Topical Guide 21
Mark Dorset
Clams; Clamming; Methods of Clamming; Clamdiggers
Grandfather. . . was a casual clammer who usually wanted only a few clams for dinner. He “treaded” for clams, walking around in the flats and feeling for the clams with his toes.
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?”
On Bolotomy Bay there are, or were, three primary methods of harvesting clams: tonging, raking, and treading.
The Bayman Statue in Bayman Park in the village of Babylon on Long Island, New York, depicts a clamdigger tonging for clams. He is holding the handles of the tongs; the basket that gathers the clams is out of sight, as it would be beneath the water of the Great south Bay.
Here is Eric Kraft’s paternal grandfather, Edward Daniel Kraft, raking for clams:
I’m not offering a photo of someone treading for clams because all the ones I found just looked like people standing in the water.
For a good idea of what harvesting clams in Bolotomy Bay would have been like, watch this video, originally an 8mm movie, documenting clamming in 1972 from the point of view of one clamdigger, Tom Seerveld. (See tonging in action starting at 4:10.)
I can’t resist inviting you to compare tonging, raking, and treading to hackin’ and hewin,’ runnin’ at the coal face with your head, and scrabblin’ at it with your bare ’ands in Peter Cook’s “Sitting on the Bench” from the revue Beyond the Fringe.
[more to come on Thursday, June 10, 2021]
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