PEOPLE OFTEN USE THE WORD “culture” as a synonym for “cuisine.” When they claim to adore the “diverse and vibrant culture” of the city they live in, what they’re actually trying to say, nine times out of ten, is that they like kung pao chicken. Those of us who grew up in Massachusetts often hear strangers extol our culture. But it is seldom our elegant accents or our well-earned sanctimony that so beguile them. They generally mean that they like fried clams.
That is why the worst outbreak of red tide since 1972 strikes people as not just an inconvenience but a civilizational crisis. Red tide is an algae called alexandrium fundyense. The science behind it remains obscure to most people, largely because getting a clear picture of it would gross you out to the point where you wouldn’t want to eat clams anymore. Basically, alexandrium fundyense produces a brain poison called saxitoxin, which concentrates in clams. This is not such a problem for clams, which do not have brains to speak of, but it is dangerous to the solid plurality of Massachusetts residents who do.
My father used to take me clamming a lot. We did it just the way the commercial clam-diggers did, sloshing along the waterline in Wellington boots with a shovel and a pail. I would walk behind with the pail. My dad would bang the stock of the shovel into the damp sand. If the sand bubbled, that meant there was a clam there, and he would start digging.
There was generally one perfect clam tide every couple of months or so. In my memory, though, they always happened at about 4 o’clock in the morning in the freezing cold. The moon would illumine the bubbles in the pounded sand, the lacy line of surf, the boats just off the beach, and the cliffs. It was immensely romantic, which I suspect was its appeal for my father. For me, at 7 or so, the appeal was in getting to chase seagulls around with a shovel. But there was also the food. We would walk up the cliffs with buckets of pocketbook-sized quahogs clinking in the pail, and these would provide meal after meal for weeks–fried clams, stuffed clams, clam casserole, clam chowder.
Pretty much everyone lived this way, so the red-tide outbreak of three decades ago meant minor hardship and major grousing. Most of our neighbors scoffed at the scientists’ warnings. They thought red tide was being blown all out of proportion by ecologists, as they were then called, and various granola-eating weirdos. (“All you gotta do is boil it out,” said the father of a friend.) That same spring of 1972 was when recycling began in our town, and the resistance it met was even more dogged. I’ve always associated red tide with the last days of the ecological Old Regime, marked by indifference to (and contempt for) the environment.
Our favorite swimming hole back then was called the Lead Mills, a beautiful place where the harbor ran under a disused railroad bridge. Not until a couple of years ago was the place fenced off, when it occurred to some on-the-ball young selectman that the place was called the Lead Mills for a reason.
A popular fishing spot was the power plant at the mouth of the harbor, where it was rumored toxic chemicals poured into the harbor, and gigantic and ghastly fish bred. Most cod near the shore were about the size of your forearm, big ones were the size of your arm, but the ones over by the power plant, veering around with their eerie, O-shaped mouths wide open, looked like golf bags with fins. The fishing is good in pretty much every cubic foot of Massachusetts Bay, but the power plant was where everyone wanted to be. On a Saturday afternoon in summer it looked like one of those oil paintings of the battle of Lepanto, crowded with boats and ropes and thrashing fish.
When I think of America in the 1960s and ’70s, I think of garbage tumbling down main streets on windy days. Any chain-link fence would be flecked with napkins and newspapers and potato-chip bags. As a Little League centerfielder, I would always make a preliminary circuit around my position to reconnoiter the heavier concentrations of dog mess and broken glass that might make a sliding catch unadvisable. The year that recycling and red tide made their appearance (along with “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl,” if memory serves), I was driving along a highway in the back seat of a friend’s car. He took his finished can of Tahitian Treat and chucked it out the window. He saw that I was about to remonstrate with him, because he fixed me preemptively with that 10-year-old’s squinting look that combines hatred and pity and said, “What do you think ‘Disposable’ means, idiot?”
–Christopher Caldwell
