by Laura Muha
It is late afternoon in the Mount Sinai harbor; wind rustles through the beach grass and water laps against the moss-covered pebbles along the shore. In the distance, two clammers, bushel baskets in hand, wade toward a mud flat laid bare by the receding tide. On the side of the road, an old man with a shock of white hair and a grizzled beard watches them wistfully from the window of his battered green Plymouth.
There was a time, not long ago, when Charlie White was out there, too, the sun beating down on his bowed back as he churned up the thick black mud with his clam rake and tossed the gritty shells into his basket.
No one could beat Charlie White in those days. He was the king of the clammers, the best and fastest, bringing in eight or nine bushels for a few hours’ work and raising nine children on the profits.
But no more. Two years ago, on his doctor’s orders, Charlie White hung up his boots and his bushel baskets and laid down his clamming rake for good.
“I’m 78 years old, you know. I think it’s about time I quit,” he says, patting his chest where doctors have told him a knot of cancer is growing. “When you get just so old, you get tired. My doctors tell me not to do anything because of the cancer.”
So today, Charlie White drives down to the harbor and watches his middle-aged son and daughters clam while he thinks about the days when the white shells on the harbor floor were thicker than beach grass and you didn’t need a license to dig them.
“Times are changing, changing fast,” he says, gazing out at a horizon cluttered with rooftops and boat masts. At one time the skyline was bare, and a clammer could see straight from Mount Sinai to Bridgeport. “In those days, 50 cents a day and you lived good. Now you make $100 and you don’t live – you just exist.”
To Charlie White, who was born on a houseboat just a few miles away from where his car is parked, clamming is almost a religion, with the hack-hack-hack of the clam rake and the cry of the gulls providing the litanies. He has been to church only once in his 78 years – “it was quite some time ago” – and had intended to go back. But the next Sunday he needed money, so he went clamming instead, and the preacher scolded him for working on the Sabbath.
“I looked him right in the eye and I said to him, `Then how come you take my pennies on Sunday?’ ” And Charlie White turned on his heel, walked out the door and never went back.
He never went back to school, either, not after the second grade. In those days, he says, “they didn’t care whether poor colored people went to school.” So he dropped out as soon as he could read the tide charts and calculate the price of a bushel of clams on the open market.
Instead of reading and writing, he learned the lore of clamming as he worked the harbor floor winter and summer. He became skilled at finding the mollusks – searching for their breathing holes and the thin jets of water they emitted, then plucking them from their hiding places and tossing them into his basket.
In those days, he could get $2.50 a bushel; today a bushel brings $35, but the market is smaller, White says. “Nobody cares for steamers like they used to. Young people, they don’t want to cook ’em – they just go buy a can of this and a can of that.”
White doesn’t eat clams any more himself – the cancer has taken away his appetite – but he savors the memory of the fried clams and chowder his wife, who died two years ago, cooked on their big wood stove. “You’d get up and have a big pan full of fried clams. It was wonderful.”
When times got rough, White also worked on lobster boats and dug potatoes and cut cauliflower. But he always came back to clamming. “You ain’t got no boss . . . nobody to tell you to hurry up, when to start or stop,” he says.
“I’ve even cut ice and clammed – that’s when you had plenty of clams here,” says White. “Now it’s two and three clams here and there. You couldn’t do it today.”
He spoke sadly of the dwindling clams. At one time, the mud on the harbor floor was so thick with razor clams and skimmers and soft-shells and steamers that a clammer could dig eight or nine bushels in the three hours between tides.
But then developers dredged the harbor. And recreational clammers – “city people,” White calls them – swarmed over the harbor in numbers more plentiful than the gulls above their heads. They carted off young seed clams that should have been left to spawn, and the supply of clams dropped until a clammer was lucky to get a bushel for an afternoon’s work.
That is all White’s daughter Nettie expects to gather on this day as she hacks at the harbor floor the way she has since childhood. Only now, instead of working side by side with her father, she works alone, and he watches from shore. Yes, she says raising her voice above the rhythmic scrape of her rake, she thinks her father misses clamming, but she can’t say for sure.
“He don’t talk about it,” she says, tossing a clam into a plastic bucket without looking up. “He don’t worry none of us about his troubles; he just goes along and takes it the way it comes, I guess.”
Which is exactly what White is doing as he watches the clammers from his car and chats with the joggers and motorists who pause to say hello. At one point, he gestures toward a cedar house just up the road.
“There used to be a milk dairy there. All green grass and cows.” He shakes his head. “I often wish those days I had a camera – but nobody realized things was going to change the way they are now.”
He looks at the swans swimming at the water’s edge. “I see a lot of kids down here throwing stones at them,” he says. “I yell at ’em every time I see ’em do it. I don’t like to see people hurt things.”
Then he sighs and squints at his watch in the waning light of the afternoon sun.
“The tide’s turning,” he says, mostly to himself. “They’ll be coming back soon.”
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