The Enchanting Tale of the Abalone Song

The sea was cold that morning—colder than usual, even for the coastal kelp forests off Carmel. A current rolled over the reef like a whisper, brushing the abalone’s shell with a thousand silken fingers. For decades, it had clung to the rock, unmoving but deeply alive. It knew the rhythms of the tide, the pulse of moonlight through kelp blades, the hush of passing fish.

And then—A shadow. Large. Two-limbed. Clumsy in the water. It came with sharp metal and careful fingers.

The abalone tensed—not that it could flee, but instinct was deep in its muscle. For a moment, it resisted. For a moment, the world held still.

Then the knife slipped under its foot and popped it loose with a sickening finality. Out of the water. Into the air.

Sky. Noise. Sun.

The abalone could feel itself drying, gasping through skin that rarely knew the wind. Around it were others—freshly pried, still wet with the grief of separation from reef and sea. A burlap sack closed above them like a cave, and the world went dark.

It was 1907. The beach near Carmel-by-the-Sea was bathed in morning fog, thick as oyster liquor and just as salty. A campfire crackled on the sand where poets, painters, and bohemians stirred from tents and driftwood shelters. Among them was George, robed in a blanket and wild with hair, already working a frying pan with theatrical flair.

“Coffee first, then abalone!” he shouted, shaking a pan as seagulls cried overhead.

The others nodded, bleary-eyed but smiling. They were used to George’s antics—used to mornings like this, wrapped in the salt-and-musk perfume of Pacific air, their souls half-awake but their hearts all in.

From a cooler, the abalone were unveiled—flesh gleaming like moonstone, cool to the touch. One by one, the cooks peeled and cleaned them with practiced hands. Then came the pounding.

Whack. Whack. Whack.

The mallets rose and fell like a tribal rhythm, flattening muscle to tenderness. But there was something deeper in the sound—a cadence, a pulse, a beat waiting for words.

George, already grinning mischief, began to hum.

“Oh some think that the Lord is fat,
And some think he is bony…”

The others looked up. A few snorted. One of the painters shouted, “What in God’s name is that?”

George grinned wider.

“But as for me, I think that he
Is like an abalone!”

They howled. Someone banged a skillet in time. Another chimed in with a verse about priests, another about the Pope. Soon, the song was building like a wave—absurd, joyous, irreverent.

“Oh mission point’s a friendly joint,
Where every crab’s a crony,
And true and kind you’ll never find,
The clinging abalone.”

The pounding became percussion.

The surf became harmony.

The abalone, now sliced and searing on cast-iron, felt its being unravel into steam and spice. Its death, at least, had become part of something—a ritual, a song, a story passed around a fire in the fog.

The men and women feasted with greasy fingers and mouths full of verse.

One woman sang a quieter stanza, after finding an empty shell on the beach:

“Though once you clung to ocean’s stone,
Now here you lie, not flesh alone—
Your memory rides the roaring sea,
A song in tides, eternally.”

Decades later, the song would echo in books and fairs, sung by folk singers and misfits, scholars and surfers. But that morning, it was born in the rhythm of laughter and loss—between mallet strikes and salt-stung hands.

And beneath it all, the ocean waited, indifferent and ancient. Another tide would come. Another abalone would rise.

But this one?

This one became song.

Watch the video:

Science of abalone:

California Abalones, Family Haliotidae by Keith Cox (definitive but dated overview of abalone)
Red Abalone Fishery Peer Review, 2018 (review of red abalone management strategies prior to fishery closure)

Brian N. Tissot