#5- Lightning Fried Clams- Almost (with Brother Bernie)

#5- Lightning Fried Clams Almost … with Brother Bernie
When you tell people that you dig clams for a part-time job,often times they will say “oh, that must be fun!” – well not really…it’s damn hard work on the back and legs in all kinds of heat and cold, in calf-high mud with very pesty insects horseflies or gnats swarming and biting , sometimes good and other times very slim pickins, sometimes on the beach and sometimes by foltilla out to the sand bar exposed at low tide- don’t get caught in the rushing tide. I got into it because of Robbie who was an ace, just had the knack for finding the good digging spots. It was good money under the table and really good exercise during the summer.
FYI the master diggers would buy the clams brought up from the beach and bring them to the plant in Newburyport for clorination, as all the areas were posted as contaminated. Each digger was required to have a license from the city @$25 and the state @ $50 and eventually to report the money per rack = 2 heaping 5 gallon buckets which is a lot of clams ( varied on demand from $18 - $40 plus which traditionally had been under the table and “back in the hey-day” the good diggers would get a barrel = 6 racks on a tide and sometimes would dig in the morning and evening. Many noted the mis-management of the clam flats over recent decades and the decline of the flats.
There were of course lots of characters in this “racket”. Jim Foster master digger from Brockton who used to answer Robbies phone calls as to whether there was digging from his toilet seat. Jim would reward us with a warm Tab from his festering cooler when we humped all our clams up from the beach and after going through the “brokies”- hey after digging for 4 hours on a broiling day and having used all our own water we’d drink anything. I still remember coming up from Wollaston Beach to the parking lot on a scorcher , absolutely parched, drinking the first drops of a tepid Tab which just foamed explosively right out from my mouth and nose. Foster’s son “Skippy” was at least partially deaf and dumb and often blitzed and I remember watching him staggering on the Germantown beach in gradually smaller sircles until he fell backwards and fortunately missed impaling himself on his clam fork. Master Joe Malik with his overalls and classic Zen rejoinder “The less I know the better I feel”- seemed inane at the time ,but is a good one in the “whatever and it is what it is” era . …There were guys named “Hog” and other cute appelations, a number of “brew afficianados” and those “chemically enhanced” all drawn by the variable hours, and loose work requirements.
My brother Rick aka Bernie- a much better mollusk harvester than I , joined me out on the clam flats during our summers off from teaching,but in 1981 due to the tax cutting Prop 2 ½ we were both laid off from our jobs with no rehire in sight and to supplement our unemployment out we went to dig in earnest desperation . I had finished the SeaBright album and the band had dis-banded and despite hundreds of attempts to sell my music it turned out that I was not going to support us by being a song-writer and sometime performer and some real 2- punch anxiety set in as I realized I was not to be a teacher either- Well in January I did get a redemptive job with the Lung Association …having learned much with the help of counseling and medication to cope with life crises…
Sometimes going to the flats in the very early AM Robbie would drive, the legendary Lance in the front seat ( who at times hid in the eel grass to avoid the clam wardens as he did not have a license to dig) Ricky and I in the back seat with Robbie’s “psych” music blasting…I was 31 at the time and just felt sonically assaulted. As the fall progressed I got more desperate. On one ocassion Robbie talked me into bootlegging in a closed area in Braintree- he charactericzed it as “loaded” and on a Sunday morning we were digging away, he looked up and yelled ,”Shit ,it’s the Green Meanies!” (Environmental Police) coming in every direction with no escape for us. We were relieved of our clams, photographed (I made the weirdest face I could while pulling a stocking cap low over my face – please don’t publish this in the Ledger under “Former Teacher Disgraced” ), and we were issued $100 dollar fines which Rob could make in a day or two and it would take me 5. Thankfully the photo was not published and my car not impounded, and I went to the courthouse and paid the fine. Speaking of clam dreams I had a classic- I was digging next to Robbie,not finding a single clam, ending up in a hole 2 feet over my head and he yells just feet away as I climbed out, “Mike you should have dug over here; it was loaded “ ,as he used a bobcat to pile football size clams into the back of an almost full pick-up truck! Another phenomenon was an eye strain looking for clams in the sand/mud whereby when you closed your eyes you could see clam necks coming out of the dark!
Rick and I had some truly bleak November mornings when we scratched Wollaston Beach for 4 hours in the wind and cold and made only $8 for ½ a rack … eventually we both got back to professional employ, thank goodness.
But back to the near- miss tale. Rick and I were digging off the Adams Shore beach (just down from what would be the Roche-Cotter residence on Post Island in 7 years.) It was the summer of 1980, an August evening, very humid, coming on dusk and it started to pour, just pelting rain and we were both soaked. We could hear thunder and see lightning over Boston and Rick ,the science teacher exclaimed, “Hey Mike maybe we ought to get out of here; that lightning is getting close.” Older Bro Mike, the English teacher replied, “No, don’t worry. That lightning is 25 miles away!” The Y on away was just out of my mouth when there was a huge explosion and blinding flash and we both jumped straight up in the air. Looking up we could see where lightning had struck the chimney of the house not 100 feet from us,smoking bricks were still in the air and the residents ran out holding their ears from the concussion. Ricky and I soaking wet, jumped up out of our water filled holes, dropped our metal buckets and forks and ran up to the car to give ourselves a grounded breather…man that was as close to getting fried along with some clams as I ever want to be!