From the Archives • December 2000

...armies of diggers yanked, maimed, and pillaged with abandonment... Peter Lindsey

The Professor would like to present a couple of bits of doggerel as prefatory material for his screed this month:

Sadly, both clams and menhaden appear to have vanished in many parts of our country. Unlike schools of migratory fish, our regional bivalves, the northwest razor clams, move only a scant distance in their short lifetimes. They scuffle up to the surface of sand bars to feed on plankton, then kick back down a few feet into their sandy beds. Tagged clams have been found to travel only 50 feet or so laterally in a year.

The little rascals, toothsome and tender as they are, take a terrible beating from armies of shoreside diggers. They've always reminded me of Schmoos, those small, vulnerable little mushroom-like entities that appeared in early Al Capp cartoon strips. Schmoos, like razor clams, were succulent and helpless. They practically begged for predation.

For decades the harvest remained bountiful and seemingly boundless here. Numbers started to fall off on local beaches by the 70's. People blamed El Nino, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens ("lots of pumice on the offshore beaches. The clam spat can't establish itself properly"), and shifting currents from the South Jetty of the Columbia River. Forget that clams were once extracted by bulldozers from local beaches, that cars skimmed across clam beds at low tides, and that armies of diggers yanked, maimed, and pillaged with abandonment for most of the 20th Century. Clamming on northern Oregon beaches for the last two decades could be optimistically described as "spotty." By the 90's, the average person's daily catch included a preponderance of yearling clams about the size of an extra small oyster removed from the shell. Oregon's bag limit remained 24 clams. The season ran from September to July, digging permissable on any low tide series. Commercial diggers dug in the same areas as sports diggers; less than ethical commercial harvesters hauled sacks home to stock the freezer.

On November 11th of this year we travelled to the southern Washington beaches for their short opening. Conditions were sweet: gentle surf and mild weather. In 10 minutes each of us dug our limit of 15 clams, each of them the size of a basketball sneaker. Other clam diggers we encountered evidenced the same success.

One needn't be a Rhodes Scholar to see the wisdom of Washington's radically curtailed seasons, strict bag limits, and stringent enforcement.

I feel obligated to nudge the State of Oregon gently out of sheer embarrassment. When will our Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife stand in and make some tough decisions? Thirty miles away in the State of Washington the clam fishery is thriving. Here in Oregon the creatures seem destined to go the way of the dodo and the abalone. Commencing changes tomorrow may be too late, but to do nothing is unthinkable.

Page Top • The Morgue • Current