Clamming Up

Our first night with Anna and Ian they treated us to a straight forward dinner of salmon and asparagus.

And yet it was the best salmon either of us had eaten, there was no fancy sauce but the fish was flaky and delicious. I looked out the window at the inlet’s furiously rushing tide and thought this was the perfect metaphor for the Pacific Northwest, fish on a plate and for trees and salt water running like a river. But it wasn’t going to stop there. 

I have no idea where we are, Layne followed Google’s blue line and we bought gas for about four forty a gallon, the cheapest we’d seen in Washington State. We made turns and drove through avenues of fir trees and eventually…

…we drove up a driveway through the forest to a house overlooking a tidal inlet, where they are storing a friend’s van as a favor, typical of them, both generous to a fault, always.

We met Anna and Ian in 1998 in Zihuatanejo as we all prepared to leave Mexico and sail south to Central America. It was a friendship that stuck hard even as we traveled apart and met up in isolated anchorages all along the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. 

After forty years of marriage he and Anna are firmly rooted in Puget Sound where their family lives. They love the outdoors and hike and camp and travel madly for their jobs in television field production. If you have watched world class sports from golf to the Olympics to soccer or football, chances are Ian worked on the television signal and Anna managed the production. 

They keep coffee tables full of now decorative passes and pins of their various journeys. They have Emmy statues on their bookshelf. But they always come home to these mad tidal waters and endless miles of forest. After a while you can see why.

When they suggested we go clamming I wondered what we might be getting into. I had visions of wading in sticky tidal mud and reeking seaweed covered rocks. They are tough and think nothing of riding eight knot currents on paddle boards or walking the Great Wall of China till teatime. Not me.  

I need not have worried. Anna showed us how to scrape clams from just under the surface while Ian casually picked oysters off the drying tidal dirt. 

And presto - dinner got ducked in clean water and washed and set aside to expel the dirt the shells inhale into their lungs out into a bucket of clean seawater. 

As we walked Ian showed us the crabs struggling to hide as the tide flowed out of the kelp beds. 

A kelp crab in Anna’s grasp. 

Rusty braving tidal waters. 

A starfish stranded just waiting for Anna to put it into deeper water. 

Iridescent kelp. Another wonder of the tidal waters. 

The colors of low tide.  

It was all too much…

In six hours the salt water would be lapping at the front gardens and a tub would be pushing a couple of barges laden with gravel right through here. 

Then we took off to see the Olympic National Park, a small slice of it as we plan to drive around the place after we leave this Garden of Eden of Ian and Anna. 

It’s a National Park so Rusty is barely tolerated as usual. 

A warm 82 degrees and a chance to soak up the sun. 

Our walking and talking is full of reminiscences and memories, sailors we knew and places we miss. 

The natural world here is extraordinary and largely untouched. 

We retreated from the park and took a logging road in the forest to accommodate Rusty who wore himself out. 

We had fish and chips on the patio where Rusty was banned. 

But he got lots of attention where he lay recovering from his hike. 
Jumping rock:



The Evergreen State. 

I was delegated to shuck the oysters…

…Layne covered them in butter cheese and garlic…

Ian grilled them…

And then, like the walrus and the carpenter we ate them. 

And the clams. 

And the chocolate zucchini bundt cake delivered by a baking neighbor. 

A perfect evening with the worlds most generous of friends. As though we hadn’t been wiser for 24 years. 

And after I won Mexican Train dominoes for the third night in a row we went to bed. 

Rusty was still hoping the local deer would put in one last visit. He was quite refreshed after an evening sober snoring on our friends’ couch and he sleeps in the van on his bed with the door open. Always vigilant. Our friends deserve the best guard dog in this silent peaceful neighborhood.