AFTER
three minutes of digging on a muddy and shell-strewn beach along the shores of
the Hood Canal in Washington State, I had gathered enough shellfish for a
pretty mean paella.
I don’t
mean to brag — it sure wasn’t through any skill of my own. The Hood Canal is a
glitteringly beautiful 60-mile-long fjord and the western waterway of Puget
Sound, and it sits about an hour and a half outsideSeattle (although
the trip may take an hour or more longer until repairs to the Hood Bridge are
completed this June). With the snow-clad Olympic Mountains as a backdrop and beaches bristling with oysters, clams, mussels and crabs, it’s ripe for
a shellfish safari. In summer, throwing crab pots off the dock for Dungeness or
red rock crabs and shrimping for the sweet and sizable Hood Canal spot shrimp
are main attractions. But oysters are available year round, and the sport clam
season opens each spring on some public beaches.
I came
up from San Francisco the first weekend in April, just after the harvesting
season opened at Potlatch State Park, south of the town of Hoodsport on the
canal’s western shore. I asked my mother-in-law, Robin VanSickle, who loves all
manner of seafood, to come along. In Northern California, where we both live,
there are lots of oysters, but they’re grown mostly on farms; they’re either
suspended in racks or in plastic mesh bags placed on top of mud flats, so you
can’t pick your own.
But you
can on the Hood Canal, and therein lies the fun. It’s the kind of old-fashioned
place where shellfish permits can be easily procured at a gas station or
general store, along with all kinds of local wisdom: the best time of year for
picking oysters (spring is nice, since winter is too cold to be comfortable,
and summer heat makes some oysters milky from sitting out in the sun too long);
optimal tides for clam digging (the lower the better); and the right size for
clams (anything that fits through your thumb and forefinger in an O.K. gesture
is too small and should be thrown back).
“They
freeze nicely in the shell,” one woman said as we waited in line at Hoodsport’s
tiny hardware store. “That’s how I make my clam chowder.” Robin consulted with
a man at the counter about the easiest way to make clams spit out sand (soak
them overnight in a bucket with water and a handful of cornmeal). Oh, and if
you aren’t paying attention, sometimes clams will pull a disappearing act on
you.
“Razor
clams are the most fun to catch,” said Lee Geist, a young bellhop and
summertime dock master at the Alderbrook Resort, where we stayed. “They’re the
ones that run away.” With its long foot, a razor clam can burrow back under the
sand in 10 speedy seconds. But razors are typically harvested on the open
Pacific coast of Washington; most of what you’ll find on the Hood Canal are
steamers, a k a Manila and Japanese littlenecks. They are bad burrowers, which
makes it easy for a rookie shellfish harvester like me.
Spring
is a moody time on the Hood Canal: it can be blazingly sunny and 70 degrees, as
it was during our weekend there, or it can be snowing, as it was three days
before we arrived. Moss-covered alders lean together over the roadway; the
Olympic Mountains are mirrored in the glassy, cold water. The icy mountain
runoff ushered by rivers into the brackish waters of the canal makes a prime
breeding environment for oysters; in tide pools, mud flats and gravel banks,
the oysters’ irregularly fluted gray-white shells take shape around the rocks
and nurse shells they’ve decided to grow on.
It was
on a tidal beach at Potlatch State Park where I plucked a specimen that seemed
more barnacle-encrusted royalty than food item, its shell sprouting seaweed
tendrils and crowned with mussels, the surface itself a nurse shell for several
minuscule baby oysters.
“That’s
a good one,” a man in knee-high boots next to me said as he expertly wielded
his shucking knife. He was Jerry Briggs, a heavy-construction-equipment
operator from Winlock, a small town some 75 miles south. Mr. Briggs explained
that since young oysters seed and grow on the shells of other oysters,
harvesters have to shuck their catch at the water line and throw the shells
back. He and his wife, Pamela, used plastic bags to secure their limit of 18
shucked oysters per person per day.
Mr.
Briggs grew up fishing and trapping on the Hood Canal, and his family spent summers at
a rented cabin just up the road. “We’d lie down on inner tubes and fry
ourselves in the sun collecting oysters,” Mr. Briggs said. “It was something we
just grew up doing — we learned everything from the old folks.” As a young man,
he was a member of the Murky Lurkers, a club that spent summers scuba-diving the deep, clear waters of the canal and picnicking on its
shores. They caught and barbecued everything from crabs and oysters to sea bass
and octopus.
Mr.
Briggs was happy to teach the finer points of picking and shucking: how to spot
the seams on a living oyster and how to insert the tip of the shucking knife at
the joint of the shells and wiggle with just the right amount of force, to
avoid a self-gouging catastrophe (Mr. Briggs also pointed out several of his
battle scars). We scrutinized the beach and watched oysters open, filtering the
water, and then snapping shut on our approach. From one of my finds, Mr. Briggs
even extracted a tiny pearl.
After
an afternoon that seemed to fly by, we had all collected our quotas. Robin and
I said goodbye to the Briggses and stopped at a gas station on the way back to
our hotel; there, we spent $17 on an aluminum baking tray, a bag of ice, a
bottle of Washington Hills 2007 gewürztraminer (screw-top), a small bottle of
cocktail sauce and a jar of horseradish.
Back at Alderbrook, we hurried to the dock just in time for
sunset. As we prepared a little makeshift picnic, ospreys and bald eagles
soared overhead, and silvery schools of baitfish burbled below. With a toast to
the Olympic Mountains in the distance, we tipped oysters into our mouths and
tasted the luxuriantly round, salty flavor of the sea.
For Entire article see link below
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/travel/escapes/01shellfish.html?_r=0
