Clam Diggin'
Jul/03/07 10:44 AM Filed in: MEMORY LANE
.....I
don't have a lot of memories of my clam diggin' days
at family camp since I was still pretty young when we
switched to chili cook-offs. Why did we switch to
chili cook-offs you ask? Much to our parents'
chagrin, the razor clams of Washington were becoming
endangered and the state no longer allowed clamming
on Camano Island. Anyway, for many years family camp
was around the first week in July, which just
happened to be the peak of clam season on the
Washington shores. I remember getting up at an
ungodly hour to catch low tide at the beach on Friday
morning. I’d watch our group walk around like
hunchbacks, peering into the sand and under rocks
just waiting for that tell-tale sign of clam life -
streams of clam spit.
Yep.
You see, clams tend to stay pretty shallow in the
sand until they sense trouble, and as soon as they do
they spit sand and water either as a defense
mechanism or as some sort of a propulsion, I'm not
sure which (at least, I always preferred to think of
it as spit and not something else). As soon as you
see that gleaming stream of clamminess you’ve gotta
dig like mad after it because those clams are nothing
if not professional tunnel diggers. Once we’d caught
enough clams for roasting and for chowder we'd head
back up to the campground to start the competition.
One vivid memory for me is how much I hated the smell
and taste and texture of those clams! Once we moved
off the beach and over to the campfire, the adventure
was over for me. I'm pretty sure my little kid brain
was so disgusted by those slimy, rubbery blobs that I
blocked the rest of my memories permanently. My Mom
has filled in some of the gaps:
"The clams would be dug up and placed in buckets of water along with some cornmeal and left overnight. The cornmeal was to be consumed by the live clams in the hopes it would force out all the sand from their tiny little digestive tracts. The next day we would steam them alive in a big steamer pot we had and then eat them right out of the shell. Later we figured out we could just put them on the grate over the campfire until they popped open. They were so delicious dipped in a little butter but we also saved lots for the clam chowder cook-off, which became a chili cook-off when we could no longer get clams. One of the great family camp mysteries is what happened to the steamer basket from my clam pot--it just vanished into thin air one year at Camano."....
SEE PREVIOUS FAMILY CAMP POSTS
"The clams would be dug up and placed in buckets of water along with some cornmeal and left overnight. The cornmeal was to be consumed by the live clams in the hopes it would force out all the sand from their tiny little digestive tracts. The next day we would steam them alive in a big steamer pot we had and then eat them right out of the shell. Later we figured out we could just put them on the grate over the campfire until they popped open. They were so delicious dipped in a little butter but we also saved lots for the clam chowder cook-off, which became a chili cook-off when we could no longer get clams. One of the great family camp mysteries is what happened to the steamer basket from my clam pot--it just vanished into thin air one year at Camano."....
SEE PREVIOUS FAMILY CAMP POSTS
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