LOW TIDE
- Katie Lowe
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
An excerpt from Christi Elliott's Always Game---out now!
All photos by Mat Trogner
DURING THE SPRING AND summer, I go clamming. You can dig clams all year, but I’m too busy with hunting and fishing. Clamming is gathering—a kind of mingling, in this case, between hunting and fishing. Unlike hunting and fishing, I’m guaranteed to succeed, to always bring home dinner. I find it methodical, peaceful, and relaxing.
One day last summer, I gathered my gear to dig clams for Travis’ birthday. I wore leggings and LaCrosse rubber hip boots. In the back of the 4Runner I put a plastic laundry basket, clam rake, and a hod (basket for the clams) that is exactly one peck, the limit I’m allowed to haul with my permit. One peck is almost two and a half gallons, plenty for a meal or two. I also grabbed those blue rubber gloves that lobstermen wear. Hanging on the basket are two measuring tools: one a PVC ring, two inches, that I use to measure clams (if it falls through it it’s too small), and the other is a stainless steel quahog measuring ring that you use to measure the hinge of a quahog (if it doesn’t touch both ends, it’s not big enough to keep).
I arrived just before low tide at Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park in Freeport around 11am. From the parking lot, I took the wooden steps on a trail down to the water’s edge, the northern reaches of Casco Bay. I surveyed the flats. I saw turned-up mud where others had dug and left, herring gulls squawked and pecked at the clams the diggers inadvertently broke and left behind. It should take me only an hour to dig a peck, pretty slow compared to commercial diggers. From the land, I walked out onto the mud flats. My theory is that the farther I walk from the stairs, the better the digging will be, just assuming the area near the stairs has been picked over. I continued a ways down toward an osprey nest sitting atop a tall dead tree.
The walking surface was terrible—a soupy muck. I tried to walkup on the bank as much as I could because once you walk in the mud, you sometimes lose a boot, or kick up mud on yourself. It’s a messy job. I smelled the tidal rot and a slightly fishy aroma of low tide. I saw the water line a few hundred feet beyond—and I remembered that once it turns, the tide would come in quickly. In the past when I started digging, I would look out to see the waterline far away, and then, getting lost in the job at hand, I would be surprised when suddenly the tide was lapping at my boots.
When I got to a spot that looks good, I walked out a little farther and looked for holes in the mud the size of a pencil eraser that indicate where, at high tide, the clam’s siphon, or neck, was sticking out into the water. At low tide, they retract their siphon, leaving a telltale hole that betrays their location.
I found a few holes and started digging. I bent over and dug my rake tines all the way down, then I lifted the mud up and turned it over. I dug a couple of inches behind the telltale holes to avoid spear-ing the clam. I flipped the mud and looked, scoping for retracting siphons. Sometimes clams will squirt water and you can dig them out with your fingers. I flipped over more mud and picked up my first clam—it was long and almost filled by palm. A good clam for the birthday boy, I thought. The shell was covered in mud, so I wiped it off. I inspected the shell to make sure it wasn’t broken, that I found a living creature and not a whitened shell filled with sand. Live clams have black-ish-blue shells. Since this was a good spot, I stopped looking for holes and instead dug the original hole bigger and bigger. I quickly had my limit.
Since I had been digging in the same place for a while, my boots were nearly cemented in the muck. I worked hard to lift my feet, to maneuver in the sticky mud that wanted to pull the boots from my feet. The mud made a slurping sound when I finally freed my boots. I carried my haul back to shore and gave my clams a rinse in a small tide pool. Back at my truck, I removed my muddy boot sand changed into my flip flops for the drive home.
When I arrived home, I hosed my boots and gear off in the driveway and left them to dry. Since I rinsed the clams in the ocean, the mud was mostly gone from their shells. In the kitchen I put them in a pot with a wet paper towel over them and then in the fridge to stay cool. For Travis’ birthday dinner, I rinsed the clams in fresh water to wash away any remaining sand and grit before I steamed them. I boiled water for rinsing and melted butter for dipping while I steamed the clams until they opened. I placed the steamed clams in a large serving bowl and then Travis and I dug out the meat. We slid the outer skin off the neck, and dipped the meat into the hot water, to give them a final rinse, then dropped them in the butter, and then devoured them, one by one.
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Join author Christi Elliott and Islandport Press for the celebration of her new memoir, Always Game. The chefs at The Villager Cafe have created a special wild game tasting menu inspired by the book.
Nov 20, 2025, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
The Villager Cafe, 25 Mechanic St, Camden
