A Bivalve to Behold
 Durell Godfrey
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(10/08/2008) On Sunday it rained all morning, then stopped and the sun popped out — to the delight of a large group of people who had assembled in front of the Donald Lamb Building on Bluff Road in Amagansett in honor of, not some celebrity or politico, but the quahog, of all things.
It was the occasion of the East Hampton Town Trustees’ annual clam contest. Mercenaria mercenaria has thusly been anointed for the 18th year without a miss. And the object of this affair richly deserves its acclaim. It is one of the few organisms that still bears the original Native American name, not the English name, and with good reason.
Those who preceded us here built a large part of their life around the quahog. Other wild food stocks would come and go, migrate away, or dwindle down to a few, but not the clam, it was always around for the taking. You would be hard pressed to find an Indian midden that didn’t contain hard clam shells, or bluish inner parts of them that were used as the coin of the realm, wampum, among different Native American communities along the Northeast Coast in the 1600s.
Every bit of the clam was used. You might say it was the staff of life. For many of us here on the East End, it still is.
When I was a boy on the North Fork it was hard to find a household that didn’t have a large clamshell or two around. They were used decoratively because of the color and shininess of the nacre or the fascinating pattern of circular concentric ridges, doubled as ashtrays, and were even used as bowls or plates, the “half shells.”
The meats could be eaten raw, cooked whole, in the shell or parted from it, or chowdered. Clams were plentiful in the Peconics. You could dig them with your toes or use a rake, and it was a rare individual who didn’t go clamming. It was as popular as fishing or hunting or Sunday pickup baseball, and one could do it all year around, except when the waters were frozen over in the dead of winter.
What we didn’t know at that time is that the quahog is as venerable as we old-timers and as venerable as another local creature with a hard shell, the box turtle. Both can live to be centenarians.
Several of our wild oaks and a few of our white pines are more than a hundred years old. And it is not always the thickness of the bole, what we call the “d.b.h.” or diameter at breast height, that gives the oak’s age away. I have found more than 125 annuli in oak cross sections that were less than a foot in diameter, while others a foot and a half in diameter had 80 or fewer rings.
Aging a quahog by its size may be just as deceptive. Every year since the trustees’ contest first began, clams from Lake Montauk, Napeague Harbor, Accabonac Harbor, and Three Mile Harbor have made it to the contest’s judging table. Every year the largest clam by weight, thickness, and edge-to-edge length has come from Napeague Harbor.
One suspects, however, that the largest clams from Three Mile Harbor and Accabonac Harbor, two-thirds the size of the Napeague Harbor ones, are just as old. We know that the oldest clams in Lake Montauk are comparative youngsters compared to the others: Lake Montauk, once Long Island’s largest freshwater lake, was opened to the sea permanently only in the mid-1920s. Hard clams can’t survive in fresh water; they need tidal, saline water.
The bottom sediments of Napeague Harbor are rich in iron, residual from a time about 3,000 years ago when the land between Montauk and mainland Amagansett was preoccupied by bogs, several smaller ones of which survive today.
Certain microbes known as iron-precipitating bacteria make a living in bogs; their metabolism deposits iron as a waste product. In Colonial times, when the mother country was reluctant to furnish the colonies with iron and other metals lest the colonists manufacture their own guns, which would be used against her sometime in the future, iron was scarce. Its principal source was bogs.
On color aerial photographs, the rust-colored bottom of Napeague Harbor is quite evident. The sands on Napeague Harbor’s east shore are reddish.
When bay scallops were around, those harvested from Napeague Harbor were bigger across than those from Accabonac and Three Mile Harbors. However, as I discovered in a study I did while at Southampton College, their muscles, the parts we relish, were no bigger around than the muscles measured from those other two water bodies.
The Napeague scallops may have been pumping iron, but their inner physique didn’t acknowledge it.
On the other hand, the hard clam meats — a good part of which are the muscular “digging feet” — of the largest Napeague clams are larger than those from the largest Three Mile Harbor, Accabonac Harbor, and Lake Montauk clams. They could be taking Geritol!