And then, inevitably, we start looking at real estate. Not because we’re planning to pull up stakes, fold our tent, close up shop, and leave Cape Cod. At least not today. It’s just that we can imagine a future somewhere else.

A couple weeks back, we spent a night and a day on Long Island’s North Fork, on our way home from Kevin’s family’s annual Christmas party. We’d been to the North Fork before; we have friends in Jamesport. In our hazy distant New York past, we’d visited a winery or two, and Kevin played the worst round of golf of his life at Island’s End, in Greenport. (He had a life-threatening case of the shanks.)

This visit, we had a leisurely breakfast at the Greenporter, with little pastries and the Sunday New York Times, and then went off to see what was to be seen. On the recommendation of the waitress, we stopped at a vineyard called The Old Field, in Southold.

We thought it would be the first of several stops, but it was not to be. Instead, we ended up talking to the owner, Chris Baiz, and his daughter, Perry Weiss, about winemaking, deer hunting, and oyster farming until we had to leave to catch the ferry. Other patrons came to the tasting room, tasted, and left again, and we were still there, tasting and talking.  

We were utterly charmed by these people, by the place, by the possibilities (and by Old Field wine, which we bought a lot of). You can grow things on Long Island – good things like grapes and oysters. There’s water all around for fishing and for looking at. There are more deer than you can shake a stick at. It’s beautiful and it feels remote, but it’s only two hours to Manhattan.

When we came home, Kevin started looking online and came up with the perfect property for us. Waterfront, along a stretch that looked perfect for growing oysters. Acreage, so we could plant things. The house needed work, but we could live with that. If we’d had three million in spare cash lying around, we might have bought it.

We could see a future on the North Fork, and we’ve also looked at houses and envisioned futures in Arizona, south Florida, Montreal, the Hudson Valley, New Hampshire, Sonoma county, and, in a real flight of fancy, Provence. There are lots of places we could live.

But I’m ruling out anything on the equator. Granted, there are lots of places along the equator that I probably wouldn’t be so keen on even if they weren’t equatorial. The part of Congo that Joseph Conrad made famous, for example. I don’t want to live in anyplace that has “darkness” in its nickname, thank you very much. And then there are Colombia’s drug-lord stomping grounds. If I need a bodyguard, it’s out. All in all, the equator runs through some pretty dicey neighborhoods.

But that’s not my objection.

It’s the weather I object to. Not the warmth, or the sun, but the year-round sameness of it. If you live on the equator, every day is pretty much like every other. Oh sure, there are some rainy seasons and some windy spells, but nothing like an actual winter. Or a fall, or a spring. I want seasons.

I launched this site almost two years ago, in February. February is not an auspicious time to launch a site about harvesting your own food, and many of my early posts were about one of the few viable food-gathering activities available on Cape Cod in the dead of winter – shellfishing.

Winter clamming

I raked quahogs, I dug steamers, I gathered mussels. My friend Linda showed me the ropes, and often went with me in sub-freezing temperatures to break through the ice and harvest some clams.

Aside from some entry-level gardening, this was my very first experience procuring food from the world around me. The first time I raked through the sand on the sea floor and came up with an actual, genuine clam, I felt a kind of excitement that you don’t normally associate with shellfish. The very idea that you could go outside and get your own dinner!

Since then, that idea has kept us very busy. We’ve raised animals for eggs, for meat, and for honey. We’ve grown, and foraged, and fished, and hunted. We’ve procured food every which way from Sunday. But it had been a while since I’d been clamming.

Yesterday was beautiful. Bright sun, not too cold. Low tide was around noon, and I tossed my waders in the truck and headed down to Osterville. The parking lot was full of other people with the same idea, and I had to park a ways up the street.

Amy, from Natural Resources, checking my clams (they were all legal)

I suited up, plugged in my audiobook (A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell, whose talent should dissuade just about all of us from attempting fiction), and waded out. After getting a half-peck of oysters (the limit) in about ten minutes, I went down the beach for clams. After a few exploratory rakings came up empty, I found the quahogs.

I’m better at clamming than I used to be. I also have a better rake (a Ribb Rakes Snappin’ Turtle that Kevin gave me for my birthday two years ago). But the feeling of raking food up from out of the sand is still the same.

When I did it every week, for weeks on end, that first winter, it inevitably lost some of its attraction. And that first winter, we ate a lot of clams.

This year, though, I haven’t done much clamming. I did some bullraking, to clear the clams off our oyster grant, but summer and fall kept me so busy that I don’t think I’ve been out with my peck basket and Snappin’ Turtle since about April.

Seasonality gives everything a chance, once a year, to be new again. It’s a joy that Colombian drug lords will never know.

No related posts. Yet.

It all started when my friend Chef John, uncharacteristically, made a mistake.

John’s web site, Food Wishes, is a collection of extremely good recipes. They’re straightforward and easy to follow, familiar enough to be craveable, but with an interesting spin or variation. His videos are clear and helpful and he’s smart and funny. He’s classically trained, but he never lords it over you; he just helps you master whatever technique it is that he’s using. His food is really, really good.

The best thing about Food Wishes, though, is that it makes you want to cook. I’m a big fan.

So I was surprised when, back in January, Chef John made a mistake.

He posted a clam chowder recipe, and it looked wonderful. Creamy but not viscous, with a combination of fresh and canned clams. And no cornstarch! Cornstarch is my particular chowder peeve. (I also have a chowder recipe, with a different approach – I puree onions and potato to make the base.)

No shells!

The things is, though, that John left the littlenecks in the shells. And that’s just wrong. You don’t want shells in your soup. I don’t even like them in things like Bouillabaisse, which are more stewy than soupy. It’s the cook’s job to take the clams out of the shells, thank you very much. I’m nobody’s idea of fastidious, but picking hot shellfish out of hot, soup-covered shells is simply not my idea of a dinner-table activity.

I registered my disapproval in his comments section, and he promised to give the issue a full airing at a later date.

Well, that later date has come, and I need to know what you think. Shells in soup, or no shells in soup? If enough of us weigh in, we might be able to convince John.

You might also enjoy:

1. Bluefish, fluke, quahogs, sea clams, and oysters Smoked bluefish for breakfast, pan-fried fluke for lunch, and tri-bivalve...
2. Clam chowder Kevin had a hankering for chowder, so I harvested a...
3. Clams and oysters in chowder I had oysters and clams in the freezer, and I...

We’d been doing a lot of clamming, and we’d lost tines on three rakes – one of our recreational rakes, our bull rake, and our friend Les’s bull rake, which he’d lent to us.

My rake, with all its tines

Time to make a trip to Ribb Rakes, which makes (and repairs) high-quality clam rakes.

I think you can tell a lot about a place by what sorts of businesses don’t have signs. When we lived in New York, it was the kind of after-hours clubs that served absinthe to supermodels. And there was this one restaurant in the Village, which I thought was pretty hip but, judging by the fact that I’ve been there, probably isn’t.

On Cape Cod, though, it’s the clam-rake repair shop that doesn’t have a sign. Only the cognoscenti get to rake with all their tines.

The Ribb Rakes web site has no address. The shop is on a little residential street, and there’s no indication that welding is going on, and clam rakes are being fabricated.

I don’t remember how I found out where it was (you can call, but they don’t always answer the phone). My first visit there was over a year ago, when I wrote an article on clamming for Edible Cape Cod. In it, I sang the praises of the rake Kevin had given me for by birthday – the Ribb “Snappin’ Turtle” model, a long-tined, mean-looking version that, in the article, I said looked like Freddy Krueger’s clam rake.

I hadn’t been there since, but I got us there with only one wrong turn.

We took the rakes out of the back of the truck, and the welder came out of the shop to see what we needed.

If your mental image of a welder is a big old burly guy in one of those Darth Vader helmets, you need to pay a visit to Ribb Rakes (I might even tell you where it is). The welder there is named Greta, and she’s young, and slim, and female. And although I’m no judge of a weld, people who are say she’s very good at what she does.

She does wear the Darth Vader helmet.

It was Greta who came out and said hello when we pulled into the yard. Kevin introduced himself, told her he was a newly minted oyster farmer cleaning clams off his grant, and then introduced me.

“You look familiar,” Greta said.

“I visited a while back because I did a clamming story for Edible Cape Cod,” I said, dubious that she’d remember something so far in the hazy distant past. I figured she saw me at Stop & Shop.

But I was wrong.

“That’s it.” she said. I remember you. You like the Snappin’ Turtle. Freddy Krueger’s clam rake.”

Now, a sure-fire way to make me your friend for life is to remember one of my jokes, especially if it’s over a year old.

“I can’t believe you remember that,” I told her.

“Usually, people take clam rakes much too seriously,” she said. “So I remember that.”

I like Greta. And she repaired all our rakes, overnight.

So, not only do I know where Ribb Rakes is, I have an in with the welder. From there, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to absinthe with supermodels.

You might also enjoy:

1. Happy birthday to me My birthday was a couple weeks back. Kevin and I...
2. The new fitness craze! Today I had an epiphany. Just as yoga’s getting old,...
3. The equipment conundrum For my birthday, Kevin gave me a new fishing rod....

And the finding of them isn’t the only difficulty with steamers. Once you encounter a bona fide steamer hole, you still have to get the steamer out without breaking its shell. This isn’t easy. The rakes made for steamer digging are short handled, with tines at a right angle to the handle. You kneel on the beach, dig out the sand in front of the suspect hole, take a layer of sand off right above the suspected clam (being careful not to go too deep), and then use your hands to try and locate the steamer. Once you’ve done that, you still have to pry the thing out of the wet sand, a hospitable home he has no inclination to leave.

Digging up a steamer clam from Tamar Haspel on Vimeo.

I have only a tenuous grasp of the physical laws that account for the sucking vacuum behind a clam you’re trying to pull out of wet sand, but I have vast experience with the sucking vacuum itself. Electrolux should be so lucky.

All this by way of saying we had good reason to marvel at the two-peck haul of the guys at Bay Street.

Naturally, we struck up a conversation, hoping to wheedle their secrets out of them. One of their secrets, though, was lying in plain sight in the bed of their pick-up. It looked a lot like a toilet plunger.

“Hey,” I said, with the grace and subtlety that mark all my encounters with strangers, “What’s with the toilet plunger?”

This was one secret they were perfectly willing to share. They described how, when you get to a fertile steamer ground, you use the plunger to dig a kind of crater in the seabed (you use it under water), and the clams just drift up with with sand you displace. You scoop them up with a net, and Bob’s your uncle.

And just where was their particular fertile steamer ground? That, they weren’t telling. I understood.

Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to try the plunge method of clamming. It turns out that purveyors of shellfishing equipment actually sell something called a “clam plunger,” which looks suspiciously like a toilet plunger except that it has a longer stick and a net attached to the non-plunging end. Overall, it looked like the kind of thing we could improvise.

We have a stick. We have a net. And, of course, we have a toilet plunger.

Anyone who either knows me personally or follows this space understands that I am loath to buy anything I can cobble together out of stuff that’s lying around. The clam plunger was just begging to be cobbled. We had all the parts, and the duct tape to cobble them, but even I draw the line somewhere. Call me doctrinaire, but I think anything that’s used in the toilet should not be used in food procurement.

We bought a brand new toilet plunger, and headed out to our very own fertile steamer ground with it, stick, and net. We also brought our conventional gear, just in case.

We had discovered our steamer ground accidentally. We’d gone out for quahogs, but we kept spearing the soft-shell clams with our wicked, long-tined quahog rakes. Exactly where was that, you may ask? I’m not telling, and I know you’ll understand.

We got to our super-secret steamer spot, and Kevin waded out ankle-deep. We found an area that looked to have some steamer holes, and he started plunging. After two or three plunges, he came up empty. No clams, of course, but also no plunger. It had come off the aluminum pole and lodged itself in the sand. The threading on the end of the pole apparently wasn’t a perfect match with the threading on the inside collar of the plunger.

The same physical laws that create the sucking vacuum behind a clam apply to plungers, and it took a good deal of effort to dislodge it. Once we did, we put it back on the stick it came with, and tried again.

It works as advertised, more or less. The plunging creates a crater, and much of the sand and silt you dislodge floats away on the current. A great deal of it, though, seems to settle back in the hole, which we couldn’t make deep enough to reach the clams, which are usually about six to eight inches below the surface.

Whether the hole depth was the problem, or the clamlessness of the spot, we don’t know. We do know that we didn’t plunge up a single clam. We ditched the plunger and went back to the rakes.

Dinner, and then some

None of last year’s steamering excursions had been entirely satisfactory. The clams had been few and far between, and what there had been tended to be below legal size (two inches long). Although we’d never been completely skunked, the ratio of effort invested to clams harvested always seemed a bit high. This, our new fertile clamming ground, made for a much better experience — once we gave up on plunging. Most of the holes that looked like steamer holes proved to be just that, and Kevin and I both got much better at finding them and dislodging them without breaking their shells. Although we had a few casualties and a few shorts, we went home with five dozen steamers.

We had them for lunch, steamed and dipped in butter, accompanied by cole slaw and beer. 

It wasn’t only the clams, though, that made it such a fine morning. There were signs that winter was finally on the wane — fish were jumping, trees were budding. It was warm enough that I didn’t need a hat. The sun was out. It was a joy to be on the beach, clamming with my husband, looking forward to spring.

You might also enjoy:

1. Steamers Neither Kevin nor I is a mad steamer enthusiast.  We...
2. Littlenecks! We’ve found many excellent uses for large clams, but there’s...
3. Sea salt was the best I could do There were clams in the fridge. There was also clam...

Katie's first harvest

Kevin and I went clamming this morning, accompanied by our friend Katie, who is visiting from New York. It was a very satisfying experience.

Until today, I thought I was the only person on the planet who gets a thrill out of raking clams up out of the seabed, but now I know there’s at least one other. Perhaps this means that Katie and I have a low thrill threshold, or that we don’t really know what a thrill is, or maybe that we’re just inordinately fond of shellfish, but it was a joy to take someone who took so much pleasure in the activity out into the bay with us.

Katie, who is as die-hard an urbanite as I was, nevertheless appreciates what we’re trying to do here. She’s as ready to fish and lobster as she was to clam, and she’s even warming up to the chickens. She understands the pleasures of a shack in the woods – the pond, the privacy, the hammock.

But we all have to draw the line somewhere.

Logistics required us to take both our vehicles to Cotuit Bay, and Katie rode home with Kevin in the truck, with me following in the car. When we were about half a mile from home, Kevin gestured wildly out the window and pulled over to the side of the road. I followed suit, wondering what was wrong.

As I got out of the car, I heard Katie saying, a bit anxiously, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” She told me afterward she thought it must be either a broken axle or a dying animal.

A black-staining polypore, without a doubt

Kevin got out and ran across the road. “Did you see it?” he called back to me.

See what?

Across the road was a giant mushroom cluster. Kevin picked it up. “I think it’s a hen-of-the-wood!”

A hen-of-the-wood! I couldn’t believe he had spotted it from a moving vehicle.

When I got a close look at it, I thought it probably wasn’t a hen-of-the-wood, but it had a similar structure and it smelled very good. I was cautiously optimistic.

Katie was overtly pessimistic. “That’s poison. I’m not eating that,” she said. “Where’s the dying animal?”

We took it home and looked it up. Figures that, just days after I write about my mushroom identification problems, I find one that looks exactly like the pictures in the books. This was clearly a black-staining polypore and absolutely edible. We’ll eat it tomorrow, after Katie goes home.

Mycologist wannabe

You might also enjoy:

1. While I was out Yesterday I went to Boston to see my friend Katie,...
2. Oyster farming: a thrill a minute Yesterday our 80,000 oysters went back in the water. Just...
3. Chin up It must have been five or six years ago that...

Clammers, though, have a different use for them. When you wade out with your rake, you need to bring a basket to contain your catch. As soon as you go beyond about ankle-deep, that basket needs to float. There are rings made for the purpose, but noodles are cheaper. You simply cut a length equal to the circumference of the top of your basket, and tie it on.

Doesn't float

That’s what we did, and went out for a trial clamming. Voila! Flotation. Well, for a while.

We miscalculated the noodle-to-clam ratio. One noodle will support about three-quarters of a peck of clams. Then, just when you think everything’s going swimmingly, you drop a clam into your basket and the whole thing sinks to the bottom.

Since we didn’t have another noodle, and stores don’t stock them in the dead of winter, we got very good at dropping our clams into the sunken basket so that a good 80% of them went in. The other 20% we had to re-clam. Clamming is hard enough the first time around. Scrounging around the sea floor for clams you’ve already caught is pretty demoralizing.

Floats!

My friend Linda, an experienced and enthusiastic clammer, understands. For my birthday (albeit belatedly), she got me a noodle, all cut up and ready to attach to my basket. To fully appreciate the value of this gift, you need to understand that, in order to get it, she had to deck the local high school swim coach, who wanted to buy out the entire stock.

Linda, her mother, and her little daughter Lily conspired to get me a gift that I needed, that I wanted, and that I was very glad to have. And, if that weren’t enough, they wrote me a poem:

Your new clam gear looks sweet from head to feet!
There’s only one problem left to defeat.
You’ve got new waders, a rake, and maybe a boat,
But that basket, when full, refuses to float!
We cut up some noodles and made you a gift.
Tie them on good so they don’t go adrift.
So, as late as we are, there’s one thing to say:
Have a happy, happy belated birthday!

Everyone should have such friends.

You might also enjoy:

1. Happy birthday to me My birthday was a couple weeks back. Kevin and I...
2. Extreme clamming Yesterday, a day when the temperature never got out of...
3. Littlenecks! We’ve found many excellent uses for large clams, but there’s...

Kevin out musseling

Mussels are the gateway shellfish. If you’re a little intimidated by clamming or oystering because of the expertise, special equipment, and fortitude involved, then musseling is for you. You just wait for low tide and pick the things off the rocks. Literally. Then, when you’re bolstered by your mussel success, you can move on to more challenging shelffish.

Naturally, I did this in the wrong order. I tried clamming, which is hardest, first. This resulted in an ignominious episode involving wandering around on a beach known to be clamless, on a day when clamming was forbidden, using a clam rake to dig where clams wouldn’t have been anyway. But perhaps I was lucky. If I’d done mussels first, I might never have made it to clams at all.

We were tipped off by a friend that the Cape Cod Canal was jam-packed with mussels, and we went there at low tide yesterday morning, not knowing what we’d find. We brought a wide variety of implements, from a garden trowel to a pitchfork, because we weren’t sure what we’d need to harvest the catch – assuming we could find the catch. When we got there, we left all the implements in the car as we made a reconnaissance run to see if there actually were mussels to be harvested.

The canal is bordered by large, sloping, walls of rocks, the lower parts of which are covered with seaweed and algae that can make them quite slippery. Climbing down turned out to be the hardest part of the outing, and we were amply rewarded for it. Mussels, mussels, everywhere. We had about eight pounds of them inside ten minutes. No implements were required; we picked up big clumps of them in our hands. It was as though the mussel truck had dumped them there, just for us.  (Here’s what we did with them.)

The haul

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent my entire adult life in cities, but I haven’t yet gotten over my astonishment at being able to go to the right place at the right time and pluck dinner out of the water, or the woods, or the earth. Yesterday, I was astonished all over again at the canal, at low tide.

You might also enjoy:

1. Mussels with garlic and Pernod* It was a beautiful day with a mid-afternoon low tide,...
2. Mussels reinvented as a pasta sauce I turned the leftovers from the mussels in coconut milk...
3. Mussels in coconut milk* I got my second batch of mussels from the canal...

Linda and me with our haul. That's me on the right, in Godzilla's waders.

Shellfish have many virtues. They’re tasty and versatile, low in calories and high in minerals. They’re good raw or cooked. They freeze well. There’s really only one problem with shellfish: shells. Since oyster season opened last October, I figure Kevin and I have gone through almost 400 oysters. Every single bloody one of them had to be shucked, and I’ve finally become a competent oyster shucker. Clams, though, are another story. They just won’t give it up for me. I know I’m supposed to find their weak point, skillfully insinuate the blade of my clam knife between the shells, and then, with a deft twist, pry them open, but I’m afraid deftness has never been my long suit.

My friend Linda, though, is as deft as the day is long, and she promised to help me master clam shucking.

First, though, we needed clams. The last time we’d gone clamming, we tried Barnstable Harbor, which seems home to only large-size clams, with nary a littleneck. (How does that happen? Every clam is a small clam before it’s a large clam.  Maybe the harbor is like the gated community my in-laws live in, where residents have to be 55 and children aren’t allowed.) This time, we decided on Cotuit Bay, on the ocean side of the Cape. We first went to an area Kevin and I had successfully mined for littlenecks in the past. It was frozen over, so we headed a little north to a spot I’d never been to.

The presence of other clammers boded well, and we waded in. Three seconds later, Linda had a basket full of clams and I had nothing. Or that’s what it seemed like. But I’m used to being out-clammed by Linda, and I take it in stride. In a little under an hour, we both had a peck’s worth of clams of varying sizes, with a good portion of littlenecks.

That evening, Linda and her husband, Dan, had a few friends over to watch the Super Bowl, and I brought about two dozen of my smallest clams for a pre-game raw bar. Assuming, that is, that I could get them open.

Linda took the bowl from me and said in a low voice, “We’ll have these open in no time.”

“Why are you whispering?” I asked, automatically matching my tone to hers.

“Because you have to sneak up on them,” she told me.

I understand that, if you intend to eat them, many animals have to be snuck up on. Deer. Wild turkeys. Rabbits. But clams?  I’d always thought of them as imperturbable.

“If you scare them, they close tighter,” she explained. Aha! Whence the expression “clam up.”

This was beginning to make sense to me. My previous attempts at clam shucking had involved some pretty knocked-around clams.

I carefully set the bowl of littlenecks on the counter. Linda gently took one out, and placed it, long edge down, on the cutting board. The more curved edge of the clam, where the delineation between upper and lower shells is most obvious, faced up. She placed the clam knife blade between the shells and pushed down. The thing opened, just like that. The knife sliced through the clam, leaving half attached to the upper shell, and half attached to the lower. She cut both halves free – deftly – and handed me the clam. It was spectacular, briny and sweet.

Long years of experience trying to imitate people who are good at things has taught me that part of being good at things is making them look much easier than they actually are. Sure, when Linda does it, she opens the clam. When I do it, I slice off a fingertip. I was not sanguine as I took up the clam knife.

I picked up a clam and put it, long edge down, on the cutting board. I put the blade between the shells and pressed down.

To my astonishment, the clam simply opened. Just like that.

We set to work, and we did indeed have the whole bowl shucked in no time, except for one stubborn hold-out. I couldn’t get the thing to crack, and I gave up and handed it to Linda.

“You do the shuckin’,” I said.  “I’ll do the jivin’.”

She, of course, got it open on her first try. As she was cutting it loose from its shell, she let out a cry of astonishment.

“Look,” she said, holding up a small purple bead, about a quarter-inch in diameter, “a pearl!”

The clam pearl

And so it was. A perfectly round pearl, light purple on one side and dark purple with an eye in the middle on the other. Clams, it seems, aren’t the only reward for clamming.

You might also enjoy:

1. Extreme clamming Yesterday, a day when the temperature never got out of...
2. Littlenecks! We’ve found many excellent uses for large clams, but there’s...
3. Happy birthday to me, Part Deux One of the critical pieces of clamming equipment is the...

“I’m in,” she said.

Linda is always in, and that is one of the things I like about her.

We’d been oystering together many times, but this was the first time we went clamming, and the two activities are very different. Okay, not very different – oystering and badminton are very different – but the skills involved are not the same. There really is no skill at all involved in oystering, at least in Barnstable Harbor. The oysters just sit on the bottom, close to shore, and sometimes even exposed at low tide. You pick them up, measure them to make sure they’re over three inches and therefore legal for taking, and put them in your basket. When you have half a peck, the weekly limit per shellfish license, you go home. The only skill is packing the basket to fit the maximum number of oysters.

Clamming, though, can be tricky. First, you have to find them. Clams are much less cooperative than oysters in their mode of living; they bury themselves in the sand and leave no telltale signs. Then, once you find them, you have to dig them out, which is often harder than it sounds. In Barnstable Harbor, it’s a royal pain. The sea bed is mucky, and it holds on to its clams for dear life.

We donned our waders and gloves, grabbed our rakes and baskets, and ventured out to see if we couldn’t get the harbor to surrender some its bounty.

We waded in up to our knees in the area where the clams were known to be and started raking. Almost immediately, Linda came up with a big fat quahog. I kept raking. She got another one, and then another. I had nothing. She lucked into a good spot, I figured, and kept raking. Then, finally, pay dirt!

You almost always know when you hit a clam. You feel the tines of the rake go over the shell, and then you get behind it and try to pry it loose. If it’s a big clam, buried deep, you can break a sweat doing this, even in subfreezing weather. I felt for the clam’s perimeter, and then dug behind it for all I was worth. Finally, it gave way, and I pulled it out and plunked it in the basket.

I looked over at Linda. “I got one!”

“Excellent,” she said.

And then I looked at her basket. It was half full. Half full! And all I had was one stinking clam. How could this be happening? She was standing right next to me, digging in virtually the same spot. And have I mentioned that she’s about half my size?

“Okay,” I said, “Why is it that you have half a basket and I only have one clam?”

Another thing I like about Linda is that she never makes you feel like a jerk.

“I’ve been clamming for a long time,” she said, “And I have a really good rake.”

She pointed out that my technique was too scattershot. I should stay in one place, dig pretty deep, and then expand my search by working the perimeter of the hole I’d already dug, rather than starting a new hole.

“You’re traveling too much,” she explained.

I followed her instructions, and did a little better, but she was still pulling up half a dozen clams for every one I unearthed. It was deeply frustrating.

Eventually, I managed to get about two-thirds of a peck. (A standard shellfishing basket holds one peck, which is ten quarts.) Linda had long since gotten her peck, and had spent the extra time trying to find smaller clams and throwing some of the largest ones back. She offered to help me, and I took a few clams from her, but I had a peculiar sense that filling my basket was my responsibility, and I was reluctant to let her do my work. Since letting her help me would have meant we got back to a warm car, and then to our warm houses, that much faster, this was pure selfishness on my part. Having a friend who never makes you feel like a jerk is particularly important if you insist on acting like a jerk.

We were out there for a good hour, and we went home cold and tired. But it was a good cold and tired.

You might also enjoy:

1. Happy birthday to me, Part Deux One of the critical pieces of clamming equipment is the...
2. Clams, a whelk, celery, beans, and other miscellania, all in black bean sauce It had been a while since I went clamming, and...
3. The heart of the deal The other day, I was forced to be a jerk....