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Old Man River's Shell Game
- University of Iowa Press
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old man river's shell game WENJOE MARTELLE stepped out of his cabin door the night mists were still hanging over Harper's Slough and the first rays of the sun were just slanting in over the limestone bluffs on the Wisconsin side of the river. It was not quite five in the morning but already a couple of johnboats were on the Mississippi, their big outboards driving them down the running sloughs to the clam beds. Downriver a flock of egrets rose from Jug Handle Slough and swung north over the timbered islands, and a pair of otters in Japan Slough lifted their heads and heard the coming of the distant boats. Martelle pulled on his patched hip boots and walked stiffly down the steep bank to the 16-foot cedar johnboat with its pair of racked crowfoot bars. There'd been some rain up in Minnesota, he saw, and the river had risen an inch during the night. A good current in the big sloughs today, where a boat could drift right along but not too fast. This might be the day when a good man with a proper 6j outfit could take a half-ton of shell, and maybe even find the pearl that would set him up for the rest of the summer. He put his lunch of beef, bread and water under the transom seat of the jo'boat, checked the gas in the auxiliary tank, and pushed off. The work day of the clammer had begun. * * * * * In the bed of the Upper Mississippi, half-buried in mud and silt, are scattered congregations of fresh-water clams. They are simple creatures, little more than two strong shells enclosing a soft, formless body. Blind and brainless , they lie on the river bottom with shells agape, laved in the currents that bring them food and oxygen. Within each shell, partly surrounding the body, is a delicate mantle of tissue. This is the organ that builds the shell - rough and dark on the outside but with inner layers of pure, iridescent pearl. Three generations of fishermen on the upper river made their livings from this shell, shipping it to downriver factories for a nation's shirt buttons and cuff links. That was yesterday. Most of the shell is gone now and the fleets of fishermen have headed back to the farms or downriver to new industries. Only a handful of the old-time clam fishermen remains, a last-ditch defense against the zipper and the plastic button. Joe Martelle is one of these rivermen, a small dark man with a French name whose people have been on the river longer than anyone can remember; blood kin to the old couriers du bois who set up the fur post of Prairie du Chien. He headquarters in Harper's Ferry, a little Iowa town across the river from Wisconsin and a few miles downstream from Minnesota. During the clam season from early June until late fall he's on the river whenever it's right for clamming, working the running sloughs for "washboards ," "3-ridges," and the valuable little "ladyfingers." The tools of his trade are simple, scarcely changed from the primitive gear of sixty years ago. The basic equipment is the crowfoot bar, a pole about twelve feet long that is 68 [3.237.189.116] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:22 GMT) festooned with short lengths of chain. From each chain is hung a pair of "crows' feet" - small, four-pronged grapnel hooks made of heavy wire. The boat drifts with the current and drags the crowfoot bar and its hooks along the river bed. Feeding clams are sensitive to disturbance and will clamp tightly if touched by a foreign object. According to Hollywood, divers in tropical seas dread the great marine clams that can close on a swimmer's foot and drown him far beneath the surface of a lagoon. This same trait keeps the Mississippi clammer in business. As a crow's foot passes over a gaping clam, the irritated bivalve seizes the wire hook with a viselike grip. 'When some instinct tells the fisherman that he's floated far enough over a clam bed, the crowfoot bar and its clam-encrusted hooks are heaved up into the boat and picked. Martelle carries two crowfoot bars but works only one at a time to prevent fouling. They are handhewn birch poles cut from the rocky hillsides above the river; he scorns poles of metal or...