Unprofessional clamming

— Photo by Invertzoo

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

In one part of my brain it’s endless summer, as I was reminded by Dr. Ed Iannuccilli’s  recent column  in GoLocal about crabbing as a kid on the Rhode Island shore. (Hit this link to read the doctor’s sweet essay: https://www.golocalprov.com/articles/dr.-ed-iannuccilli-crabbin-on-a-summer-evening)

My paternal grandparents lived in a gray-shingle house on West Falmouth Harbor, on the Cape side of Buzzards Bay. (The house has since been torn down and replaced by a monstrosity twice as  high.) The harbor once had vast numbers of quahogs and more than a few oysters, too. We kids would wade out on the flats, collect the shellfish in a bag and bring them back to a stone dock, where we’d smash them to get at the meat, over which we’d squeeze a lemon,  and eat right there. Very messy and unprofessional. This was before our father showed us how to open them with a special knife, which I don’t think I could do now. I fuzzily remember that he could do it with one hand, and with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

On those seemingly open-ended days, a southwest wind was always blowing off Buzzards Bay, the air was  always about 76 degrees, as was the water, and the haze  turned into a purple fog in the late afternoon as the catboats and the bluefish and striped-bass seekers returned to the harbor from the usually choppy open bay.

A big oil spill in 1969 closed the harbor to legal  shellfishing for decades.  (Still, people, especially poor immigrants from Southeast Asia, would come clamming anyway and probably  lied to the stores and restaurants about where their shellfish came from). But something good came from the disaster: West Falmouth Harbor became an internationally known place  for research into the effects of oil spills and how to remediate them, in large part because the Marine Biological Laboratory was just down the road, in Woods Hole.

I’ll always remember the late ‘50s under a hazy sun as I dug into the sand to pull out a delectable quahog.