Life Of Razor Clams, East Winds, and a Truculent Tattoo
posted by on April 23 at 9:45 AM
Last weekend, I went to a small town on the Washington coast to dig razor clams.
What that means is this: sleeping on the floor of a one-room cottage with three friends while hail and snow and wind beat on the thin old walls. (We had a fire and a couple bottles of wine to keep out the cold.) Then getting up at 5:30 in the morning, in the dark, to squeak down to the beach in our new galoshes, try to ignore the hail, and look for little holes in the sand—the razor clam’s ventilation shaft.
When you find one, you dig furiously, shove your arm into the cold, wet mud, and feel around for a rubbery neck or a smooth, sharp shell digging down and away from you. It’s messy. And fun.
Anthony Bordain once described digging for geoducks being like “fisting Shamu.” This was like that.
Crowds of people staggered up and down the beach, some with PVC clam guns, some with small shovels. One methed-out local ran around the surf in cutoff jeans and bare feet. Sweet old couples lugged around mesh bags full of clams. A small clutch of Japanese tourists wandered around with laminated fishing permits hanging by lanyards from their necks.
The clamming wasn’t so good—hardly anybody but the crustiest locals caught their 15-clam limit. “It’s the east wind,” said one old bald guy with a giant black beard. (It looked dyed.) “I don’t know why, but fishing and clamming are always bad in an east wind.”
One lady said she was clamming at Kalaloch the morning Mount St. Helens blew. Nobody could get any clams and nobody could figure out why. Then they heard about the volcano. She figured the clams felt the shocks and hunkered down.
Anyway—our cottage had a weird collection of magazines, including a recent copy of Iceland Review (vol. 45, no. 1), with this photo of a Dutch drug dealer who is doing six years in an Icelandic prison:
The quote is from Jacques Mesrine, a French bank robber and murderer who, in 1979, became France’s public enemy number one.
It says: God protect me from my friends. I’ll take care of my enemies.
Maybe it was the firelight or maybe it was the wine. But I thought it was the loveliest tattoo I’d ever seen.
There's a typo.
They did this on Weekend Magazine recently! it must be real!
(and LOL@1 for cryptically noting that there is a typo but not identifying it.)
Stupid sayings sound better in French.
It's spelled Kalaloch Brendan.
Fixed. Thanks.
I hate word tattoos, but this one is beautiful. And a little creepy. What are the dates?
Merde.
You had a cottage? We used to use tents.
@ Fnarf: Mesrine's birthday and deathday.
He was born in '79 and died in '86? Precocious bank robber.
Oh, that's a three. I'mb dumb.
Too bad about the French syntax mistake in the tattoo. I hate it when that happens.
I hearted clamming with my Dad on the Washington coast when I was a kid. I was just trying to explain clamming to a friend yesterday: the early morning, the "holes" in the sand (we would jump up and down to make them "breathe"), the fast digging cuz the clams are digging too. So fun. Thanks for the picture and reminder. I'm calling my 79 yr old dad right now and talk about clamming.
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