Topical Guide 33
Mark Dorset
Pelecypodophobia
I began a halfhearted imitation of [Grandfather’s] shuffle, worrying all the while about what to do with the clams I found, if I found any. Should I take the awful risk? “I’ll be unmanned if I do, unmanly if I don’t,” I thought.
Almost at once, my toes struck something hard, something that could only be one of the tasty bivalves.
Slowly, resignedly, I took a breath, dipped beneath the water, and dug it out of the sand. I stood up slowly.
“You got one,” called Grandfather. He beamed at me. “I think maybe you’ve really got the knack. Now your father—”
“Yah! Woo! Hey!” I shouted.
Grandfather’s mouth fell open. He watched me thrashing in the water, rolling around, holding the clam with both hands, twisting, turning. Soon enough, a hefty chowder clam flew from my hands and fell into the water, baloomp, some distance away.
“Damn!” I cried, smacking the water with my open hand. “It got away!” . . .Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?”
My father and I were shuffling along side by side, and I had already felt several clams, though my father showed no signs of having found a single one. Then, suddenly, and with greater glee than I’d seen from him before, he sang out, “Hey, Dad, I got one!” He was smiling like an idiot, I thought. He threw himself beneath the surface and almost at once seemed to be locked in a life-or-death struggle with something huge and frightening. His legs shot into the air, his feet flailing. Spray shot out from the place where he fought so desperately. Twice he lifted his head above the surface and gasped for breath. At last he stood upright, with his hands still beneath the surface, as if he were throttling something. Then, as if propelled, his hands shot out of the water, and from them flew a clam. It sailed through the air and landed, baloomp, in the water about ten feet away.
“Son of a bitch!” he shouted. He smacked the water with his fist. “It got away. I guess I’m no better at this than I ever was.”Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?”
The cover of the Warner Books paperback edition of “Do Clams Bite?”:
Bivalves, Reference Works
From the publisher’s description of The Secret Life of Clams by Anthony D. Fredericks:
It breathes with tubes, it has no head or brain, it feeds through a filter, and it is the source of dozens of familiar proverbs (“happy as a clam!”). Clams, it turns out, have been worshipped (by the Moche people of ancient Peru), used as money (by the Algonquin Indians), and consumed by people for thousands of years. Yet The Secret Life of Clams is the first adult trade book to deal exclusively with this gastronomic treat that is more complex than its simple two shells might reveal. The Secret Life of Clams features compelling insights, captivating biology, wry observations, and up-to-the-minute natural history that will keep readers engaged and enthralled.
[more to come on Monday, June 28, 2021]
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