bluff is one of the coldest, most windswept, remote, desolate, depressing outposts of humanity in the southern hemisphere. It's the saddest-looking place I've ever been. The people here -- Bluffies -- haven't managed to shape or tame the environment at all. It's shaped them instead. It's brutal: the gray sea quickly disappears in a sheet of fog; dirty little fishing boats tethered to rotten jetties; a cluster of dirty, one-floor buildings crowded around the harbor; the trees bent toward the buildings by the wind; the hills on the other side of town also lost in fog; wet wind; rain; fat teenagers with wild hair roaming the streets; old frayed rope; empty shipping containers; oyster shells by the side of the road.

Inside an 18-wheeler, a band is playing 1950s standards: Three Steps to Heaven; La Bamba; Twist and Shout. And in the background, just more fog. Whiteout. But, the Bluffies are all dancing in the stinging rain, holding their beers aloft, eating their oysters, clutching each other, laughing, drunk, celebrating. Right there, at the end of things, in the last town in New Zealand before Antarctica. In this challenging place I'm sure there's a lesson to learn from the Bluffies.

It's either:

A. Don't live in Bluff; or,
B. Celebrate, wherever you are.

Right now, I'm going with A. (ck)