Red Tides

Photo by Lei Han via Flickr; cropped.

The summer my father’s kidneys began to fail, I was nine years old. At twilight I lay down on the wet, coarse sand of the Long Island Sound’s tide flats, grit digging into my knees, face inches from the damp. I pressed my hands alongside the siphon holes of soft-shelled clams, called longnecks or “piss clams” because they drew in seawater, filtered it for food, then shot it back out in a stream. Press the sand and they’d dig deeper. I played them, an orchestra submerged, while inside the sand the clams burrowed away from me, like they couldn’t do from a swift rake in the hands of an adult.

“Monkey!” my father called. I looked up; he stood framed by the rows of cottages, barefoot and in dungarees, a bucket in his hand. “Want to dig?” At dawn and dusk, clamdiggers filtered out to hunt for longnecks.

“Yes!” I ran up to him, wet sand on my knees and on my dress.

He grinned, “Alright then. Find me a good spot.”

I ran to the place where I’d been playing the orchestra. “Here!”

He walked up, kneeled, the dampness spreading from his knees up and down the denim. His bony feet curled for balance, toes digging into the sand, arches exposed to the air, vulnerable and naked. With his rake, he combed the ground where the clams were buried, revealing the animals. I sat next to him and dug in the hole he’d made as it filled from the water table below, sorting out clams in the low-visibility murk and dropping them into the bucket.

Out in front of me the water of the sound, what F. Scott Fitzgerald called a “great, wet barnyard,” stretched shallow and calm in the low tide. Like my father’s body, the water of the sound faced a rising tide of poison. The factories of Bridgeport, Connecticut, were visible in the haze, and I could see a radial tire marooned by the jetty to the west. Behind me was The Periwinkle, my grandmother’s rented cottage on the stretch of summer places we called Dogshit Beach. Only a train ride from New York City, pollution and development had tarnished and crowded the beach where my mother spent her childhood summers. When she was nine, it was middle-class vacation oceanfront. She could find horseshoe crabs and mussels and snails and fall asleep to the sound of clear blue waves. By the time I was nine, both the ecosystem and my father were slipping away.

When my father finished searching an area, he got up, sandy hand on hip, and scanned the sandbar for another set of breathing holes.

“There!” I pointed.

He picked up his bucket and moved. I ran to the tidal edge to wash the sand off my hands, then ran back to the next hole — hunting, hunting.

His metal bucket was full of freshwater from the outdoor hose at The Periwinkle, to which he added cornmeal and sea water. In the mixture, the longnecks leaked sand. Free from their holes, the clams’ shells seemed ready to splinter and peel away from their delicate bodies. When the bucket was full, my father got up.

“Want to freak out your mother?”

She stood in the front yard against the blue dusk, smoking a cigarette. She hated the smell of chowder and left the cottage when he cooked clams. She wouldn’t eat sea creatures but