The Puddle

Walk a hundred yards down the dirt road from our summer place and you’ll find the narrow rocky beach of a shallow bay enclosed by a long arching sand bar stretching along the horizon.  A few gulls idle on the breeze and tiny sandpipers scurry along the shore like eccentric wind-up toys.  The waves breaking on the sandbar beat a distant rhythm only interrupted by the drone of a red biplane circling slowly overhead giving island tours. The water is barely deep enough to float the couple of small boats habitually moored there; it’s warm and clouded with silt stirred up by the tide and by the millions of creatures living in it.  It hardly seems to qualify as the ocean, and for this reason we call it the Puddle.  I’ve swum in the Puddle since I was a child and my stepsons swam there as well, shrieking as their feet were tickled by swarms of tiny fish or bitten by invisible crabs.  It’s the place where I first learned the pleasure of digging for a meal and everyone I’ve ever taken there has been seized by the joy of the hunt.  

Steamers, quahogs and mussels

What we hunt in the languid water on long summer days are steamers, quahogs and mussels.  There are also crabs and conch, but the crabs are too fast and the conch too tough, so we stick to the slow-moving, tender bivalves.  Steamers are soft-shelled clams, the ones you get fried or drenched in butter at snack bars up and down the East Coast.  Their shells are never fully closed, with a lewd strip of belly protruding between them that ends in a long wrinkled neck like the trunk of a miniature elephant. The neck is really a combination of mouth and foot that the clam uses to move around and to drink in the rich seawater that contains its food.  You dig for steamers in the exposed flats at low tide.  We spread ourselves out in a straggling line along the water’s edge looking for tell-tale air holes in the sand.  If a jet of water squirts up as you step close to a hole you know that a clam is down below and he knows you’re up above, so you’d better start digging.  Mostly we dig with our hands like dogs.  A shovel is more efficient, but more tiresome to use, and it can cut the clams in half making them no good to eat.  You have to dig down quickly and wrap your fingers around the clam before it can escape.  Steamers can move remarkably fast and slide right out of your grip as you try to pull them up.  Once out of the sand the clam will continue to squirt, especially if you stroke its lascivious belly. 

Quahogs are easier prey than steamers as they have no necks to run with and lie placidly in their beds waiting to be caught.  “It’s like pickin’ up Easter eggs when you find the right spot,” said a satisfied woman in a sun-faded bathing suit as she hauled her basket from a small boat to the shore.  The regulation wire basket with a square metal gauge attached for measuring the quahogs’ girth is the sign of legitimate hunter. That and the plastic sandwich bag containing an up-to-date shellfish permit in case of a run-in with the warden – a man better known for his water-colour paintings – who runs around the bay in a small skiff making sure that everyone’s paid up and no one’s taking the small seed clams that should be left to grow into next year’s crop.  The smallest quahog that’s legal to take is one inch thick and is called a littleneck.  These are the ones to eat on the half-shell dressed in nothing but a squeeze of lemon and some Tabasco. If you’re leery of opening them up with a knife, there’s nothing better on pasta than these tiny clams sautéed until they pop open along with a bit of onion, Portuguese linguica and chopped parsley.  The next size up are cherrystones which are good steamed with beer or roasted on the grill.  Finally are the chowders, palm sized monsters whose flesh is favourful but chewy and prone to getting stuck in your teeth.  These are reserved for soup and stuffed quahogs where the meat is chopped, mixed with onion and bread crumbs, mounded in the shells, drizzled with butter and baked.  A good stuffed quahog is crispy on the outside, soft and savory inside with a strong taste of the sea.  They’re nothing like the stogy ones served in restaurants that taste of store-bought stuffing mix.

Methods of hunting for quahogs are idiosyncratic – each person swears by their own shellfish divining voodoo.  Quahogs are generally found a couple of inches down in sandy beds covered by a foot or two of water at low tide.  There are no air holes to give their location away, and only burly professionals use the heavy, toothed rakes to them dig up.  The preferred method of the hungry amateur out to find enough for dinner is to stand about knee deep in water and execute a slow backward dance – something like a reverse Macarena minus the arm movements – while pushing their feet into the sand and feeling for a hard round bulge.  Sensing a promising bump, the hunter plunges their arms to the spot by their feet to retrieve the prey.  The dancers leave a wake of drifting mud behind them along with a scattering of peewees – clams too small to be taken legally.  They often appear to be hypnotized by the performance, and it can be hard to convince them to leave the stage and head for home.  “Just one more.” “The last few I found were too small.” “We only have a couple of dozen – that’s not nearly enough for chowder.”

Queen of the Dance

My sister is the undisputed Queen of the Dance.  She can spot a bed of slumbering quahogs simply by casting an expert eye across the Puddle and squinting.  “They’re out there” she states categorically and heads out with the basket and license, sporting a pair of cast-off men’s dress socks.  “Just thick enough to keep from slicing a toe off, but thin enough so you can feel the clams.”  This summer she was on a tear – two straight weeks and not a fallow day among them.  Her success could be measured by a significant increase in the carpet of shells that covers the dirt driveway.  The clam-shell driveway-paving project was begun over twenty years ago and my two stepsons gleefully contributed, dumping the shells out after dinner and whacking them with a hammer to break them up. The coverage is spotty, spikey grass and roots poke up through the shards, but we’ve papered a two-car spot and the cost of maintenance is free.  Sometimes we fill in a bit with big shells that wash up after storms, but it’s clear that this is cheating.

On either side of the beach where we find clams and quahogs are two salt ponds fringed with dense sea grass. The shallow water is full of eddying schools of minnows and bright blue crabs darting about their business.  Occasionally you can spot the ponderous wake of an enormous horseshoe crab – an ancient titan progressing across the bottom at a stately pace, trailing a mantle of seaweed.  The banks of the ponds are solid muck studded with big black mussels covered in barnacles and algae.  My brother is one of the few people who loves their bright orange flesh and intense briny taste so he hauls them out by the dozen.  We usually eat them steamed, showered with garlic, lemon, a slug of white wine, and lots of bread to soak up the juice. 

Now of course you can eat quahogs or mussels at other times and in other places.  Maybe a seaside restaurant or a moules-et-frites place with a glass of beer.  They may be plumper. They will certainly have less sand in them. But they won’t be the same.  Not just the taste – no lingering low-tide funk – but the sense of satisfaction in having pulled them out of the sea and the link to a thousand-and-one childhood adventures.  This may just be the city-dweller’s longing for the shore, or the pull of nostalgia. But for me this flavor mosaic combines the real with the remembered to create a sense of the past flowing into the future.  There will be other tides, more baskets to fill, hands to do the hunting and hungry mouths around the table.