Dig clams? Hoe no!

‘You will come to appreciate the price of clams’

Footwear failure, fatigue confront novice diggers in quest for elusive mollusk

Tom Blanchard was the first to lose his boot to the mud.

There was a slurpy wet sucking sound followed by a brief groan. Tom’s foot came up out of the muck, but his footwear did not. He stood on one leg, desperately flailing his arms while his stockinged foot hung in the air like an ugly bird.

“The boot came off my foot,” he told me later, “before I knew anything was happening.”

That’s how the clam flats get you, friend. One of the ways, anyway.

You can’t say we weren’t warned. Before we went anywhere near the mucky expanse at Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park in Freeport, guide Michael Frey cautioned us that clams wouldn’t be just jumping into our buckets in delicious surrender. To get to the bivalve mollusks we were going to have to stomp and slop and squish our way through the grayish muck that would suck at our feet and try to bring us down.

“That muck wants your boots more than you do,” Frey said. “We’re all going to get muddy. It’s a muddy business.”

And a bit of a back-breaker, when you get right down to it. It’s not only that the clams won’t politely deposit themselves into our pails, they hide in scattered spots under all that muck, rarely gathering in convenient clusters.

To find a clam, you must first look for tiny air holes in the mud that might indicate their presence. Might. The only way to find out is to use your claw-like clam rake to dig.

“We’re going after the soft shells,” Frey told us. “They can be down pretty deep.”

The clam rakes are short, with handles just a foot or so long. To tear a hole in that stubborn mud, you have get down on your haunches or your knees, maintaining precarious balance while using your pulling muscles to dig. The fishy stench of the muck assaults you like a punch to the nose. The thigh muscles burn, the lower back aches.

“You will come to appreciate the price of clams,” Frey told us.

The human eye wants to seize upon anything bearing even a vague resemblance to a clam under all that mud, but that’s not how it works. The soft-shell creatures we’re after have to be at least two inches long, according the rules of shellfish harvesting in Maine.

While I’m digging, I hear a man named Joe Olimpio muttering behind me.

“Nope, too small. Nope, this is just a piece of shell. Nope . . . I don’t know WHAT this is.”

When he finally found a clam, it had a giant, ragged hole in the side of its shell, which rendered the mollusk useless. Where did that hole come from? Why, from the tip of a clam rake tine, of course. You have to attack the mud at an angle to avoid this, which, of course, only makes things more difficult.

You know what? I don’t think the seafood joints charge nearly enough for clams, now that I know what I know.

Footwear, footwear, footwear

Clamming is hard business. So, why are nearly a dozen of us out here stomping through the stinky muck in the pouring rain? Why, particularly when we are not getting paid for the work? Why, especially when the chances are slim that any of us will collect enough clams to make a meal out of?

Why, indeed.

Jim Fay recently moved to Maine from Vermont. He came with his family, his motivation of the “when in Rome” variety.

“I figured if we’re going to live in Maine,” Fay said, “we’ve got to learn to dig for clams.”

Tom Blanchard, he of the missing boot, came with his wife, Lisa. He did some lobstering back in the ’60s and ’70s, so he knows his way around a shellfish.

“It’s a matter of learning to do it right,” Tom said.

His wife Lisa? Well, she’s mostly hungry. The lady loves clams and, though she lives in Texas now, she is a Mainer through and through. Lisa is a little bit ashamed that this is her first time out on the flats.

“And I’m a 13th-generation Mainer. Can you believe that?” Lisa said. “I’m going to get out there and get my own supper.”

Clams and beer, that’s what Lisa was all about. But to get it herself, she was going to have to stomp her way across the flats, searching for air holes that were very hard to spot in the rain, and she was going to have to dig.

God bless Lisa’s appetite, I never once saw her taking a break or getting anywhere near close to quitting throughout the ordeal . . . ur, event.

“I find the hardest part is walking in this mud,” Lisa said. “I think having the right footwear is a big part of it.”

Ah, yes. The footwear. The professionals tend to use waders, which rise from their feet all the way up to their armpits. Our group, on the other hand, wore a little bit of everything, from flip-flops (“I don’t care if I lose them,” said the woman wearing them. “That will just give me an excuse to go buy more shoes.”) to sneakers, to Bog boots to basic work boots that lace up and prevent the mud from eating them.

“I went into my daughter’s closet,” said Lisa Blanchard. “She’s not going to be very happy when she notices that her Bog boots are gone.”

For Lisa, walking was the great difficulty. For others, it was the strain on the lower back. And for a few, it was the burning on the leg muscles.

Tom Blanchard summed up his complaint in one word: “Lungs.”

Facing the clam pee

Clamming IS vigorous exercise, and yet there are men and women up and down the coast who do this for a living. They catch enough of the quiet, elusive clams to put dinner in the mouths of local families and free-spending tourists who invade Maine each summer. The latest study on the value of the Maine shellfish industry found that the total economic impact of the shellfish industry is around $56 million, with $29.9 million going to Maine residents as employment income.

That includes a lot of clams. Which means a lot of sloshing through the mud, a lot of bending and a lot of digging. According to Frey, some of the professionals will work through two tides in a day, which means a lot of hours on the clam flats.

As you can by now surmise, it isn’t glamorous. The first clam I saw plucked from the mud belonged to Olimpio, who lives in New Hampshire but who volunteers at Wolfe’s Neck. The clam didn’t treat him nicely.

“It was peeing all over me,” Olimpio said.

“He’s not actually peeing,” Frey assured us. “He’s just getting rid of water.”

Which may or may not have comforted Olimpio. Within seconds, he was back in the mud, digging a hole quite close to the first one he’d dug.

“I don’t know about stomping all over the place,” he said. “I’d just find a spot and stick to it.”

That strategy went against everything we were told about air holes rising from the mud, but what could we say? By the time the day was over, nobody had collected more clams that Olimpio.

It turned out he was a ringer. Sort of.

“I do have a clamming license,” he said. “But every time I’ve gone out, the flats have been closed. Red tide or whatever. I’m really just a rookie. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

Olimpio managed to collect four or five clams, but that’s far short of a meal for an average person. Nobody on the flats that day gathered enough clams to fill the tummy, but collectively we did all right. By the time we walked off the flats, muddy, wet and sore, we had maybe a dozen clams among us.

We gave them to Lisa Blanchard, who had worked so hard for so little. She didn’t even have to share them with her husband, who doesn’t care for clams.

“That’s all right,” Tom said. “She likes them enough for the both of us.”

About the clam

Two kinds of clams are harvested in Maine: soft-shell and hard-shell. Both are harvested year round, with the peak season in the summer months.

Hard-shell clams are often called quahogs, cherry stones or little necks (depending on their size). They live closer to the surface of the ocean floor.

Soft-shell clams, aka steamers, have rather thin, brittle shells, so you have to be more gentle with them. They live in the mud, sand and gravel intertidal areas, and tend to bury themselves far deeper in the mud than hard-shell varieties.

Today the soft-shell harvest averages around 10 million pounds per year, with the value of soft-shell clams increasing over time, making soft-shell clams Maine’s third most valuable fishery.

Clams feed by drawing in water through a siphon. The food is filtered out of the water by the gills and swept into the mouth by a layer of mucus. The water is then expelled from the animal through an ex-current siphon. Soft-shell clams have longer siphons, allowing them to bury themselves deeper.

Since clams are filter feeders, the presence of clams and other bivalves in the water actually improves water quality.

The health and stability of Maine clam populations are threatened by pollution and poor water quality caused by agricultural and residential runoff, increased shore development and aging infrastructure. Additionally, clams are threatened by the invasive green crab, whose populations have exploded in recent years due to warming temperatures.

Source: maineclammers.org