On the water’s edge – Science teacher

December 30, 2025

The Parable of the Quahog and the Horseshoe Crab

Not so long ago, I spent an afternoon tossing a bucktail into a channel behind West Wildwood. The sky was steely, a mist was falling, the clouds and the sea merged as one.

While working the beach I stumbled across a couple of the holes we left clamming the day before. A few feet from one of the holes I saw a grand-daddy of a quahog–a huge chowder clam just sitting on the flat exposed by the low tide.

A quahog that big may well rival me in years on this Earth. It didn’t get that large by acting stupid, and there’s hardly enough nervous tissue for clams to get senile. Still, there it was.

I went to pick it up. It resisted.
I went to pick it up again.
It resisted again, as if glued to the beach.

I tugged yet a third time, and the sands shifted–the clam was stuck to the base of an old horseshoe crab, now buried in the sand. Her now kicking legs pushed the sand next to the clam.

A large horseshoe crab may well be 20 to 30 years old.

Here they were, an old horseshoe crab tethered to an even older quahog, waiting for the tide to rise. The quahog, guided by millions of years of instinct, clams up tight at low tide. With the edge of the horseshoe crab wedged along it edge, though, it faced dessication.

I tried to remove the clam again, but dared not pull any harder than I did. I left the two critters there to square their issue with the next full tide.

Some things cannot be anticipated, and some things cannot be fixed.

October 6, 2024October 6, 2024

Stealing the souls of children

“People pay for what they do,and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”

James Baldwin

In the end, it’s the ground that will save us, if we are, or even want, to be saved.

We’re of the mud, of the air, of the water, of the sun. We diminish the folks before us on this once fine land when we “honor” these as metaphors.

We diminish our ancestors from our homelands who spoke of the spirits and the blurring of the lines between the living and the dead as autumn darkness presses on our souls.

Cliffs of Moher, County Clare (Aaron Logan via Wikimedia)

These are not simply metaphors or myths or models. They are ways to understand the world, the world beyond the digital.

You cannot grasp a fistful of earth through a screen.
Our hands were made for more than pushing keys.

We are stripping the souls from our children.

We become who we deserve to become.
But we should let our children decide whether a soul is worth keeping.

Winter is coming, again.

November 6, 2022

Clamming in November

You don’t need much.

A rake, a basket, a mud flat, and if you’re so inclined, a license.

Take what you need for dinner, eat them before the next low tide. I put the smallest and the largest back into the flat, tucking them into the mud, keeping a promise made years ago to my niece who loves clams but not killing.

A tired November bee on a tithonia flower

November can be kind, but more often than not, the dying light is unkind to those creatures that depend on the sun.

But the creatures keep moving, and so do I, to the rhythm of the tides and the pull of the rake, one life feeding on another, grace for one, the abyss for the other.