"Clammer Hold The Rake And Has Fun Even Though It's Hard Work Sometimes..."

The Quahog is a delicious beast. It lurks just beneath the surface of the sandy bottom of an ocean cove. For some, lying in its murky mud, festooned with dark, black sand, washing the toxic waters from its soul and emerging from its sometimes icy keep, not willingly, but pulled up by the metal tines of a clamming rake pulled along by the clamming man who scratches the cove’s many nooks and crannies for treasures of the briny deep.

A winter thaw brought the clammer to the cove. Missing was the ice that held the cove in thrall during last winter’s freeze.

Missing also were the slabs of ice that rose and fell with the tide leaving leaning decks of ice cantilevered over the peat banks suspended like beachfront decks.

Some of these icy acrobats had reached their tipping points, lost their balance and tumbled from their perch on the peat onto the sand below. A mild mist enveloped the marsh that ringed the cove.

The clammer carried a long clammer’s rake and a basket to hold his catch. He wore a blue brimmed billed cap. A monogrammed message at the front of the cap read, “Sail Fast”. It was mirrored on the back with “Live Slow”. Hanging from the cap were several clear plastic holders, which contained present and past shellfish licenses.

He wore a black t-shirt, covered by an orange hoodie, split down the middle with a silver zipper. Seaweed colored waders, pulled only to his waist, ended with attached rubber boots. The suspenders hung down on his back. One trailed in the water behind him as he entered the water from the sandy beach uncovered by the receding tide.

He stopped several feet out in the water and decided this would be a good place to begin. As he entered the water, a few Canadian guess paddled away with guttural honking. A mooring float bobbed in the water beside him attached to a mushroom anchor. Its rusted shank several inches above the water heeled to port, the ring at the top of the shank, shackled to its eye, held the chain that dangled from the ring and submarined to the float’s rope line.

He began to scratch the sandy bottom with his rake. As he pulled the wooden handle towards him, the rake’s knifed-shaped fingers struck something solid. The mother load, he thinks, as the knife-shaped fingers of his clamming rake strike something solid.

The tines let out a scraping sound. He backs up the rake, moves it forward a few inches and digs the tines in deeper.

A veritable treasure trove, he muses. Or some granite, glacial refuse from some distant ice age.

He bends into the 6-foot hickory handle of the clammer’s rake. His rubber-booted feet, held firmly by the uliginous sand, lift and are released, reluctantly, from their snaggy grip.

The dreadnaught cleaves the cove's rippled surface. The final onslaught comes within close range of the elusive quarry. The clammer presses that sturdy pole against his shoulder, pulls back on the middle of the pole. Gets more leverage. Baby-steps, slowly, towards the prey, locked in the sand below and finally, with a pull and lift, the catch is caught and pulled into the basket attached to the rake’s metal tines.

The quarry is captured and brought to the surface along with some seaweed, black mud, an errant spider crab, and a blue-jeweled scallop, snapping to be free.

The clammer holds the basket just beneath the surface and rinses wet black, muddy sand back into the water. The spider crab makes his escape and plops into the water. He removes the scallop, silent now, and tosses it back into its salty home. It snaps its bivalves together like some clapping patron of the arts and scallops away, disappearing into the muddy water roiled by the released mud and the clamming fork as it scratched the cove’s bottom for the elusive Quahog.

What remains in the basket are eight hard-shelled clams. Delicious beasts, raw or cooked. Quahog, from the Narragansett “poquauhock”. Made them the coin of the realm. Linnaeus labeled them Mercenaria mercenaria, just wages; soldier’s of the sand; minions of the mud, just one among many of the clam cohorts.

Narragansett’s called the pierced pieces of shell Wampum. As good as money and twice as nice.

I could be a millionaire again, the clammer thought, if Wampum was still legal tender. He picked each Quahog out of the clamming basket and placed them in a round basket floated by a white doughnut-holed life-saving float. This galvanized metal basket was inserted into the doughnut hole and attached to the float with pink nylon string. The floating basket, half full of the briny beauties, was attached by a yellow piece of rope to the clammer’s waist with a bowline knot.

The clammer continued his quest. He was relieved that he could be clamming so late in the season. He was tired of his normal winter fare, mussels. Tonight he would feast on Linguini with quahogs and with a basketful, they might last the week if his Linguini held out.

If it didn’t he could always bicycle up the road to the Dollar Store and get another pound of the DaVinci Linguini for only sixty-nine cents.

The fog was getting thicker, obscuring the distant shore, the trees silhouetted in the mist. The basket soon was overflowing with clams and the clammer thought about heading for shore. One more, he thought, and threw the rake out in front of him. The basket splashed into the water tines down and sunk from view. He scratched the bottom. The rake hit something solid and refused to go farther.

A rock, he thought.

He tugged on the rake. It refused to budge. He got better leverage and pulled harder. The rake held fast. But whatever was holding it refused to give up the rakes tines. He pushed the rake back, but it was now caught and no amount of pulling and pushing had any effect.

He splashed up to where the rake was caught and reached down through the murky water and tried to release the rake, but it was really snagged on something and he could not budge it.

The clammer followed the rake to its tined end and felt something. The sleeves of his orange hoodie were now soaked up to his armpits.

Feels like a pipe, he thought. He would need two hands to dislodge the rake from the pipe. The water was cold in December. He dug around the edges of the pipe and soon had it free.

Must have been blown there by the hurricanes, he thought.

With one final tug he brought the pipe to the surface. It didn’t look like a pipe.

It was a candelabrum. He brushed away some of the muddy sand. It shone gold beneath the muck. Brass, he thought, as he looked for rust, but could find none. Too shiny for bronze.

The clammer turned and headed for shore. He approached a muddy part of the cove and his boots sunk into the muck almost to his knees. The candelabra was heavy. He steadied himself with the rake and pulled each boot out of the muck and was soon on firmer sand, which continued up to the shallow beach.

The beach was crowned by dead straw-yellow winter marsh grass and interspersed with overhanging dark-brown peat, full of hole digging Fiddler crabs, which scampered into their lairs as the clammer approached.

Thousands of silver and black mussels clustered at the edge of the beach, anchored the grass and peat, now completely out of the water at low tide, that most uneasy time for clams.

The clammer hefted the basket by its metal handle and put the clamming rake over his should along with the candelabra. He thought it might weigh 20 pounds at least and he struggled through the dead marsh grass, being careful not to step in any random holes that laced the marsh and were filled with the tide’s last liquid remnants.

Making his way across the marsh grass, he arrived at the back of a small cottage, covered by weathered cedar shakes, some of which were missing or cracked. The white paint framing the windows and doors was faded and in places peeling. The roof’s asphalt shingles were crowned with green moss, which seemed to have escaped from the large oak that cradles the cottage in its grip, its summer leaves mostly gone except for a few brown stragglers that refused Mothers Natures call.

An outhouse stood off to the right under a huge white pine and the smaller pitch pines which afforded some privacy for the privy.

The clammer dropped the basket and the candelabrum near the doorstep and entered the cottage. He soon returned with a bucket of cold water and a pink washcloth. He rinsed the remaining sand and muck from the candelabrum. He stood it up on the stoop.

He rinsed the clams, taking each one from the basket, rubbing off the remaining muck and dropping each cleaned Quahog into the bucket. When all the clams were rinsed, he emptied the water from the bucket, leaving the clams inside and took the bucket and the candelabrum into the back door of the cottage which led directly into a small kitchen with a maple table, three chairs, a yellow-white Kelvinator refrigerator, a cream colored gas stove left over from the 1930s, and a white enamel sink.

The sink had no faucets, but at its right-hand end, was an ancient cast iron pump. It was 17 inches tall and had the words “Nelson Bros Saginaw Mich” cast into its handle.

A silver pitcher. black with tarnish, sat besides the pump. The pitcher was filled with water for morning pump priming when no amount of working the handle up and down would bring the water up the pump and out the wide mouthed spout.

The clammer got a Shaw’s plastic bag and put the clams from the bucket in the bag. He took the bag and opened the refrigerator door. He made some space for the bag on the second metal shelf by moving last night leftovers to the bottom shelf and shoved the bag into the refrigerator, closing the door behind them.

He went out the back door again and picked up the candelabrum and brought it into the cottage and placed it on the kitchen table.

I guess I’ll take you to the second hand store and see what you’ll bring, he thought. I can use the money. But first I need to get out of these waders and this wet hoodie.

He went outside again and pushed the waders which were bunched around his waist and pushed them down to his knees. He put his right foot over the left rubber boot and pulled his right foot out of the waders, repeating the process for the left foot. Underneath the waders, his running pants were rumpled, but dry. He unzipped the soaked hoodie and removed it. He left the hoodie and the waders in a pile beside the door and went back into the cottage.

His bedroom was to the right of the kitchen. It had a double bed with a cast iron frame. A pine bureau, chest high, with wooden knobs sat at the far end of the bedroom. He opened the second drawer and removed a black t-shirt. He was wearing a white t-shirt. He pulled that off; it was damp around the armpits. He pulled on the clean black t-shirt and closed the drawer.

Need some socks, he thought, and they were in the top drawer and he found a pair that had the Nike symbol on them and sat down on the bed and pulled them on. He found his Nike running shoes under the bed and slipped into them, tying the black laces with a double looped knot.

I might need a jacket, he thought, and went back into the kitchen and grabbed a green army surplus jacket off the hook by the back door. He zipped it up and took out the woolen army surplus mittens that were still in the jacket pockets. He grabbed the candelabrum and went out the back door and saw the waders and the hoodie lying there so he placed the candelabrum on the stoop and hung the hoodie and the waders over a clothesline that went from a hook on the back of the house to the oak tree.

He picked up the candelabrum from the stoop and placed it in the basket on the front of a mountain bike standing by the side of the cottage.

He got the mountain bike for free. It had been placed in a junk pile in front of a fancy house he had driven by and he stopped and threw it in the back of his red Datsun pickup. It turned out to be a Jeep Cherokee Sahara Dual Suspension Mountain Bike.

The great things people just throw away, he thought. Lucky for me though, I can always make a few bucks just by grabbing discarded stuff; one man’s junk, my treasure.

After a few adjustments to the gear mechanism, it was in perfect working condition. The fat tires showed almost no wear. He found another abandoned bike with a basket on front attached to the handle bars and he removed the basket and put it on the mountain bike.

He put the candelabrum in the basket and climbed on the bike and was on his way down the dirt road to the main road that led to the town, a mile away.It was still misty when he pulled up in front of the second hand store. He pushed down the bikes kickstand and entered the store.

It was filled with old beds, chairs, beds, tables, bureaus, lamps, lights, Polaroid cameras lined up of a table, a sun-dial, and other people’s junk.A husky man came down the crowded isle. He was wearing a big smile and a white Stetson hat. His teeth were very white. The clammer wondered if he was using those whitening strips. His western shirt was tucked into a pair of Levis and the Levis sported a huge silver buckle imprinted with a Texas Longhorn. His black cowboy boots made loud clicks on the wooden floor as he approached the clammer.

“What’cha got there, E-M?” he said. He liked to call people by their initials. He considered it more western even though the farthest west he ever got was the Berkshires.

“Looks like a candle holder and a big one at that.”He took the candelabrum from the clammer.

“It’s heavy, E-M. Looks like it might be brass.”

“I thought it might be gold, Charly, it being so heavy and all,” the clammer said.

“Could be, You should be so lucky, but I don’t have anyway to test it.”

“Well, what’ll you give me for it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. My customers don’t go for fancy stuff like this."

"You are a big help, my friend. I could use a few bucks. I'm hungry and it might be nice to have supper at the diner."

Sorry e-m. This recession has dropped my business by 25%, so I'm not looking to buy stuff I know I can't sell.

"OK, I guess I could use a candle holder back at the cottage."

"Tell you what I'm going to do. I got some candles that I can't sell. You can have them. I'll be right back. Stay right there."

Charly headed for the back of the store and disappeared behind a group of 1950 ish dressing tables. He was back in a few moments and handed svral boxes of candles to the clammer.

"That's gret Charley. How much."

"Nothing, nada, zip. Use them in good health. What ever."

"Great price. I accept. Thanks, a lot, Charly."

"My pleasure, e-m. Enjoy."

The clammer turned and headed out the door with the candelabrum.

He grabbed his bike, placed the candelabrum back in the bike's basket, kicked up the kickstand, mounted the bike and headed back towards his cottage, his legs pumping slowly on the pedals.

Arriving back at the cottage, he noticed a new hole in the cedar shakes that covered the cottage. Damn! he thought, another hole from those pesky woodpeckers. If they weren't protected, I am mighty tempted to shoot them before they ruin my home. Just get out my trusty Ithaca 20 guage pump shotgun and blast them to kingdom come. Naahh! I wouldn't do that.

That crooked police chief is just looking for something to charge me with and throw me in the slammer and steal my land.

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