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Ray Routhier and longtime clammer Tim Downs fill a metal bucket with clams, about 15 pounds worth $15 at the wholesaler, while digging off Pine Point in Scarborough.

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Reporter Ray Routhier places a clam in a pail while digging for clams with longtime clammer Tim Downs in Scarborough.

Photos by Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

ABOUT THIS SERIES

 

MAINE AT WORK takes an interactive look at iconic, visible or just plain interesting jobs done by folks in Maine. Reporter Ray Routhier shadows a worker or workers, reports what he sees and tries his hand at some of the job's duties.

IF YOU'D like to suggest a job to be explored in this feature, e-mail rrouthier@pressherald.com or call 791-6454.

THIS WEEK'S JOB

TITLE: Clam digger

WORKER: Tim Downs, 48, of Pine Point, Scarborough

HOURS: Dependent on tides and sunlight. Four to six hours a day in winter, up to 10 or 11 hours a day in summer.

COMPENSATION: Paid per pound by wholesalers, with the current price at about $1 a pound. Downs makes about $20,000 to $30,000 a year, digging clams full time.

DUTIES: Bending over all day, often in mud to your knees, digging clams with a rake and your hands, then driving them to market. It helps to have a boat or canoe to get to the best clam flats.

SURPRISING FACTS: There is no quick way to dig clams; the state only allows digging by hand and with hand tools. Downs and some of his fellow clammers started smoking cigarettes as a way to keep the bugs away in summer.

PERKS: Working for yourself, the view, and being at the beach all day.

SCARBOROUGH — It was about 40 degrees with a strong wind whipping off the water when I met Tim Downs at the boat launch at Pine Point around 9 a.m.

"Great weather for working," said Downs, 48, of Scarborough.

I thought he was kidding.

"It's not hot, there's no bugs, and the mud isn't frozen," Downs said.

Ten minutes later – after we had crossed the Scarborough River by boat and trudged across a mud flat known as "The Spit" in our hip boots – I realized what Downs was talking about. Trying to forcibly remove clams from mud that has been pounded by the tides is back-breaking work.

So any respite from heat, bugs, or ice is welcomed.

I watched as Downs, a third-generation clammer, bent himself completely in half at the waist and began thrusting his short-handled metal rake into the ground. He turned over foot-long chunks of mud and shoveled them behind him, between his legs.

"It's important to keep the hole clean, so you can see where the clams are at," Downs said.

Once he had a hole dug, he began digging up mud more strategically, looking for air holes the clams had made, and placing two of his four tines on either side of the hole so as to not pierce the clam. Then he'd flip a chunk of mud over, and more often than not, find clams.

"We'll get this one next year," said Downs, holding a clam that looked less than 2 inches long, which means the state deems it too small to keep.

The tools of Downs' trade are simple, just a metal rake with a foot-long wooden handle, a metal bucket, and some onion bags for carrying the clams back to his pickup truck. So when he asked me to try some digging, I thought it would be something like playing in the beach sand.

I bent over (oh my back!) and plunged the rake into the sand with a thud. I had to pull with two hands for a few seconds to get the solidly-packed mud to move even a little. On my next plunge of the rake I heard a loud crack, a sound all clammers fear and one I'd come to hate by morning's end.

"Oh, you busted that one," said Downs. But I found another clam nearby and picked that one up, thinking I had my first keeper. "Full of mud, no good" was Downs reply.

I eventually got some keepers. No cracks, no mud, and they squirted little streams of water onto my jacket. That's good, Downs told me, because when clams are alive they take in water and circulate it through their bodies to help keep them nourished while buried in the mud.

As I continued to whack away at the mud, and crack more clam shells, I began to feel some pain in my back, my arms, and my legs. A couple of times while straddling the muddy hole and shoveling mud through my legs, I felt a knee start to buckle and almost fell over.

"Yeah, it's an unnatural position, my back hurts all the time," said Downs, who has had a commercial clamming license since he was 12 years old.

By the time I had dug for 20 minutes, with two or three breaks, I was exhausted and hurt all over. Plus, I had sand in my teeth. Some summer days, Downs will do this for 10 or 11 hours and has collected more than 300 pounds of clams in a day. Just thinking about that makes me ache all over.

"I ought to have stock in Advil," said Terry Twomey, 61, another clammer working the same area as Downs. "I had to have a deep tissue massage, just to go out clamming."

When I walked over to talk more to Twomey, I realized I was slowly sinking. I had stepped into wetter, softer mud, and was standing where someone else had been digging. I pulled my boot and foot out of the muck with both hands and heard a loud sucking sound. Then Twomey directed me to safer mud.

About seven other clammers were working in the area, and Downs knew them all. He went to kindergarten with some. Like him, many of Scarborough's eight or nine full-time clammers grew up in town and started clamming as kids.

Over the years Downs has worked other full-time jobs, when the clamming slowed down due to red tide (a naturally occurring toxic algae) or a decline in clam populations. He's worked at the Snow's clam chowder factory in Scarborough, for Poland Spring, and for the former S.D. Warren paper mill in Westbrook. But he always did some clam digging, and began doing it full time again about four years ago.

It's an unpredictable business. There was a closure of clam flats this summer, for red tide, and sometimes clamming is stopped because too much rain changes the local conditions.

Clamming is highly regulated, Downs tells me, and he understands why. Clams are an important resource at the bottom of the food chain. Lots of other creatures in the marshes, rivers and on the ocean's shore depend on clams for food.

To enforce the regulations, Scarborough's Marine Resource Officer, Dave Corbeau, comes out among the clammers often, as he was the day I went out with Downs. In fact, Corbeau gave us a ride because Downs didn't want to put two people in his canoe, his usual commuting method. The current can be pretty swift in this area, where the Scarborough River meets the ocean.

Corbeau told me that fines for violations – including for keeping clams that are too small – can be as high as $1,500. Clammers can also lose their licenses for a period of time, and licenses are hard to come by. Corbeau told me there are currently 48 commercial clam diggers licensed to work in Scarborough. There are more licenses for recreational clammers, people who just want enough clams to eat.

Downs tells me he doesn't eat clams much. But when he does, he likes them battered in flour and fried in bacon fat. "That's how I keep my boyish figure," said the 280-pound Downs.

When Downs and I have filled his metal bucket with clams, about 15 pounds worth $15 at the wholesaler, he tells me it's time to dump the clams into a giant onion bag. I offer to do it, but Downs stops me.

"The shells are pretty fragile, so you have to be careful," he said. I know I've cracked my fair share of shells this morning, so I let him do this task.

He sets the bucket and bag on the mud and gently tips the bucket and slowly rolls the clams into the bag.

Then I dig again for a good five minutes without getting a single, intact clam. I stick my rake in the ground and proclaim myself a failure.

"No, you get better and better every time you come out," said Downs, trying to comfort me. "I've been doing this about 40 years, so I'd hope I know what I'm doing a little bit."

Staff Writer Ray Routhier can be contacted at 791-6454 or at: rrouthier@pressherald.com