Sketch: March, melting snow, 32 degrees Fahrenheit, -4’ tide, clams
The mountains approach the sea, and on the shoulders of these mountains are brush-choked benches that cliff into the Pacific. Looking down on these benches, you can see the naked branches of alder, willow, Devil’s club. From the air, the brushy bench looks benign, but a mind schooled in Alaskan terrain quails at the thought of walking up this marsh of thorns. A brown bear has stirred from his winter sleep and left a line of tracks in the old snow, parallel to our flight path. A coyote. The air is so clean and crystalline you could shatter it like glass if you had a stick long enough.
The tide is on its way out when we arrive, although it won’t slack for another hour. We turn the airplane into the wind and park it on the beach. There’s six of us, there’s another airplane involved, and we are all fathers. It’s a Monday, but clam tides don’t always happen on a Saturday; anyway, we won’t be gone for more than a day of work.
A creek falls into the sea here, fanning into a flat beach that grows every minute with the falling tide. The creeks whiplash all over his beach, changing with every tide. There’s already at least a half mile of beach. I don’t know a clam from a rock, but it doesn’t take long to develop an eye for the depressions they make in the sand when they burrow into the sand. When clams burrow into the sand, they stick out their “foot,” burrow into the sand, swell the foot with water, which pulls water from the surrounding sand, which allows them to stick their foot a little deeper. They then pull this foot toward the shell, which pulls the clam deeper into the sand. If this seems like a primitive and slow method of travel, just try catching one. You can find a clam with his head above the sand but by the time you get to him with a shovel, he will be eight inches down and bent for the netherworld.
There’s yelling, and dashing, and frivolous digging. All of us are dads but we act like boys, ribbing, joking, poking. We are thinking of our children; one picks up a an empty conch shell and tosses it into the bucket. “For my boys.” He says. Another tosses a shell into the bucket. “For the babies.” I pick up a corrugated bi-valve shell, with the lines radiating from the hinge, and think of Raelyn. I toss it into the bucket, but someone else cleans that bucket of clams, later, and the shell is misplaced and I have to substitute it for another.
These men are not perfect. They say things they shouldn’t, they yell too loudly. I find a streak in myself that’s borderline mean when I am with these boys, and I know that my vices are on display, too. We go for the throat when we are together, the good part being if you say something that’s not quite right they will cut it down. But we are happy to be alive, and happy to be here, on this earth, doing this activity. As I grow older, I am becoming better at accepting the flaws in myself and the people around me, which allows me to have friends.
Toe to the Pacific, back to the Alaska Range, I stand between the restless sea and the ring of fire. Soon we will climb into a tube frame covered with fabric, and fly back up the bench and across the salt, between the sky and the earth, held up by fragile steel and aluminum, borne by the predictability of the wind. Between ethereal and matter, the mutability of the eroding sand and the implacability of the mountains, the call of fatherhood and the call of adventure. I have a thermos of coffee and pour several cups on the way home, sharing a cup with my friend. I do not know the balance, if there is a balance between the love of wilderness and the love of domestic life, or if and when a well-lived life is bound in the tensions. Maybe fatherhood is the grandest adventure.
It is a Monday. We have almost three buckets of clams for clam chowder, and I don’t even know If I like clam chowder. But we congregate around a table, cleaning clams and telling jokes. The children run in and out, the women bring a pot of coffee and some cookies and make faces at the clams. It’s good. It strikes me that though I love solitude, any man who can call up two or three other men and depart on a Monday to do an activity for the activities’ sake ought to count his blessings. What better way to navigate your middle years? Some of us have made sacrifices to take a day off. We talk, about trivial, everyday things. We aren’t on religious themes, although we could, and will. For now, we are just a few humans sharing a day and an activity, and wouldn’t trade it for day’s pay.