the diggers of Hull

The Diggers of Hull

            The soft yellow dawn full moon hangs low over the steel blue Atlantic reflecting hints of rose from the encroaching sunrise. The tide is dead low, exposing the long stretch of dark smoky grey rock beach. Trails of upturned mud and rocks already speckle the shoreline. The diggers must have been here earlier than 5:30am, although that’s when they told me they would start yesterday when I inquisitively stopped jogging to see what a man was lugging from shore on a small green floating plastic boat; as a Miami girl, I call it a Northeastern boogey board. Behind the seawall was the Joe Malick Shellfish truck. The man, a digger, squat, strong backed with Italian brown eyes and matching jaw line, unloaded the 'NE boogey board'. He had two giant plastic red bags filled with clams; I later learned it's called a bushel. The other man, who I would be introduced to as Neil, handed the digger a wad of cash once the bushels were loaded in the truck headed to Newberry for treatment. The clams are considered mildly contaminated by the EPA these days.

            “See you in the morning,” Neil said to the man taking off his rubber gloves.

            “That you will! I want to learn to clam. I’ve been reading about it and-”

“This isn’t for you. It takes a strong back and weak mind,” Neil interrupted me. He began writing up a receipt from the passenger side door. After a minute I replied,

            “I’ve got neither, so I’ll be perfect.” I leaped across the 3 ft. break in the seawall where the stairs cut down to the beach and continued jogging along. I think he smiled and half chuckled.

                                                                        0()()0

            Man has been clamming since before recorded history. Long before nets, hooks, shovels, spears, rakes man has used his hands to dig. Paleolithic men used the shell’s sharp edges to make jewelry and tools for wood work and agriculture; the shell was attached to a stick, making the first known hoe used by the Native Americans for planting corn. Thousands of years later, man continues to harvest from the sea finding the same satisfaction and having the same appetite for a hearty dish of seafood. While the ways of clamming have only slightly changing over the centuries, man now uses rakes, metal pails and the floating boogey board, this elemental act of connecting to the sea remains the same: simple, hard work done with the same, yet ever fluctuating, low tide.

            “Ten years ago you used see 100 guys on this same beach,” Neil said without looking up from this rake that he stabbed through the rocky mud with two hands before using one to snatch up the steamers (clams) before they burrowed quickly back down. “Now look around, there are four of us. Laws have changed turning lots of guys away. Less money now. Less clams, too.”

            “Could be five if you’d give me a rake already.” I’d been pestering him to let me dig since I arrived just after dawn. “I’m a lot tougher than you think.”

            He finally paused from digging, but still not looking up, “Its too late in the season anyways. By the time you pay off the $200 permit you won’t make anything.”

            “Its not about the money. I just want to dig, so I can eat all the clams I want. It’s $20 bucks a plate at these restaurants!” The truth came out: I admitted to myself in this moment too, I really didn’t want to be a digger; he already knew it.

            “I don’t do it for the money either, although with three kids under 10 in private school it helps.” He threw another handful of clams into the bucket, “I want to break my dad’s record.”

            “How many bushels is that?”

            “Not bushels. Men. How many diggers I have working for me,” he stood up, the sweat beading down from beneath his faded, well broken in baseball cap, the hat of a professional. “I’ve had so many guys come and go over the years you wouldn’t believe it. The best, a burly guy, 6’3 from Maine came in the middle of January, ice everywhere! I felt so bad for him that I gave him a pair of boots he lined with plastic. Four weeks later, he was hauling in 8 bushels a tide making $400 a day. That’s a better story. Then you have my family member.  They came out saying how clamming has been their lifelong dream, blah, blah, blah... they lasted three days and dug up maybe 12 bucks worth,” he squinted as the salty sweat squirted like a steamer into his eyes and promptly went back to digging.

            I understood why he wasn’t making the minutest gesture to help me get started digging. I was one of hundreds he’d met with high hopes and probably little delivery. He was digging for a legacy and had no time to mess with amateurs, hobbyist, and assumably, a yuppie like me on vacation. Real diggers are like the terns diving for fish, they know exactly when and where to dive; their system is efficient. They, like real diggers, simply do it right, wasting no energy and time.

             If only these diggers knew I am planning on earning my Hullonian status and am staying through winter, they might give me a fair chance. I walked away mindfully over the small wet rocks looking out for the long squirts shooting up, a sign of a colony of clams according to the book I’ve been reading, The Compleat Clammer by Christopher Reaske.

           According to this little clam bible, Clam means “bond” in English, “close” or klammp in German and the verb “clamor” describes stopping or quieting. As an age-old expression, we call someone a clam if they can keep a secret or say someone made a clam if they goof up and as Neil says, ‘Happy as a clam at high tide’ we relate the clam’s mannerism to our own. 

Its open shell looks like a smile. 

            As I walked around the diggers still in ear distance I listen to their conversations about new taxes the city sited them with for, more bills they were having to pay, the headaches about their families, their own frustrations with themselves, the normal daily ups and downs of life. “I might as well own a cow with all the milk my kids drink!” one digger exclaimed in a conversation about trash collection.  I laughed to myself thinking of the bond clams represent, the human bond, something being replaced by text messages and ipads. I thought about what Neil said about digging so his kids didn’t have too, so they could grow up with the educations to enter our fast paced high tech society.  A world far away from the ebb and flows of tides and natural way of connecting to nature, a way of life no longer valued and seen as a less superior to the SEOs (search engine optimization) Google has paved a promising future for.

            As a teacher, I wonder what kind of education should we not klammp towards? In my humble opinion not one based wholly in technology, competition and route learning (memorization). Instead, earth based learning: teaching kids to use their hands and hearts, appreciate nature and co-create with it rather than against, to live in harmony with earth’s systems, a system we are apart of and no form of technology can set us apart from. We have already klammped closed part of our perspective to marine life ecosystems in the ways we harvest from the sea. The commercial fishing industry’s inevitable “bycatch”, unwanted, marine life such as turtles, sharks and fish is 1 ton to every 4 tons according to the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmosphere Association). So, for every 8000 pounds of  fish that makes it to the shelf, 2000 pounds of sea life is tossed back into the ocean dead. Along with bycatch, commercial nets are dragged along the ocean floor destroying reefs.

Getting back to clamming and children, there is a bond to nature and even our own children we are in danger of losing the more we disconnect from seemingly primitive ways of life for modern lifestyles devoid of physical activity and bonding with each other. Most of us are overwhelmed with the speed and busyness of life, we check to relax with TV or Facebook, virtual games and the average kid lives half his life on ipads or video game. There is a you tube video of a baby trying to figure out how to make a magazine work like an ipad, that says enough: behold generation touch screen.

If only we could eat those virtual clams.

            Clams are classified in the phylum of Mollusca and are known to be one of the 110,000 kinds mollusks identified by man; more like scientist as most of us know only the popular edibles: steamers (soft shell clams) and the hard shelled, oysters, mussels and and. For true North Easterns, there are quahogs also called round clam or hard shell clam, and the soft shell razor and jack knife clams. These mollusk tend to be where they were the year before, and the year before, and before, and before, they live in the same places, although the grasses and landscapes evolves. Mollusks stay the same, taste the same and continue to invite us to live off the land. 

          These age old clams like humans don’t change in the deepest essence: we live in community and have a need to feel connected, understood and loved. And also like the mollusks, we come in many varieties, making it seemingly to feel this connection. Some people are more like the hard-shelled oyster, others are mussels moving where ever what it is attached to goes or like a scallops they move freely through their life, and some of us are dramatic, feisty, quick and with a soft shell, like a steamer; I’m a steamer.

            As the golden morning rays cast their glow upon the diggers this morning, I'm softened as I think about the clamming profession viewed as menial and something one without education would do, the dwindling bounty of clams available today, the contamination of our oceans and the fading ways of bonding with one another and nature. The tides of life change and so do we when we wake up and realize the world we are creating and passing onto future generations. And without further contemplation, like a steamer, I was feisty to leave and quickly find my own rake for tomorrow’s low tide at 5:49am.