© 2010 Brian Davidson/Uncharted Staff

Photographs by Brian Davidson

As waves glide over the sand, tumbling over each other with the outgoing tide, seagulls shriek, children shout, and I pick my way through half-buried plastic bags and discarded cigarette butts peppering the beach at Seaside, Oregon. The man approaches.

He carries a mesh bag in one hand and what looks like a posthole digger in the other. He walks on the wet sand, not too near where the ocean laps, not too near where the sand dries out and makes walking harder. Occasionally he stops, thrusts the posthole digger vigorously into the sand a few times, kicks at the sand thus extracted, and either walks on or picks up a dark object from the dug-up sand and drops it in his bag.

My kids are in a tide pool, burying their feet in the muck, letting the incoming waves wash it off, then burying their feet again. Their images reflect off the smooth, wet sand like a funhouse mirror, the waves rippling their features into a corrugated mass of color and light. 

The man with the posthole digger is closer now. He stops and jams the digger into the sand again, two, three, four times, kicking the extracted sand aside as he dumps it. On the last kick, the hunter finds the hunted: a clam, gritty with sand. He drops it in the bag.

We talk for a while as he digs at the next spot. As he walks, he looks for the tell-tale hole in the sand – narrower than a pencil – that shows somewhere beneath the sand a razor clam lies, hiding from predators, but ready for the soup.

“Lexie,” I call to my daughter, not far away, playing in the surf with her brother. “Come see. He’s going to dig up a clam!” She’s too busy playing, along with her brother. The man digs anyway.

He comes almost every day, he says, and digs. He enjoys the serenity – hard to believe with all the tumult and crowds on the beach, even on this, a cooler, windier day. But watching him walk up the beach, tools in hand or slung over his shoulder, digging, oblivious to the sunbathers further up the beach or the swimmers in the water, it’s easy to imagine a portable circle of serenity surrounding him.

It’s also easy to imagine myself walking along the beach, reciting snatches of Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” and chuckling to myself about it, though the poem is about hunting and eating oysters, not clams:

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes."O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.

He doesn’t mind that I look like a tourist, bedecked in a loud Hawaiian shirt, with a digital camera and binoculars slung over my shoulders. He digs and finds a clam – looking something like a dirty ice cream sandwich – the clam inside the shell spilling out like a muffin-topper on the bus. He asks my daughter, who finally wanders over, if she wants to touch the clam.

She looks at it, wrinkles her nose. “Eew,” she says. But she’s curious. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Eat it,” the man says.

She looks at it again, this alien, sand-covered thing. “Yuck!”

“Oh, now, you eat clam chowder, don’t you,” he asks, teasing. Yes she does – a fact we discovered not a few days earlier at Mo’s restaurant in nearby Cannon Beach. “Well,” he tells her. “This is what’s in clam chowder.”

She looks at the clam again, still refusing to touch it. “Eew.”

The man and I laugh. She leaves to play in the surf with her brother again. The next day she will eat an entire bowl of clam chowder for lunch.

We chat a bit more, the Clam Man and me. I don’t ask his name. He doesn’t ask mine. We know this is likely to be a one-time encounter on a crowded beach.

Nevertheless, amidst the hubbub of a touristy town, the life of a seaside dweller goes on, clams and all. I forget the bumper cars and the Columbia Street arcade and remember it's nature we're visiting, where there just happens to be a city in the way.

Want to go claim digging? Go here for excellent advice:

http://www.clamdigging.info/ 

It’s also important to know that if you want to dig clams, you have to have a shellfish license from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. There’s more information on that here:

http://www.clamdigging.info/Clam-digging-ethics.html#Anchor-OREGO-20249