Adventure in the Underground Economy: When We Shelled it Out

From ages 14 through 18, I engaged more than 250 days of outings each year--fishing after school, sometimes before homeroom, weekends. At 19, I began a life of commercial shell fishing. Hardcore outdoor activity, especially considering the wetsuit work in January and February. My teens had been a life of incessant activity and little conflict between interests outdoors, social, and school, little conflict besides the gripes of grouchy Black Dog mornings and the usual sorts of uncertainties teenagers work out in the privacy of their minds. Absolutely no reason existed for why I couldn't succeed professionally. Offered a staff position on the Manahawkin Beacon/Beach Haven Times the same year I began clamming, however, I declined. I chose the bay because I wanted to be a literary writer. I knew the outdoors. I understood it would serve my writing, as my writing would serve it. Getting published on fishing at 16 in various magazines, I finished my last article for The New Jersey Fisherman at 19 and shoved off the mainland for Long Beach Island.

The following is from a piece I wrote for The Sandpaper's Memorial Day edition, 2010. I use the description "Underground Economy" in the post title and think of the spirit of the perennial American economic pursuit beyond the bounds of regularly defined employment, much as 18th and 19th century Rocky Mountain fur trappers are remembered as rugged individualists. And yet with spiritual abandon rather than limitation to basic economic pursuits, writers such Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey, Jack London and others too numerous to mention have fulfilled free lives outside convention to emerge in university reading material. We hope to inspire bold possibilities transforming our dark age so light and love may come to us all. Jack London committed suicide, but I do not judge his life a loss. Many would contest the notion that Kerouac fulfilled his life, since he drank himself to death. But no doubt exists in my mind that each of the three I've mentioned lived much fuller lives than conformists afraid to get up and go out. Every clammer I knew held a state license, which made us legit above any illegal underground economy operation, but to have embraced this way of life recalls what one of the band members of The Outlaws said, that each of us has some outlaw in him, and more than one of the clammers I've known loves "Green Grass and High Tides," the Outlaws' signature performance.

One of us parodied philosopher Rene DeCartes. "I clam, therefore I am," which struck me instantly as having nothing to do with DeCartes, but certainly existentialism and the ambition to achieve a genuine life. To have turned our backs and walked out of the formal economy required of us no small measure of daring and apprehension. We all knew that to be an Outsider is to embrace difficulty, and for me the difficulty has indeed been grave; while each of us in any walk of life may have some "outlaw" in him, perhaps virtually no one admits it because it isn't comfortable. Nevertheless, if we are to overcome the shadows, we cannot do it only by old established patterns, but by the brilliance of sunlight itself.

When We Shelled it Out

The temperature, I remember, held at 22 F. Wind drove 20 to 30 knots out of the northwest, and three layers of neoprene wetsuit insulated our bodies. A quarter-inch of neoprene hood wrapped each of our heads; a diver's facemask covered each of our faces; quarter-inch neoprene neoprene Brute boots with heavy nylon treads gave our feet the potential to work. I leapt over the gunwale into a rush of frigid water.

Barry and John were already treading.

"We know the spot's here when the ice melts," Barry said.

"Hope that's not too long," John said.

The bay would soon freeze solid. John had a mortgage to pay. A young family to support. It didn't matter to me how long the bay would stay frozen. I was 23 and family wanted me at college. My freedom mattered more. Good money made that possible. But neither money nor the ubiquitous beach bum image held me to Long Beach Island. I wrote. For someone who loved to pore through books and spend trackless hours exploring ideas by writing in notebook after notebook, clamming seemed the perfect life.

I owned nine boats in total--and some got totaled--over 13 years. I owned all of the equipment needed, license, and sold my catch daily to local seafood wholesalers. We worked low tides, self-employed. Clam treading is the method of jogging backward in water anywhere from knee deep to as deep as the nose, depending on tidal stage and spot. Stepped on, a clam feels like a golf ball. Any of us dipped or dunked, grabbed a clam, and tossed it in a bushel basket. It was in fact an aerobic workout--even though some of us smoked Marlboros. When we smoked, we lifted clams by toes instead of by hand until only the butt remained, although some of us preferred the method in general to dunking. When I paid off necessities, I sometimes worked no more than two hours a day for weeks running, but generally a day's work was four or five hours of low tide. Often I worked with friends; often I worked alone.

Sometimes I felt as if I had the whole bay and island to myself. I never met anyone else who combined treading, beach, going out and so on, with intense study, writing, and exploration of life, ideas, self, nature, and society. My explorations, informed by fertile intuition and chosen by conscious judgment, had advantages college couldn't offer me, and over the course of the 13 years I clammed, I enrolled at three schools for short periods. College is a program more and less imposed upon the student. Following my curiosity instead, I freely developed my mind. At that young age I studied philosophy--Alan Watts, Ayn Rand, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Jean Paul Sartre Karl Jaspers, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Plato, Aristotle--taking on the difficulty it presented with great vitality and concentration. When I first began reading Nietzsche at age 20, I was lost on him, but I read Watts with great ease. Nietzsche merely required my persistence, and a couple of years later, I understood him. I read dozens of novels, poetry, and my interest in psychology especially involved Carl G. Jung's work. 

A housemate read classic novels. With a propensity to grand vision and a yearning for freedom, George joined the Navy as a scuba diver, then came to Long Beach Island to clam. Mark, whom I introduced to treading when together we quit a side job, had a serious meditation discipline and studied psychology to finish postgraduate work at Rutgers. By the time I knew George and Mark, I was already along the way of my years at the shore, but before meeting these two men, I spent the summer of 1982 clamming and discussing the Great Books of Western Civilization with a friend, Scott, from St. John's College, Annapolis, MD, where I was enrolled and studied during the spring, 1982, semester. And during the summers of 1983, 1984, and 1985, my brother David and more than half a dozen or so of his friends--all them bright at the least--spent summers on Long Beach Island and clammed.

First introduced to treading in the summer of 1980, I saw that most clammers were college kids. But during the run on the Shelter Island clam beds in fall 1983, I learned that many clammers came from who knows where. Once I stood on the floorboard of my boat and gazed a long time in awe at about 300 other boats. We averaged about 350 clams per hour, and sometimes near 600. I usually worked two tides, spending seven or eight hours a day treading that fall. Paid nine cents a clam, we all did very well for what the economy was in 1983. I paid off my new Toyota pickup truck in six month's time. By January of 1984, 13 1/2 cents a clam kept the hardcore few, me included, working hard in freezing winds and brine, ice floes bumping us on at least one occasion.

Old time rakers also worked through winter. They used a long-handled raking device known as a Shinnecock, named after the Shinnecock Indian Nation on Long Island. Made of heavy aluminum with interchangeable handle parts, together measuring from 20 to 45 feet in length, it's a formidable device that I had the opportunity to try while working in Florida. The head of a Shinnecock is 30 inches wide with four-inch teeth and a basket scoop behind them. Rakers rarely pulled 200 necks or more in one boat drift. Generally, treaders tossed clams into their metal bushel baskets faster than rakers pulled them.

Littlenecks and topnecks are smaller and more marketable clams. Chowders can be five inches wide and tough to eat. But I used to break a chowder open on occasion while busy in the water. That's a fresh clam! I have in my private collection the chowder shell of all chowders, a two-million-year-old fossil Mercenaria mercenaria (hard clam of the bays) that measures 6 1/2 inches tip to shell tip. I bought it at a paleontological and geological market event in 2004 at the Morris Museum near Morristown, New Jersey, just up the road from George Washington's Revolutionary War Headquarters.

Unlike the brave soldiers at Jockey Hollow during the winter of 1777, rakers kept warm in the winter by propane heaters stationed in their garveys. They seemed to well-respect us treaders. A garvey is an open boat made of Pinelands cedar. The boats originated on Barnegat Bay during the 18th century. By contrast, treaders' fashionably colored surfing and diving wetsuits featured that 20th century neoprene I've mentioned. Modern fiberglass varieties served as our boats, which sturdily carried onion bags filled with clams.

During spring 1984, I made a short visit to St. John's College and desires arose afterwards to try another school, Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Hampshire is not a school for the classics as is St. John's, but the school's motto is from the greatest of ancient Greek philosophers, Aristotle: "To know is not enough." Founded in 1970, Hampshire has remained an unconventional school. I seemed to sense 20th century Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung waiting for me there before I had reviewed any course offerings.

"Hey, Junghog!" My friend Mark, who happened to be a student at Hampshire, introduced the moniker suddenly on a bright afternoon when I might have been headed to the beach. I had borrowed his copy of Jung's memoir for about two months a year or so before I enrolled. At the time, Mark drove an hour to LBI each day from Roosevelt near Hightstown, meeting me at dawn when that coincided with low tide. He was a dedicated clammer who earned more than $10,000.00 the summer before he began his graduate work at Rutgers. My girlfriend of 4 1/2 years lived in Philadelphia, frequently visiting me on the island. Alternatively I went to Philadelphia, and we traveled elsewhere besides. As deeply inward as I traveled--becoming more and more interfused with nature--with her and with friends, we kept culturally connected.

Most people, perhaps, believed that the city, and the whole of the nation, were secure as stone. But even with Reagan in office and the gathering entrepreneurial upswing of the 1980's, I believed that a future crash worse than that of 1929 was possible, although I was confident, more than confident--something absolute that could overcome any difficulty informed me--that relentless persistence will reward us with renewal of the human spirit's greatness.

I had always known that I would return to the mainland. I held my last commercial clamming license in 1993. By then clams had all but vanished. In 1992, a clam bed yielded 450 of them an hour, the very last of such numbers. Clammers by the hundreds and thousands had over the years depleted the clams. Much is said about pollution in the bay and I have got word that most of the eelgrass is gone. Eelgrass is necessary for clams to reproduce, but I know we clammed the bay out. Reproductive inhibition due to lack of eelgrass seems to have coincided with our take. Improving the bay's ecology is possible, because the pollution is a by-product of development near the bay shore.