Digging up dinner
Clam digger Paul Heikkila and his chocolate lab, Tango, hit the mudflats early Friday morning for a few of the fresh, tasty treats. Minus tides next week should make for good clamming in Oregon’s Bay Area. World Photo by Madeline Steege
Column by Joe Hansen, Outdoors Editor
As the sun snuck over the horizon in the foggy Charleston mudflats Friday morning I slaughtered my first clam.
I say “slaughtered,” because it wasn’t pretty.
I’ve seen experts dig clams, plucking them out of their holes in neat little shell packages, without cutting the neck or shattering the shell. It looked kind of easy.
“Here’s the neck,” said Paul Heikkila, my clam digging guide for the morning, pulling a severed, finger-sized piece of meat out of a pile of mud I’d displaced with my shovel.
My next few shovel strokes yielded a crunching sound as I smashed the clam to smithereens. Clearly the blows had been lethal, so it was my obligation to find the darn thing, somewhere in the muck, and take it home and eat it.
“Stick your hand in there, so your fingers get numb,” Paul said, pointing to the 5-gallon-bucket-sized hole I’d dug next to the South Slough. “You’ve got to find him now, if you’re here all day, snorkeling.”
I got on my hands and knees, rooting around in the hole ,ntil eventually,I found it, my first clam; a shattered mess of shell, meat and mud.
