If they try to take me away I will plead the 5th.

We have lived on the Oregon Coast for more than three and a half years now. Its a beautiful place, with a lot of unique opportunities. One of those opportunities is to go clamming. I have not been clamming since we moved here. I have a vague memory of going clamming with my family when I was very young, but its mostly a memory of digging in the sand and Grandma cooking the clams. I don't think I got any clams on that occasion. To this day, despite my good intentions to be a true Coastie and learn to clam, I have not yet done it. Most of the reason for this is because as a Mom of five boys, I just don't usually think about going out in the early morning or late evening hours to dig in the sand with water around my ankles. I would not be able to keep an eye on the boys if I did that and I am certainly not going to go out clamming all alone. It has still been on my list of things to do...until today's events have put an uncertain future in the idea of clamming for me.


I have a friend whose Grandpa goes clam digging on a regular basis, and he always gives his clams away. We were talking about it on the phone earlier, and she mentioned that he had gone clamming this morning, and she had some clams she could give me. She made the 15 minute drive over to my house, and gave me a bag of clams. I would say there were 10 or so razor clams in the bag. It was pretty exciting to contemplate making clam chowder with fresh clams since clam chowder is one of my favorite things to make, and I have always used canned clams. I opened up the bag and this is what greeted me.

I should have taken a picture of my actual clams, but I wasn't thinking that it would become a blogging moment at the time. My clams looked pretty much like these ones anyhow, except their necks were stretched out a lot longer than this. Yes, they were a little on the ugly side, but I was going to eat them so I didn't really mind. Then something happened as I put them in a container and ran water over them...

They started to MOVE. Yes folks, they were still ALIVE. This is where I admit that was uneducated about what it takes to dig and actually use fresh clams. I thought that they died once they were out of the sand. Silly me...You have to KILL them.

So here I am with a sink full of clams. Clams who are stretching their necks out, and moving their clammy feet also known as diggers around looking for a place to dig in. This is where I became squeamish. My friend had given me no directions on the shucking and cleaning of the clams and I had assured her that I could look it up on my trusty teacher, the Internet. I had done this previous to seeing the clams move. What I was supposed to do, is use a knife to separate the muscles from the shell. None of the articles I read said anything about the clam still being alive when I did this. I went back to my Internet pal and looked again. There are two ways to shell a razor clam. One is the way described above. The other is to use hot water. I finally found an article that was truthful about the fact that when you pour the hot water over the clams, they die (meaning this was the only article that wasn't afraid to say that the clams were alive before that) and it also mentioned that if you were squeamish about killing the clams you could leave them in fresh water where they would slowly drown. (Remember where my clams are?) I began to feel horrible for torturing the clams like this. The water was boiling, and I had to do something. I also had three curious little boys looking at the clams and wondering what I was going to do. I moved the clams from the fresh water and into a colander. I debated with myself for a while. I thought about driving them back to the ocean and setting them free, but some of them were damaged during their capture and I knew those ones would not survive. I steeled myself, picked up the pot of boiling water and poured it over them. The clam shells opened and out came the razor clams. I had officially become a killer.

I won't go into the gory details of the rest of the cleaning process, except to say that I am more familiar with the insides of a razor clam than I would like to be. Half of the clams went into a nice batch of clam chowder, and the other half will be disposed of tomorrow. By the time anyone reads this and sends the authorities to take me away for cruelty to clams the evidence will be long gone...and yet...the guilt remains. Tasty guilt, but guilt all the same.