Closer to the Ground Page 16
Tall buildings. Traffic. Sirens. Doorstep-to-doorstep pavement. A proximity to other people’s lives that my Brooklynite sister-in-law, Sarah, finds comforting. Me? Not so much. My first night “sleeping” in a New York apartment, I learn: The kid upstairs plays basketball and his mother favors high heels; the couple next door is on the brink of divorce; the downstairs neighbors know the words to every song on Cheap Trick at Budokan. Maybe I’m too used to living in the sticks, but I can’t find any comfort in knowing when and how often the guy next door uses the bathroom.
On the other hand, urban life, especially in New York, is not without its charms. For me, that means more and better food than anywhere else on the planet. A smorgasbord of choices. I don’t even know where to start. Although the purpose of this trip is to meet my baby niece and help the new parents, we still have to eat, right? I need to be careful here if I’m going to keep the gluttonous food maniac from showing through my loving-uncle-and-brother disguise.
For my first meal, I take a cab directly from the airport to Grand Sichuan in the East Village to meet my brother. He’s already there when I arrive, wearing the weary, shell-shocked look of a new father. It’s good to see him. He reports that baby Nora is sleeping at the moment, which takes me off the bad-uncle hook, and we’re free to dive into the food. I’ve been dreaming of the xiao long bao (soup dumplings) since Adrian and I snuck out to Grand Sichuan before his wedding nearly two years ago. The dumplings do not disappoint. They arrive in a bamboo basket, trailing a fragrant, ginger-pork steam cloud. On the first bite, the tender covering melts away, releasing a broth so rich in flavor I’m almost moved to tears. As we eat, Adrian brightens and the exhaustion leaves his face. We talk more easily than we have since we were kids, sharing the new common ground of raising babies. With a little heavy-handed encouragement on my part, we also plan out every meal for the rest of my visit.
The first time I hold baby Nora in my arms, though, my one-track quest to eat everything in New York flies off the rails. She’s beautiful. With my muscle memory calibrated to rambunctious 35-and 45-pounders, she feels nearly weightless and impossibly calm. It’s possible that I’m biased because she’s family, but I can already see great things in her small, smiling face. Either that or she really is the best baby in the world.
I imagine her coming to the Island and going fishing and crabbing and digging in the garden with us. Will she be the glamorous city girl dropping in on her barefoot hillbilly cousins? As I weigh the future possibilities, Sarah says, “Just think, your kids will be running through the water and woods while mine are running from the ranting lunatic in the subway.” She said it, not me.
My New York days fall into a rhythm of holding Nora and trying to be helpful while staying out of the way of frantic new parents. When the baby sleeps, I kill time wandering around Brooklyn, window shopping and building up an appetite for my next meal. The endless stream of people is astounding. At one point, I catch my reflection in a storefront window and try to wipe the Jed Clampett look of awe off my face. In a fancy gourmet grocery store, I stumble across the very same chanterelles I was picking last week (“fresh from the Pacific Northwest”) for a stunning $38 a pound. I could have paid for my trip and then some if only I’d filled my duffle bag with mushrooms instead of clothes.
In the evenings, my brother and I eat. Dinnertime is Nora’s favorite nap time, and Sarah, who’s juggling motherhood and graduate school, needs the peace and quiet to study. She generously offers the two food-crazed brothers a free pass between 6:00 and 9:00 p.m., and we do our best to maximize the freedom with Roman Empirestyle gluttony. We stuff ourselves with a magnificent kaiseki service at En Brasserie, highlighted by braised pork belly in bonito broth and a satiny seafood custard; we go for a “light” dinner at Nicky’s Vietnamese Sandwiches, where I can’t decide between the lemongrass chicken or the pork-liver pâté banh mi, so I order – and polish off – both. Then, just in case we might get hungry later, we order another bagful of sandwiches to go. One night, we take a wide-awake Nora with us and “settle” for the pizza joint around the corner. I consume an entire pepperoni pizza that’s better than any I’ve had in years.
Every day, there are Brooklyn bagels from the Bagel Hole – dense, chewy rounds with a light, crisp crust and hearty malt aroma. I eat them for breakfast and lunch – plain, with cream cheese, with the smoked king I brought from home. And once, when I’ve just finished off three of these heavyweight carbo-bombs, I look out the window to see – no way! – the dim sum truck? They bring dim sum to you here? Of course, I had to check it out, which involved char siu baos (steamed and baked), pot stickers, half a dozen shumai dumplings…
Through it all, my brain runs in a closed loop of two divergent thoughts: If we had food like this at home, it would be awesome! If we had food like this at home, I would weigh 350 pounds! But if we had food like this at home, it would be awesome! And so on.
In calmer moments, which is to say, the short periods between meals, I have some real pangs of wishing we could all live closer together, of wanting to watch Nora grow up and to be a regular part of Adrian and Sarah’s life. I want our kids to feel the comfort of a life spent running around with their cousins every day, whether through water and woods or from subway lunatics. Mostly, though, I realize how much I miss my brother.
I’m also missing my own family and the soothing green forest. With every nerve-jangling siren, stranger’s raised voice, or honking horn, I feel like Holly Golightly’s father, lost in Metropolis. (My appreciation for Buddy Ebsen’s career is growing by the minute.) The massive brownstone canyons, lined with concrete and asphalt, carry a river of cars and humanity instead of water. Trees grow only from evenly spaced, well-planned gaps in the pavement. I can feel the weight of it all pressing down on me. Yet my brother navigates the urban chaos with a natural confidence; this place is home to him as much as the Island is to me. I guess it’s time to give up my fantasy that he’ll someday move to the Island and we’ll raise our children together.
On my last day in the city, I am standing in my brother’s kitchen, rocking Nora in my arms and staring out the window. Gray November light filters through the narrow space between buildings. A squirrel runs along the fence carrying something in its mouth. It pauses to eat directly in front of the window. When I look closely, I see that it’s gnawing on a chicken drumstick.
“Holy shit,” I shout, frightening the sleeping baby, “there’s a squirrel eating meat!”
“Oh,” my brother says, not looking up from the baby bottle he’s heating.
“That’s crazy. Where I come from, squirrels eat nuts and berries…not meat.”
Sarah glances out the window, takes the now fussing baby from my arms, and says, “That’s just how we roll in Brooklyn.”
Man, I’m a long way from home.
A week later, a heavy package arrives from New York. Inside I find two dozen of the densest, chewiest, finest bagels ever to exist west of the Mississippi. A gift from baby Nora. I immediately pull a bag of smoked summer king from the freezer, throw it in the microwave to thaw, and start spreading cream cheese. I heart New York.
WINTER
GOING COASTAL: GUNS AND SHOVELS
This one kicked our asses. Even worse, it was completely avoidable. As early as Tuesday, satellite pictures showed a deep low-pressure system loaded with subtropical moisture pushing across the Pacific in our direction. By Friday morning, as we packed the car, the weather service was predicting the storm would make landfall by late afternoon and continue to pound the coast for 36 hours. The marine forecast for near-shore coastal waters: South wind 25 to 35 knots, gusting to 50. Wind waves 7 to 9 feet. West swell 24 feet at 11 seconds. Rain heavy at times. We were heading right into the teeth of it. But at least we’d be on a completely exposed beach. In the surf. At night.
We should have known better. But we were committed: cabin rented, gear packed, friends on the way to meet us. The kids were excited; the parents were excited; we were all ready to g
o. And this was about more than just razor clams. We had tradition to uphold and we weren’t going to bag it on account of a weather forecast. (Okay, actually, I wanted to bag it, but the optimists in the family prevailed.)
For the past 10 years, Stacy and our friend Candace have celebrated their birthdays (which fall within a week of each other) with a gathering of friends on the coast. While the stated purpose is digging razor clams, delectable bivalves that thrive on wave-battered ocean beaches, these trips are as much about time with friends as they are about seafood. Each year, as autumn dissolves into winter, we rent a cabin near the beach and spend long hours digging in the surf and late nights gathered around a propane stove, cleaning clams.
We still talk about the gorgeous shirtsleeve November evening when we stopped digging to watch a crimson sun melt into the flat-calm Pacific. Or the time Jennifer’s fleece jacket caught on fire and we all stood around in shock until Sweeney saved the day by rolling her on the ground to extinguish the flames. Or the late tide when everyone dropped their limits on the porch and went to bed, leaving Glen, Sweeney, and me to clean clams until it was nearly light out again. My favorite memory, though, is of Stacy, nine months pregnant with Weston, digging a limit of razors even though she could barely kneel to reach them. Five days later, she went into labor.
Friday afternoon. Not a drop of rain has fallen on the three-hour drive to the coast, and Weston and Skyla combined have only asked “Are we there yet?” nine times. (Note: To combat this exasperating question, I’ve taken to simply answering, “Yes,” regardless of our location.) We have made only three bathroom stops. All good. The wind, though, is picking up. Alder saplings along the highway flail in the breeze, and a hail of old leaves, fir needles, and small twigs bounces off the windshield. But it’s dry. “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” Stacy says. “It’s not even raining.”
Candace and Glen are running late, and the Sweeneys had to wait for Maren to get out of school, so we’ll be digging on our own, at least to start. After unloading a year’s supply of clothing and groceries into the weekend rental cabin, we armor up in rubber boots, fleece, and full rain gear. Weston clambers around the cabin with a stiff-limbed, Tin Man gait, while I sort out the lanterns and hurry us along. “Come on, you guys, we gotta go,” I yell. “It’s going to be dark soon.”
That’s one of the things about winter razor-clam digs. They are scheduled around minus tides, which at this time of year happen at night. If it’s an early enough tide (tonight, the low of –1.7 feet is at 7:30 p.m.) and conditions are good, you can usually dig your limit of clams before dark. And everything is easier before dark: finding clams, digging them up, getting back to your car, and – especially important with small children – keeping track of everyone.
We drive to the beach and from the top of the dunes look down at an ominous river of sand flowing north. A waist-high layer of wind-borne grit courses up the beach, twisting, turning, streaming around obstructions and reconnecting below them like water moving downhill. Across this hellish Saharan scene, a huge ocean swell running ahead of the storm pounds into the beach and surges upward. Wind tears the top off each wave and swirls a mist of salt spray into the flying sand. When I open the car door, it’s jerked out of my hand and nearly blown off its hinges.
I’m somehow comforted by the fact that we are not the only idiots out here today. A steady stream of trucks is pouring onto the beach, and the line of parked cars extends as far as we can see in either direction. With razor clam “openers” limited to a few weekends a year, it isn’t uncommon for 15,000 diggers to converge for a single tide. Since some clam diggers are either smarter than we are or not as tough (I prefer the latter explanation), the crowd will be a little thinner tonight. We won’t get lonely, though. On the lee side of each truck, people are getting ready, strapping mesh clam bags on wader belts, struggling to light lanterns in the wind, yelling to be heard over booming surf and the hiss of flying sand.
It’s a strange scene. Down along the surf line, hundreds of people have gathered. Many of them are walking backward, tapping the sand with weirdly shaped shovels or long metal tubes. Under ideal conditions – falling tide, calm surf, no wind – buried razor clams mark their location with a “show,” a small dimple created when they retract their siphons. In heavy weather, though, the clams are either reluctant to extend their siphons or the “shows” get scrubbed away by surging water and wind. On a day like today, they’re tough to find.
The only hope is to force the clams to suddenly withdraw their siphons, leaving a short-lived “show” that can be spotted by a practiced eye. Stomping feet and pounding shovels are the preferred way to make this happen. If you beamed down from another planet – Brooklyn, New York, say – and saw 10,000 people walking backward in circles, hitting the ground with shovels and squinting through the gloom, you might assume you had stumbled into some primitive religious ritual, or gathering mass hysteria. Even if you’re participating, when you look up from your stomping and squinting to watch the masses around you doing the same, it’s easy to question your sanity.
Crowds are not a problem. There are no secrets to protect on a razor-clam dig. Everyone joins in the fun, and a friendly, collegial atmosphere surrounds the proceedings. At least, under normal conditions. Today, with the flying sand and surf, the mood leans more to the grim side. But we’re here, so we might as well get to it. If we’re lucky, we can dig a limit (15 clams per person) or two and be off the beach before we need lanterns.
We lean into the wind and trudge down to the water, where the churning waves run up onto the beach in broad sheets. (Note: Before anyone calls Child Protective Services with an endangerment complaint, I’d like to point out that the beach here has such a low gradient that the waves are only inches deep when they reach the digging zone.) Blobs of brown bubbles – wind foam – roll across the beach like tumbleweeds. The wall of flying sand, waist-high to me, hits Weston and Skyla right in the chops. When I kneel to ask if they want to go back to the cabin, I get an instant facial exfoliation and feel grit crunching between my teeth. “No,” Skyla shouts, “I want to dig clams!” Weston spreads his arms and backs into the wind. “I’m flying!” he yells.
So we stomp our feet and tap the ground. “There’s one!” Sky-la says, pointing to a pea-sized dimple that appears next to my bootprint. “It’s probably too small,” I say. Because razor clams are fragile and generally don’t survive the digging process, the law requires you to keep the first fifteen clams you dig, regardless of size. The big boys, their brown, rectangular shells stretching to six inches, are the ones you want. Most of the time, they make a “show” about the size of a quarter. “If we’re going to get our clams, we better get ’em now,” Stacy says. And with that, she puts the business end of her clam “gun” into the sand around the small show and drives it in.
A clam gun is a simple but ingenious tool: Two feet of four-inch-diameter metal tubing necked down to a hollow one-inch crossbar handle on top. The open bottom end of the wide tube is placed where you believe the clam to be and pushed into the sand. There’s a small hole on the handle that you cover with a thumb to create suction when you extract the tube. The tube comes free with a four-inch-wide cylinder of sand – and, ideally, the razor clam – inside. Releasing your thumb breaks the vacuum, depositing the sand cylinder and clam on the beach. This is Stacy’s weapon of choice, and her baby-blue aluminum clam gun has proven deadly over the years, especially when water runs over the beach the way it is tonight.
She drops the sand cylinder and the kids dive on it, pawing through the packed grit, but it’s empty. No clam. They must be deep today. I reach into the hole with my hand, scooping the collapsing sand out. When I’m in over my elbow, I feel the sharp edges of a shell – they don’t call them razors for nothing – and carefully grip the sides and wiggle until it comes loose. “Weston,” I say, “reach down in there and see if you can find the clam…I can’t reach it.” He eagerly shoulders me aside, lies flat on his stomach in liquid sand,
and plunges his arm in. He frowns in concentration while his fingers sift through the muck. Then his eyes open wide and he shouts, “I got it! I got a clam!” At five inches long, it’s hardly the peanut I was expecting.
After considerable searching, I find a good show behind a receding wave, drop to my knees and start digging. In spite of Stacy’s success with the gun, I’ve stuck with the same old-school clam shovel I’ve used since I was a kid. It has a four-foot wooden handle and narrow, curving blade with a blunt, squared-off tip. Razor clams tend to burrow slightly toward the water from their show, so you dig from the land side, using the angled blade to lever chunks of sand away from your clam. But you don’t dig all the way; any contact with the shovel would crush a razor clam’s thin shell. So you take a few scoops and finish the operation with your hand. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
This time, just as I set the shovel aside and reach in for the clam, another wave surges up the beach, caving in the hole and soaking me to the core. To avoid further drenching, I abandon the clam and stand up, just in time to catch a gust of wind-driven grit and salt spray in the face. My hat blows off and tumbles into the water, skipping along just out of reach. Awesome.
Tonight, we’re going to have to work as a team. The four of us walk backward into the wind in crescent formation, me pounding with the shovel handle and the kids, closer to the ground, looking for shows. When they spot one, Stacy moves in with the gun. It’s a good rhythm, and the next 10 clams come in quick succession. We exchange wet, sandy high-fives, laughing and joking, oblivious to the weather, fully engrossed in our little four-person world.