I don’t know why, but I’m always the only woman quahoging. (Soft shell clams are a different story.)  And I easily scoop them up without a rake, at the water’s edge. Men clammers need to use a rake and go all the way up to their chests in water because it’s really tough to get good leverage. This way they can make clamming hard work. Then they feel less guilty spending the day at the beach while their wives are at home frying the onions and potatoes in a sweltering kitchen awaiting the return of their burly fishermen from their laborious ordeal.

They come home feigning exhaustion, even though they’ve spent four out of the five clamming hours swigging brewskies and telling each other made-up stories of peril in clamland.  They lug in their basket of quahogs which they ceremoniously hand over to be cooked for the chowder. This is always accompanied by well-rehearsed pretend grunting.  (I’ve seen them teaching each other how to do it, sort of a right of passage from old timer to new.)

My husband Bob and I routinely rake in quahogs at the Cotuit town landing on Cape Cod.  We never take for granted the sights of sailboats drifting by, the magnificent ocean vista leading to Nantucket Sound, the deer ticks which have ballooned up to the size of basketballs on our shoulders. In some ways, our excursions, although delightful, have become habitually predictable . . .  that is until last week. And that’s when I learned a lesson about sharing, camaraderie and how to stop the other clammers from despising me so much that they sent a petition to the Barnstable selectmen to have my shellfish license revoked stating, “either she goes, or your pet dies”.

The first time we clammed, some twenty years back, we saw others wearing  waders and figured it was a requirement. We didn’t own any but we didn’t want to look stupid. So we  put big garbage bags on each of our legs and safety pinned the bags to our shorts. First of all, it was ninety-two degrees. Secondly, we were only in ankle-deep water. Thirdly, with the sticky plastic bonding to the skin on our legs, we quickly grew very irritable and began accusatory name calling before calling it quits.

Nowadays we’re savvy clammers and we don’t wear waders in warm, shallow water, although I think about buying a pair every time a spider crab slithers across my foot and I am forced to shriek involuntarily like one of those Gestapo-style police sirens or this very annoying Screech Owl that hangs out near my bedroom window all summer. Somehow he knows when low tide is really early and we’ve made plans to hit the beach at dawn. Those are the nights he picks to make his goofy owl sound every time my breathing slows and I’m on the verge of dreamland. That is always followed by a quick slap on Bob’s chest because I’m startled by the noise. Then Bob gets angry at me even though I argue that the owl’s to blame.

I used to think, “Oh, nature at my doorstep. The haunting sound of the midnight owl.” After a few sleepless weeks of this torture, I decided that smashing a dozen heavy coffee mugs through the TV screen would be a more smoothing sound. So all night long, I fling open my window and yell, “Hey, stuff a sock in it, you lousy owl!” Two weeks ago, my neighbor, whom I never liked because he smells, sent the police over, but that’s another story.

My crab screams send nearby over-reactive clammers into a bit of a grouchy tither. Last week, after my tenth squeal, they decided they’d had enough.

“You scared the wits out of me. Now shut the heck up.” This is not what the clammers said, but it’s the closest I could get in a family oriented magazine.  

Needless to say, the owl has nested in the windowbox in spite of the Aerosmith tape being piped into the hole the irritating woodpecker made on the side. And rather than be yelled at by my seaworthy chums, I have changed my knee-jerk crab reaction from a scream to a personalized rendition of whatever sea shanty-type song I can remember. Unfortunately, I can only recall the words to Sloop John B, and I seem to get a kick out of singing it with different accents. Sometimes I sing it like I’m German, “Vee sailed on zee Sloop John B.”  My favorite is Jackie Mason, where I end every line like a question while I shrug my shoulders. “Nu? My grandfather and me?”

I brag. This is taboo in clamworld.  "‘Hogs are jumping into my basket, Bob. Don’t waste your time using a rake.” And the topper is - I yell this in a clamless area so that everybody inches over to my spot (thinking I don’t notice) while I hone in where the getting’s good.  It’s no wonder nobody likes me.

So last week, while flipping clams from my right hand over my head into my basket on the left, and singing really loud, “You’re sure to fall in love with old Cape Cod . . . ” a clamville neophyte approached me. He was a big guy in waders with suspenders and no shirt, which made me wonder if he was wearing pants.

“This is my first time,” he said.  “Any suggestions?’  He had hard lines around his smile, which wasn’t much of a smile at that. And it looked like it was no easy task to ask me for help.

“You bet.” I was about to tell him that clams float and you skim them from the surface with a net. It was then that I saw Bob’s look. A look I knew all too well. A look which said, “You were a newcomer once.”

And so, I realized that although more clams in his basket might mean fewer in mine, I thought about the garbage bag leggings. And I remembered how embarrassing it was thinking whole clams on the menu meant you ate the shell too. So I showed him how to quahog last week. But the hardest and most self-sacrificing task of all was to give him the recipe to Bob’s  prizewinning Quahogs Rockefeller. 

So when someone wants a piece of the action, whether it’s clams, fiddleheads, blueberries or cattails, remember we’re supposed to share.

Especially if Bob is within earshot.