“I was about to forget your konks,” he said. He threw aside the ropes, pushed off, and started his engine.
“Be good,” yelled Captain Clock.
“I’m getting so old,” the clammer said, “I can’t be anything else.”
Captain Clock laughed. “That’s Captain Charlie Smith,” he said. “He’s known from Florida to Maine. More of a fisherman than a clammer. He’s in his seventies, but he’ll take that thirty-foot boat and go anywhere. Once a nor’wester caught him off Block Island, and he just crawled inside and rode her for three days and nights. When he finally got in, they say, he looked fresh as ever. They say he looked like he’d just had a shave and a haircut.”
Bollinger deposited the conches in a rusty wire basket. “Konks are my racket,” he said. “They get caught in the tongs and the boys save them for me instead of throwing them back. One of the truck drivers takes them in and sells them to Italian clam stands in downtown New York and we divvy up. It’s just cigarette money. The Italians boil the konks and make something called scungili.”
We drank some more tea, and then another clammer, a gloomy-eyed, sunburned young man, pulled alongside. He was in a catboat that had been patched with tin in a dozen places.
“Hello, Tarzan,” said Bollinger. “Didn’t that old eelpot sink yet? How many clams you got?”
“I been croshaying the mud for six hours and I barely took enough to bait a hook,” the young man said. “They was thin where I was tonging.”
“Quit bellyaching,” said Bollinger. “If it was to rain clams, you wouldn’t be satisfied.” The young man passed over a bushel of necks, two bushels of cherries, a scanty peck of chowders, and three conches. Captain Clock handed him five ones and twenty cents. He folded the bills into a wad and stuffed it in his watch pocket. “Another day, another dollar,” he said. “My back feels like it was run over by a load of bricks.” He cranked his engine and moved off, heading for Babylon. “He’ll get drunk tonight,” Captain Clock said. “I can tell by the way he was talking.” The Captain bent over a bag of cherries. He scooped a double handful out of the mouth of the bag and spread them on the deck. “Beauties,” he said. “Uniform as peas in a pod. The shells are blue now, but they’ll turn gray or white before we get them to town.” He opened a cherry and balanced it on his palm. He looked at it admiringly. “A spawner,” he said. “Now, that’s the beauty of a clam. He doesn’t make a bit of fuss about spawning. An oyster’s just the opposite. He spawns from May through August—the months without an ‘r’ in them—and he gets so milky you can’t eat him on the half shell. You can fry him, but you can’t eat him raw. A clam is better behaved. He never gets milky enough to notice and he’s just as good in the midsummer months, when he’s spawning, as he is on the coldest day of the winter.”
Captain Clock said that last year the town of Islip bought two thousand dollars’ worth of hard-shells from Massachusetts and New Jersey and scattered them in its beds. “Foreign clams put new blood in the natives,” he said. “They improve the breed. The spawn mixes and we get a better set. Hey, Charlie, hand me a knife. I’m going to try some of these chowders.” The Captain opened a dozen chowders and arranged them in a semicircle on the hatch. We were eating them when Bollinger suddenly shouted, “Here come the cops!” He pointed in the direction of Babylon, and I saw a launch flying a green flag. In a minute it cut the water just off our bow, heading for the fleet. The clammers stopped work and commenced yelling. “They’re warning each other,” Bollinger said. “That’s the police boat from Babylon. The cops go through the beds every day or so. You never know when they’ll show up. If they spy an Islip man in Babylon water, they give him a ticket and he has to go to court and get fined.” The clammers leaned on their tong and rake handles while the police boat slowly picked its way through the fleet. It did not halt; evidently the clammers were behaving themselves.
Presently another clammer called it a day and came alongside. He was a gaunt, stooped man, who silently handed over four bushels of necks, three bushels of cherries, and a bushel and a peck of chowders. He collected $13.75, bit a chew of tobacco off a plug he took from his hip pocket, mumbled, “Good night, Cap,” and pushed off. “He’s one of the best clammers on Long Island,” said Captain Clock. “I bet he’s got ten thousand dollars in the bank, and he’s so saving he gets his wife to cut his hair.” The gaunt clammer’s departure from the beds appeared to be a signal to the others. Soon after he left, they began moving toward the buy-boat in twos and threes. In twenty minutes the Jennie Tucker was surrounded by loaded boats, waiting their turns to come alongside. “They all have to come at once,” Bollinger said indignantly. Captain Clock stood at the stern, hunched over his ledger, which he had placed on the cabin roof. Bollinger helped the clammers heft their bags over the rail. He piled the chowders aft, the cherries on the hatch, and the necks forward. When a boat finished unloading he would call out the number of bushels, and the Captain would make a notation in his ledger and then pay off the clammer.
To get out of Bollinger’s way, I went to the bow and sat on a bale of empty bags. Standing in their boats, the waiting clammers smoked cigarettes and shouted insults at each other. I couldn’t tell if the insults were good-natured or genuine. “If I was you, I’d take that old cement-mixer home and set fire to it,” one yelled at his neighbor. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that dirty old boat.” “Well, it’s paid for,” said the master of the cement-mixer, “and that’s more’n you can say.” “Paid for!” screamed the first man. “You mean you stole it off the beach. Nothing’s safe when you’re around. Why, by God, you’d steal a tick off a widow’s belly!” Most of the clammers seemed to be quite surly. I heard a young clammer ask the man in the next boat, a sullen old man in wet overalls, how many clams he had. “None of your business,” said the old man. “Well, I was just asking to pass the time,” said the young clammer. The old man grunted. “Fare better if you keep your trap shut,” he said.
At a quarter after four the last clammer finished unloading, cast off, and made for home. The Captain snapped his cashbox shut and we sat down and drained the iced tea in the thermos jug. Then Bollinger hoisted the anchor, started the motor, and pointed the Jennie Tucker for her wharf. The decks were piled high. “A regular floating clam mountain,” said Bollinger. The Captain rearranged some bags on the hatch, clearing away a space to sit. He lit his pipe and added up the row of figures in his ledger.
“We took a hundred and forty-five bushels,” he said. “One day I took two hundred bushels. I emptied my cashbox for that load. The stern was awash on the trip in.” He pointed toward Oak Island. “See those boats over there? Some of the boys are still out, but they don’t sell over the rail like the others. They have bigger boats and they stay out until late in the afternoon and bring their loads right to our shed. We buy every clam that’s offered, no matter if there’s a glut in New York or a big demand. Some days we buy more clams than we can get rid of, and we take the surplus out to some lots of water we lease from the town of Islip and shovel them overboard. In the last five weeks we’ve planted thirteen hundred bushels of cherries and five hundred bushels of necks in those lots. When we need them, we go out and tong them up. No waste that way. In the old days, when clams were very dear, we used to have clam pirates. They would steal up at night and tong our lots, but not anymore. We keep a watchman, just in case.”
At five o’clock, the Jennie Tucker puttered up to her wharf. Mr. Still, the senior partner of the firm, was standing in the back doorway of the shed, waiting. He looks after the office end of the business. He is a shellfish expert and belongs to the family which once ran Still’s, a renowned seafood restaurant and hangout for Tammany gluttons on Third Avenue, and which still runs a thriving oyster business in a scow anchored in Pike Slip, beneath Manhattan Bridge. When the Jennie Tucker scraped against the wharf, Mr. Still shouted, “Here she is,” and four men came out of the shed. The moment the buy-boat was tied up, two of these men leaped aboard and began lifting the bags
to the wharf. The others placed them on handtrucks and wheeled them into the culling room. This was a long, cool room, which smelled like a clean cellar. There the clams were poured in great heaps on tables built against the walls. The tables and the cement floor had recently been hosed down and they were wet and immaculate. Captain Clock, Mr. Still, and Bollinger took places at the tables and culled the clams, tossing aside those with broken shells or gapped-open lips.
After they had been culled, the clams were poured into woven-wire baskets and dipped in a tank of tap water into which an antiseptic solution had been poured. Then some were emptied into great, three-bushel barrels and others into tubs holding three pecks. Soon the room was crowded with loaded barrels, and Mr. Still got a hammer out of the roll-top desk in the little office adjoining the culling room. He tacked tags on the heads of the barrels, addressing them to various restaurants and Fulton Market dealers. Then they were wheeled into one of the company’s three trucks. At seven o’clock, this truck contained sixty-five barrels and twenty-two tubs. “She’s ready to roll,” said Mr. Still. “If you’re a mind to, you can ride into the city with this load.” He introduced me to Paul Boice, the driver, and I climbed into the cab of the truck. It was one of those massive, aluminum-painted trucks.
We took the Sunrise Highway. At Valley Stream, we stopped at a diner for hamburgers and coffee. The counterman knew Boice. “Care for some clams tonight, Paul?” he asked, grinning. “How about a dozen nice clams for supper?” The driver laughed perfunctorily. Evidently it was an old joke. “When I want clams for supper,” he said, “I’ll notify you. Fix me a hamburger.” We did not tarry long in the diner. In Brooklyn the driver deftly guided the heavy truck through a maze of side streets. “I’ve been hauling clams over this route eight years and I know every shortcut there is,” he said. “Clams are nowhere near as perishable as oysters, but I don’t like to dawdle.” When we rolled off Manhattan Bridge he glanced at his watch. “Took less than two hours,” he said. “That’s good time.”
He made his first delivery at Vincent’s Clam Bar, at Mott and Hester streets, unloading three clam tubs and the basket of scungili conches Bollinger had gathered during the day. The proprietor brought Boice a goblet of red wine. “I get a drink on the house every time I hit this place,” he said. He drove down Mott Street, passing slowly through Chinatown. Entering South Street, he had to climb out of the cab and drag a sleeping drunk out of the road. “Truck drivers have to go slow down here just because of drunks,” he said. “I drag one out of my way practically every night.” The Fulton Market sheds were dark, deserted, and locked up when we arrived. “I make four deliveries in the Market,” Boice said, “and then I head uptown and make stops at big restaurants in the theatrical district.” He backed the truck up to the door of a shellfish wholesaler and we climbed out of the cab. We looked up and down the street and did not see a soul. “There’s a night watchman down here who helps me unload,” Boice said, “and I always have to wait for him to show up.” We sat down on the steps of the wholesale house and lit cigarettes. Across the street, on top of a pile of empty flounder crates, three overfed fishhouse cats were screeching at each other. We sat for fifteen minutes, watching the cats screech and fight, and then I said goodbye. “If you order clams or chowder tomorrow,” Boice said, peering up the dark street for the night watchman, “like as not you’ll eat some of the ones we hauled in tonight.”
1939
“It tastes fine to me.”
A FORAGER
JOHN MCPHEE
Euell Theophilus Gibbons, who has written four books on the gathering and preparation of wild food, once reached through the fence that surrounds the White House and harvested four edible weeds from the president’s garden. Gibbons has found light but satisfying snacks in concrete flower tubs in the mall at Rockefeller Center, and he once bagged fifteen wild foods in a vacant lot in Chicago. Foraging in Central Park, he collected materials for a three-course dinner, which he prepared and ate in a friend’s apartment on East Eighty-second Street. Gibbons seldom goes out of his way to perform these urban wonders, however. His milieu is open country. He lives and writes in a farmhouse near Troxelville, Pennsylvania, in the center of the state, where thousands of acres of forest rise behind his land and a wide valley of farms slopes away from his front door. He is a Quaker. He has been, among other things, a schoolteacher. All his life he has been a forager as well, becoming, in pursuit of this interest, an excellent general naturalist. But the publication of his first book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, in 1962, was not so much the by-product of a lifetime of gathering wild food as it was the long-delayed justification for what had, until then, been a lifetime of disappointment as a writer. While moving from job to job and from school to school, he had written sonnets, light verse, short stories, and several kinds of novel, including a biblical epic, which he abandoned in order to write a whimsical romance about a poor schoolteacher who gives up his profession, buys rural land, builds with his own hands a home made from native materials, and creates the impression that he is a millionaire by purchasing a dinner jacket from the Salvation Army and inviting professors and potentates to black-tie banquets at tables laden with sunfish caviar, cattail wafers, pickled top bulbs of wild garlic, wild-cherry olives, wild-grape juice, blueberry juice, dandelion wine, sautéed blue-eyed scallops, crappies cooked in tempura batter and served with mint and sassafras jellies, day-lily buds with pasture mushrooms, sautéed oyster mushrooms, buttered dandelion hearts, buttered cattail bloom spikes, wild asparagus, scalded milkweed buds, wild salads (made from Jerusalem artichokes, ground-cherries, wild mustard, watercress, wood sorrel, purslane, and green-briar under wild-leek dressing), hot biscuits of cattail-root flour, May-apple marmalade, chokecherry jelly, dandelion-chicory coffee, candied mint leaves, candied wild ginger, wild cranberries glacés, candied calamus roots, hickory-maple chiffon pie, and sweet blackberry wine. Gibbons, who was fifty at the time, sent the novel to a New York literary agent he had met, and she soon indicated to him that she felt he was not yet ready as a fiction writer. Tactfully, she suggested that he trim out the plot, characters, and dialogue; she urged him to reshape the manuscript as a straightforward book on wild food. That was seven years ago. Today, Gibbons is buoyant with royalties. He has followed his Wild Asparagus with Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop, Stalking the Healthful Herbs, and Euell Gibbons’ Beachcomber’s Handbook. He is at work on a definitive volume covering every edible plant in North America from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Circle, and his papers—all his sonnets, short stories, notes, novels, outlines, and marginalia—are under lock and key in the Boston University Library, which has established a Euell Gibbons Collection.
Gibbons’s interest in wild food suggests but does not actually approach madness. He eats acorns because he likes them. He is neither an ascetic nor an obsessed nutritionist. He is not trying to prove that wild food is better than tame food, or that he can survive without the assistance of a grocer. He is apparently not trying to prove anything at all except that there is a marvelous variety of good food in the world and that only a modest part of the whole can be found in even the most super of supermarkets. He is a gourmet with wild predilections. Inadvertently, the knowledge that he has acquired through years of studying edible wild plants has made him an expert on the nourishment aspects of survival in the wilderness, but the subject holds no great interest for him and in some ways he finds it repellent, since survival is usually taught by the military and he is a conscientious objector. Nonetheless, he has given his time to assist, in an unofficial way, at the United States Navy’s survival school in Brunswick, Maine. He has also taught survival techniques at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, off the Maine coast. It was in Maine that I first met him—in summer and only briefly—and not long thereafter I wrote to him and asked if he would like to take a week or so and make a late-fall trip in central Pennsylvania living off the land. I apologized that I would not be able to make such a trip sooner than November, and I asked him i
f he thought we could find enough to eat at that time. His response was that we could stuff ourselves, if we wanted to, right up until the time of the first heavy snowfall. During the early autumn, through letters and telephone calls, we framed a plan for a six-day trip, in part by canoe on the Susquehanna River and in part on the Appalachian Trail. We decided to start out with no market food of any kind, and we also decided not to take fishing rods or shotguns. With a regimen like that, we clearly weren’t going to eat the way Gibbons frequently eats at home, where his haute cuisine sauvage depends on liberal admixtures of such ingredients as eggs and butter, and on the advanced equipment of a contemporary kitchen. Mere survival, however, was incidental to our plans. We intended to spend the first couple of days on a survival diet, and then, gradually extending the number of ways in which we would prepare our foraged foods, we planned to introduce, a meal at a time, certain fundamental substances—salt and cooking oil, for example—that we would pick up in country stores. Thus, we would use survival foraging not as an end in itself but possibly as a metaphor, a device through which we would put ourselves in an appropriate frame of mind to recapitulate, in a sense, the earliest beginnings of human gastronomy.
While these plans were taking shape, Gibbons seemed to be full of enthusiasm, so far as I could judge from the letters of a man I scarcely knew, but then it occurred to him that the weather might be forbidding and that one result of his efforts on the river could be a soaking with cold spray. He wrote to say that even though we would almost certainly not go hungry, we might very well find ourselves beset by wind and rain, and perhaps snow. He said, “I wonder if you have considered that a survival trip might involve some pretty acute discomfort, maybe even to the extent that it could be called suffering.” He suggested that we forage near his home and do our cooking in his kitchen, forgetting survival in favor of gluttony. I telephoned him and urged him to stay with the plan, saying that the foraging we would be doing, in territory relatively unfamiliar to him, would be a much more interesting challenge for him. He said, for the first time, that he could not be completely certain that we would find enough to eat, explaining that there would be plenty of wild food in that part of the state in November but not necessarily in the specific places where we might happen to look for it. I had the advantage, in this exchange, of complete ignorance, which had given me a reckless confidence. When I pressed for the trip, Gibbons said okay, he was willing to try it.
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