Razor Clams

Buried Treasure of the Pacific Northwest

David Berger

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780295741437
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Biologia marina

In this lively history and celebration of the Pacific razor clam, David Berger shares with us his love affair with the glossy, gold-colored Siliqua patula and gets into the nitty-gritty of how to dig, clean, and cook them using his favorite recipes. In the course of his investigation, Berger brings to light the long history of razor clamming as a subsistence, commercial, and recreational activity, and shows the ways it has helped shape both the identity and the psyche of the Pacific Northwest. Towing his wife along to the Long Beach razor clam festival, Berger quizzes local experts on the pressing question: tube or gun? He illuminates the science behind the perplexing rules and restrictions that seek to keep the razor clam population healthy and the biomechanics that make these delicious bivalves so challenging to catch. And he joyfully takes part in the sometimes freezing cold pursuit that nonetheless attracts tens of thousands of participants each year for an iconic "beach-to-table" experience. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiyG20LdLVw

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTIONS

THE state has confirmed a spring razor clamming opening, so I immediately telephone my wife. “Skip work. There are some great low tides coming up.” The tide chart shows minus tides the third week of April, extending through the weekend and into the week—big lows that promise to expose many feet of intertidal beach and thus good razor clamming.

I call the small motel we like. Fortunately, they have room. The motel books up quickly during the days of minus tides, in the spring, when the dig is on. We arrive in late afternoon. The surf rumbles steadily. The beach is so flat that the breaking waves glide up the sand for a hundred and fifty feet, tapering to the gentlest lap. The next morning we awake and slip from the motel bed onto the cold floor. The weather has changed; the sky is dark and threatening. Karen drinks her coffee and dresses. She puts on rain pants and jacket, and shiny black milking boots, and ties her hood tightly. She is fully encased in rubber and no doubt will float like a buoy if the need arises.

We drive to the beach and the moment we open the car door the wind blasts our faces, blowing in hard from across the Pacific with nothing at all to obstruct it. It’s raining intermittently, and dampness seeps into every crevice. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of people around us, all gathered for this singular purpose. It’s an hour before low tide. Some people bang the beach, prospecting for clams, and a few dig, but most are waiting for the waters to lower and expose the prime habitat. My hands are freezing. I keep them in my pockets. The sun is up but barely lights the beach. It’s tempting just to quit. But nobody does. Clumps of people extend up and down the beach as far as the eye can see, facing the sea like a line of Roman legionnaires.

The tide continues to drop. The waters are receding, exposing the intertidal zone where the razor clams live. Suddenly, people are digging everywhere, as if given some invisible signal. The line of people advances and attacks. Cold hands and wet feet are forgotten.

I look for clams at the water’s edge. A wave breaks and I brace myself. Dark water, pieces of shell, and pebbles swirl around my ankles. In difficult conditions like this, when the clams aren’t apparent, it helps to prospect—banging the beach with the shovel. The vibration can cause a gurgling spurt: a show. I smack till my forearms hurt, but nothing. Finally, a spurt. I place the shovel behind the little dimple that results and, with a few pulls, excavate a narrow hole. I see the clam’s pale neck telescoping down into the sand. I dig after it with my bare hands, following the hole it leaves behind. Damn, these clams can move fast! My arm is deep into the beach when my fingers touch the shell and pull it up. It’s a hefty clam, glossy, tapered, and as elegant as a 1920s cigarette case. I wash it off in a puddle of water and add it to the net hanging off my belt.

I walk up the beach to the drier sand to find Karen, who is digging with an aluminum tube. This is a cylinder about thirty inches long, with a crosspiece handle at the top. It’s an effective tool, especially in drier sand. Karen has only a few clams, but they’re large.

“I’m wiped out,” she says. “I’ve dug a lot of holes.”

“You didn’t get a clam each time?” I ask.

“No, maybe every other hole,” she says.

You can dig a lot of holes while clamming, each one teaching you about water and sand, their endless interactions and significant weight.

Black clouds rumble on top of us from down the beach. We are swallowed by darkness. Only people immediately adjacent are visible. Suddenly hail comes whistling out of the sky. We huddle with our backs to the weather. The hail bounces and the beach turns white, layered with pellets. Then it stops and the cloud continues up the beach.

Karen spots a dimple she thinks is a clam, rocks the tube deep into the beach, and grunts up a column of sand. She rests while I poke through the sand, and there’s the clam. She puts it in her net.

The low tide is over and the sea is flooding in again, smoothing over the mounds of sand and filling in holes. People are dispersing, returning from whence they came. Not that many have their limits, due to the conditions. This was a hard dig. Some have just a few clams. Karen and I are each one short of our limit, fourteen clams instead of fifteen, but we’re weary. My hands are aching and I can hardly clasp the shovel as we walk up the beach to the car.

Later in the afternoon the sun comes out and everything glows warm and cheerful. At the motel’s outdoor cleaning station, I dip a colander with razor clams into a pot of simmering water. The shells spring open and the razor clam flesh spills out. Dipping, first step in cleaning the clams. I dump the opened clams into a sinkful of cold water to stop any possible cooking.

A fellow walks in from the beach and lays his clams on a screened table to hose off sand. I glance at his haul. Fifteen clams, all large, not a single one broken. A pro. The stout woman across from me whose hands haven’t stopped working puts down her knife, picks up a pair of scissors, and starts cutting out the fat clam stomachs and other dark, inedible parts.

“I think I’ll make some chowder tonight,” she says.

I’m cleaning clams, too, and the piles of clam meat are growing. I admire the clam’s construction, as I always do: a cathedral of siphons and tubes. The garbage pail fills with discarded shells, lustrous purple and white inside. I prop one of the shells upright on the counter while I clean. I’ll take it home, along with a few others. In a few months it will dry up, become bleached and fragile. But for now the thin shell is fresh and supple, and the perfectly symmetrical oblongs look like angel wings, with a drop of mother of pearl at the hinge.

Early evening and we prepare dinner. We sauté the clams with shallots, oil, and lots of butter. We reward ourselves by cooking mostly the tender feet. We butterfly them, and each side is laden with spawn, the clam’s reproductive material, a.k.a. clam butter. We cook them for a minute or so on each side. It isn’t long till there’s a big platter on the table. The razor clams are fresh, the taste sweet and distinctive, and we dip crusty bread into the butter to soak up the razor clam flavor. We hum with delight.

I first went razor clamming out of the most casual curiosity. I was a transplant from the East to the West Coast. I’d barely heard of razor clams, but I had a clam shovel I’d purchased at a garage sale, thinking it might be useful in the garden. I somehow managed to get myself to the beach at the right time. I can’t remember much about the one and only clam I caught. I was too spent from battling surf and sand. The clam was much deeper in the beach than I had expected, and it moved fast. Subsequently, I heard people say: “These are clams you have to chase! It’s sport!” But nobody had told me that. To find myself on a miles-long beach, under an endless sky, chasing a clam buried in the sand, was quite novel. After hours of fruitless effort, I found the one clam only after extending my arm much farther into the sand than I thought sensible; I was up to my shoulder in the beach and felt like I was reaching in to turn around a breached calf. But then my fingertips brushed the tip of something hard. I pinched and gave a pull. The object, to my surprise, pulled downward. I pinched harder and pulled upward. The clam strained and pulled downward. It was a battle of strength and wills that I only slowly won.

A razor clamming dig can bring out many people.

I wasn’t alone that first dig, one arm deep in the beach, pinching and pulling for all I was worth. As I discovered, many people love to dig and eat the Pacific razor clam. The whole tribe of society gathers to dig its allotted fifteen clams. Old-timers. Hipsters. Families with dogs. Groups of twentysomethings. Sportsmen in camouflage clothes. Mothers pushing strollers. Busy urbanites and coastal denizens. Even couples on dates, sweetly murmuring. When I arrived at the beach, I saw the entire arc of humanity lined up in front of the surf. I was stunned. On a good clamming weekend, people flood from every corner of Washington, Oregon, and points beyond. It is really the quintessential Northwest activity. Salmon, move over. A mass of humanity comes to the shore to chase, catch, clean, cook, and consume this seafood delicacy. There is joy in the abundance. It’s a family activity and the lore is often handed down generationally. It’s not uncommon to see eighty-year-olds, male and female, out on the beach pursuing an activity that they learned as kids. No child forgets the wonder of being on the beach, digging for clams with a throng of gyrating humanity, and no octogenarian either.

One season, after a dig, I fell in love with razor clams. I became infatuated; they were all I could think of, day and night. It was a onesided love affair, what with me mooning around and the razor clams going about their business as if I didn’t exist. I explained to a friend that I had fallen in love, had held a clam my hand and felt an ache in my heart, and she looked at me strangely.

The state of affairs came upon me without warning. I was cleaning a limit at an outdoor station specifically designed for the purpose—essentially some sinks and counter space, and a pot for dipping. I was alone; my fellow clammers had come and gone. I could hear the white noise of the Pacific Ocean in the distance. The sweet smell from scores of cleaned clams hung heavy in the air. I laid out a clam the size of my palm on a wooden board. I was cutting away the shell and viscera when all at once the entirety of razor clamming suffused my being. The big sky, the closeness to nature, the fellowship with other clammers, the tasty meal, the physical challenge all crowded in. But it was the single quivering clam that most occupied me. Each element of it seemed perfect. I became enamored of the long neck, the powerful foot, the translucent oblong body. It was all perfect, I thought, as I peered at the clam and cradled it in my palm. I noticed how the tip of the foot was hard and pointed, how the foot curled and rippled with power. I noticed how the clam body nestled in the clam shell, the muscles levering against the thin shell’s reinforcing rib. I was smitten by the streamlined geometry of the shell, the outer surface lacquered and smooth.

Even though enamored, I also had to laugh. The neck extended like a slinky. The single foot somehow resembled both a baby’s leg and an elephant’s haunch. The razor clam was a cathedral of engineering, but to us humans, who have two of most everything and for whom symmetry is so important, it also appears comical. One plump pogo stick of a leg. A neck with no head. My funny valentine indeed. Nonetheless, it was perfect. When the shell opened, in the process of cleaning, the two halves unfolded at the hinge. Inside, the shell was pearly white with blushes of purple and pink. The interior lines radiated like light, and I couldn’t help feeling an archetypal resonance—that the clam was snug in a kind of celestial shawl.

It had rained heavily earlier in the morning, but now the sun was out and the earth was steaming as I held the wiggling clam in my hand. I looked at the confabulation of siphons, filters, organs, neck, and foot. I thought of the clams in the dark depths of the beach, the sand pressing in steady as a mother’s hug. I was glad to be alone in the clam kitchen with these strange feelings, with just the natural world for company. I recognized them as peculiar. Clams are not a typical object of the heart. And yet I felt that kind of yearning.

Eventually I sought a more formal introduction to Siliqua patula, or the Pacific razor clam, as it’s commonly known. It dwells only on the western edge of the North American continent, from northern California to southern Alaska, but most especially on the fifty-three miles of flat, sandy beaches that make up Washington’s southern coast, prime habitat for razor clams. Here, they are plentiful in numbers hard to imagine.

The shell is an elegant affair that grows to about 6.25 inches long at full maturity. It fits in your hand just so, elongated and oblong, the exterior shiny and in shades of golden brown, olive, and tan. It’s a streamlined, wily creature designed to move up and down in the sand column, like a little elevator. The clam’s digging foot extends from the bottom, and its siphon—or neck, as it’s commonly called—extends from the top. The neck, the only part of the clam to poke above the sand, is tough as tire rubber. The body is a pouch of soft viscera, encased by the mantle that builds the shell, and enfolded by skirts and fringes. The foot is muscular and holds the reproductive tissue, ironic since this is the least suggestive part of the clam, neither phallic like the long neck nor vulvate like the body fringes. These metaphorical parts are understated and in perfect balance, as if the clam were a cosmopolitan hermaphrodite.

Most of the time the neck and the foot protrude from the shell, forming a distinctive profile, though the foot can retract all the way into the shel...