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When you walk down Midden Way toward the Damariscotta River in Damariscotta, Maine, on a morning like this one (sunny, dry, high 70s), it’s easy to wonder why we don’t all grab up a Maine oyster lease and start planting the water with beautiful bivalves.

The cove is calm and inviting, the 26-foot aluminum skiff is wide open to the morning sun and a gentle breeze. We ease into the water among arcs of oyster-laden floating cages. What’s not to love about this line of work?

And then I see Dave Cheney, a former lobsterman and owner of the Johns River Oyster Co., start to haul his traps. Cheney, 46, is no slouch. He braces his legs against the low gunwale, and his broad shoulders hover out over the outside edge of a cage as he seizes it to wrestle it aboard. I could probably do that. Once or twice.

And in that moment, I also remember that these perfect summer days are fleeting. “Six months of the year, this is the perfect job,” Cheney says.

Despite the fact that long Maine winters make for hard work, Cheney runs his operation year-round. “Oysters don’t grow past Columbus Day,” he says. “When the water gets below 41 degrees, they stop pumping.” The bivalves then essentially go dormant for the winter, which creates a ridge in the shell, not unlike a tree ring, between seasons of growth.

At that point, he sinks his seed cages in the Damariscotta so they float below the ice. Then he moves any market-ready oysters to his lease in Johns River, which doesn’t ice over like the cove. It takes about 15 months for Cheney to grow a market-size oyster, but he likes to let the mature oysters soak in the Johns River to develop flavor.

“I just wanted a unique taste,” says Cheney. “The Johns River has a higher salinity and a different phytoplankton” than the Damariscotta, he explains.

The Damariscotta River is famous for its oyster production, both for the numbers it is capable of producing and the quality. According to Cheney, “75 percent of Maine’s oysters come out of this river,” a 13-mile stretch of water.

The river’s production has a long history far older than European settlers and their modern descendents. Midden Way, the dirt road we traveled to get to Cheney’s 3-acre lease, is named for the enormous Native American oyster shell deposits left in the river more than 2,000 years ago. The Whaleback Shell Midden, just around the bend from his Damariscotta lease, was once more than 30 feet deep, the result of centuries of compressed oyster shell.

Fresh water comes into Great Salt Bay at the head of the tidal river and flushes the narrows to create a perfect balance of salinity for bivalve production. We glance out over Glidden Point, a renowned local brand of oyster. Across the cove is a 5-acre lease run by Dodge Cove Marine Farm, which produces two brands of oysters. Downriver is a cluster of other oyster producers that feed the burgeoning demand for the halfshell market.

“I have a goal to have my own hatchery when I get older,” says Cheney, always thinking of the next step. After a morning on the water getting just a taste of his work, I have a new respect for oyster farmers. Like commercial fishermen, they work long days in all kinds of weather to keep their small business running. But it takes two years to see any kind of return on a significant investment. Eight years after starting his first set of seed in 2008, Cheney hasn’t lost the edge of fear you carry with you when your income depends on the whims of nature.

“If you’re not sleeping at night, you’re probably doing it right,” he says. “I’m going to succeed because I’m not going to give up.”

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Jessica Hathaway is the former editor in chief of National Fisherman.

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