“They call this bullraking for a reason,” King says. “It’s the hardest
job you’ll ever love. I’m fifty-nine and in as good a shape as I was
when I was twenty-five. I’m strong like an ox. Just don’t ask me to
run more than 100 yards.”
Soon after he slides the rake into the water, he knows it’s not going
to be a lucrative day. King aims to harvest 600 clams each day in the
winter — 1,000 in the summer, when the quahogs aren’t as deep in
the sediment — but to do so requires a little wind to ensure that the
boat drifts just enough to keep his rake moving across the bottom.
He figured out that the optimal winds will push his boat at .35 to
.39 miles per hour. But on this day, there is no wind whatsoever.
“The quahogs aren’t in one spot, so in order to catch them you
have to drift through miles of bottom,” says King, who teaches a class
for the general public called Come Clam With Me. “Sometimes it’s
the wind that pushes me, sometimes it’s the tide, and sometimes I
have to push the boat myself. Today is one of those days.”
Despite the lack of wind, King seems to dance with his bullrake,
creating a distinct rhythm with each tug on the handle as he does
a two-step across the deck. “The sound is mesmerizing,” he says.
“Every time the rake shakes, I hear a quahog go in.”
King is one of about 450 licensed commercial quahoggers in
Rhode Island, though only about 100 of them work full-time and
year-round. It’s an iconic industry in the state, but it’s one that is
facing considerable challenges as its workforce ages, profits are
inconsistent and demand for quahogs ebbs.
And yet those like King who have made quahogging their lifestyle
can’t imagine doing anything else. “Every day is a great day
because I get to do something I love,” King says. “The only time I
don’t love my job is when it doesn’t give back to me, when I don’t
make enough money. But overall, it’s given back to me 100-fold.”
After twenty minutes of tugging and dancing, he’s ready to haul
in his catch. So he takes a rope tied to his rake and wraps it around
an electric hauler. When he turns on the machine, it retrieves the
rake from the bottom. King then shakes out the mud and the clams
too small to keep, and he dumps the rest in a sorter. As he separates
and counts the quahogs by size — from smallest to largest they’re
called littlenecks, topnecks and hogs — he calculates how much
money he made. Not much.
But he’s not discouraged. Holding up a littleneck, he says, “I
paid for my house with these little guys, and multiple trucks and
multiple motors on my boat. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t
have clams to dig.”
Quahogs have been harvested from Narragansett
Bay for millennia. Archaeological sites at Point Judith
Pond and Potowomut documented large piles of empty
quahog shells at Native American camp sites that date
back hundreds of years. According to Michael Rice, a University
of Rhode Island shellfish scientist, when Europeans arrived in the
region, they were introduced to quahogs by natives. The word quahog
comes from the Narragansett Indian term poquauhock, which
was included in an English-Narragansett dictionary written by
Rhode Island founder Roger Williams in 1646. The scientific name
for quahog, Mercenaria mercenaria, comes from the Latin word for
wages or commerce and stems from the Narragansetts’ use of quahog
shells to make beads called wampum that were used for bartering.
The commercial quahog industry in Rhode Island didn’t get its
start until the end of World War II, when soldiers returning from
war picked up large tongs to harvest clams. They later adopted
the bullrake when it was invented in the 1950s. Many oystermen
also switched to quahogging at about the same time after rebelling
against the families that controlled the state’s oyster industry. The
quahog industry peaked in the 1980s after the Clean Water Act forced
improvements in water quality and areas that had been closed to
shellfishing due to pollution concerns were opened for the first time.
“The general state of the economy has a big effect on the quahog
industry and how many shellfishermen there are,” says Rice. “If
54 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l AUGUST 2020