Near the Straits of Juan de Fuca there is a bay called Dungeness and the narrow strip of land the borders the western side of the bay leads to a wonderful place called Dungeness Spit. When I was a kid my three best friends and I would camp on the northeastern tip of the spit at least once every two months.
Near the Straits of Juan de Fuca there is a bay called Dungeness and the narrow strip of land the borders the western side of the bay leads to a wonderful place called Dungeness Spit. When I was a kid my three best friends and I would camp on the northeastern tip of the spit at least once every two months. Earl, Beezer, Lyman and I attended Shorecrest High School and we had been drawn together by both the Church (Ed "Beezer" Vail, and me), wrestling (Earl Dennis who was a childhood friend to Beezer, and me) and baseball (Lyman Momeny, Earl Dennis, and me). Of the four, I was the FNG as all the others had been born and raised in the area and all of us were a little damaged. My damage came from a mother who, a few months after moving to the neighborhood, had a severe nervous breakdown and had to be institutionalized for a time. Earl was one of two boys whose father had died young, when Earl, the oldest of the two, was about six. His mom had never remarried but had an active social life on top of a full-time job and, therefore, was never around. Beezer was the fourth oldest of 13 children born to Bonnie Vail, an extremely active member of the Church and Ed Sr., an apostate who had bankrupted three businesses by the time I met him. Lyman was the oldest of two boys being raised by an alcoholic grandmother and a mother who struggled with drug addiction. In some schools, we might have been just a few of many such stories, but not in Shorecrest. Although the term would not be coined for years, Shorecrest was Yuppieville, populated by young Boeing up and comers who made a lot of money and wanted everyone to know it. Thus is was that the four of us, because of some common interests but more from a common need to be a part of something stable, were drawn together from January of 1968 until May of 1969. We called ourselves The Black Watch.
Our first campout on the peninsula came after a whimsical decision to digs some clams and because the only ferry left that Friday afternoon was headed to Sequim. We took sleeping bags, some sandwiches, two clam spades and a bucket, some matches and our ever-present rain gear. It was my first experience at clamming but I learned quickly that those little bastards can swim through sand faster than logic dictates is possible.
The process is simple. You walk down the beach and look for a stream of water to shoot from the sand and then you dig deep and fast. When you get good at it, you will almost always capture the prize... A razor clam. On this first adventure, as the tide went out, we could see big crabs in the shallows. Not big as in Alaskan King or Snow crab but bigger than the blues one sees in the East or among the Greens and Kona crabs in Hawaii.
Someone shouted "BUGS!" and Earl ran into the water and grabbed one.
That night we divided the clams into two piles; one to boil and the other to eat on the half-shell. Earl, clearly the expert here, filled the bucket with seawater and we put in on the campfire. When the water rolled to a boil, he dumped in the clams and gently inserted the Dungeness crab. As soon as the crab submerged, he pulled the bucket from the fire, explaining that when the water was cool enough that we could get a hand in and out without causing severe damage, the clams and the crab would be ready to eat.
Today, the place we camped is part of a national wildlife refuge and the rest of the area is inhabited by the wealthy. But then, the only people who lived there were poor, day-laborers who worked when they could or rangers assigned to the Olympic National Park/Forest.
Our campfire attracted the attention of four boys; all about 10 years old and all of African American heritage. They watched me struggle with my penknife to pry open a stubborn razor and offered to shuck the raw ones for a penny each. So there we sat; around a pretty good beach fire, sucking down slick, salty clams and burning our fingers on the boiled ones, telling stories which were mostly true, jokes that were mostly blue and never once mentioning the turmoil we were all suffering so silently.
Earl carefully divided the crab in four parts... As equal as possible and we cracked the shells with our younger and stronger teeth and sucked out the most delicious meat to come from the oceans. Then we crawled into our sleeping bags and talked in low tones until we all fell asleep, probably mid-sentence. We went home the next day and vowed to do it again... Soon.
The next time we prepared better. I loaded by Rambler wagon with the family tent, a Coleman stove, some food, and all the cooking gear squirreled away in our garage. We tied all the sleeping bags to the top of the car along with some nylon, swimming pool rope and some chicken wire. Before we went to the ferry, we drove to the docks in Seattle to buy some salmon heads from the fishermen, put them in a cooler and headed north.
Once on the Spit, I put up the tent while Earl built a make-shift crab pot out of the chicken wire and Beezer and Lyman attacked the Razor clams and any of the larger and sweeter Butter clams they might stumble upon. When the pot was built and the tent up, Earl and I waded into the water, grabbing a crab or two as we went, then, at a place Earl thought would be good, he hurled the pot, which had been attached to the rope and filled with salmon heads, as far as he could into the bay. Later the same boys showed up, as they would everytime we we there, and shucked our clams for a penny and listened, or pretended to, to our tales.
In the morning, Earl waded to the place where he had staked the rope the evening before and pulled in the crab pot. In it were 4 crabs and 2 starfish. We freed the starfish and boiled the crabs. When they were done, Earl pulled the meat from the bright red bugs while I cooked a big, cast-iron skillet of scrambled eggs. He tossed the crab into the eggs and I served them up with slices of American cheese. That particular dish became known as Quantz' Crab Scramble and, although the ingredients changed from time to time (onions, celery, etc. etc.) it was basically the same breakfast we would have until we parted in the summer of 1969.
As our tradition grew, so did the depth of our conversations. Little by little our painful secrets would slip out until we all knew all there was to know about the things which may have been better to have remained unspoken. At some point during early 1969, we qualified to enter the lottery... The winners of this lottery, however, were those who came in last. It was the second annual Selective Service Lottery. My birthday was drawn as number 326 of 365 which that all the old men and girls would be drafted before they got to me. Lymans was high as well and Earls was in the 200's; but Beezer scored well at number 34.
On our last Dungeness outing, Beezer's plight made our final campout gloomier than the Pacific Northwest Sky in the winter. On top of everything else, one of our team was likely going to Vietnam. Sure, Beezer could put it off for a couple of years if he served a mission but in those days only dweebs and Utah guys served missions. Besides, Beezer didn't have a window to dispose of his urine and his folks sure couldn't afford to finance his mission.
On that beach, that night, I think I experienced my first miracle but didn't know it until the very moment I wrote this sentence. The other three of us made a commitment to Beezer. Lyman, with no religion, Earl, a pretty devout Catholic and me, the other Mormon, promised to pay for Beezer's mission if he wanted to go. Beezer, however, his nickname notwithstanding, was no dweeb.
That last night we paid the boys two dollars and stuffed ourselves with clams and boiled crab then fell asleep without the typical banter. I, at least, whispered a silent prayer with the hope it might actually go somewhere. In the morning, I made the Crab Scramble and we loaded up my wagon and headed for the ferry.
We stood together on the upper deck and watched the shoreline of our camping spot disappear. Without saying so, we all understood that this was the end of something very, very special; something that could never be duplicated but something that would always be remembered and cherished; something that would prove to have been a significant part of the foundations of our characters. All of us were defined, just a little, by our hours on the beaches of Dungeness Spit.
Two months later I was on my way to Kansas, Lyman went to work for an uncle somewhere near Moses Lake and Earl accepted a partial scholarship to a small college in Oregon. A few months after that, Boeing crashed and the Vail family - Beezer's tribe - packed up and moved to Salt Lake City where Ed enrolled at the University of Utah and started a house framing business that would earn him enough money to finance his mission (he went to Brazil the same week I went to Guatemala... we two dweebs). I forgot to mention that I baptized Lyman and he too went on a mission... to Los Angeles. Earl remained stanchly Catholic and staunchly single until he was 30 years old and had become the mobile home tsar of Seattle.
Beezer returned from his mission and joined the Marines who paid for him to finish school before active duty. He became a fighter pilot... just as his dad had been in Korea. Lyman married the daughter of a real estate mogul he had met on his mission and moved to Burbank. When I left the Church both he and Beezer stopped talking to me and Earl was so busy he didn't have time enough. I have lost track of Beezer but Lyman had an affair, got disfellowshipped, decided he wouldn't return to the Church and started talking to me again. We speak about once a year.
We are all old men now... or at least what we would have called old on that beach near Sequim, but I am convinced the flavor of clams and crab boiled in Puget Sound brine still lingers on the backs of our tongues in firmly in the warm corners of our memories.
1 comment:
Great memory to share. Thanks!
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