Geoduck
Ge·o·duck [goo-ee-duhk] — A very large edible clam, Panope generosa, of the NW coast of the United States.
I notice a few scattered little stumps sticking out of the sand. I touch one, and it spits seawater into my face as it disappears underground in a boil of loose sand and water. I sputter and dry my glasses with my sweater. I roll up my sleeve, bite my lower lip, and reach down into the swirling hole. My fingers only barely touch the tip of the clam’s snout as it dives deeper beneath the surface. I shake off my hand and wipe it on my pants and then look around. Dozens of other clam heads poke up all around.
Little underground submarines. Periscopes up, looking at us from a different world. Ostriches put their heads in the sand when they are afraid. What if geoducks are afraid of something from the deep, so instead of burying their head in the sand they bury it in the air? They could rest in hidden caves and lakes, a society of clams, snails, and undiscovered species. What if they are spies, some sort of thoughtful beings sent by some underground lord to report back what was happening above?
Upon being dug up or spotted, perhaps they revert to the disguise of a clam to avoid detection. Eyes don’t work in sand and lungs can’t breathe. We just don’t know everything. Our negative conclusions take a leap into the unknown, just as our positive ones do. We can only see and feel and touch and know what happens in the moment we touch and feel and see it, and everything else is a guess based on a set of rules that we observe, but didn’t invent. We make conclusions as if we were playing the game, but only live as pieces.
I lean down and begin to dig a square around one of the geoducks, to see how close I can get to catching it before causing it to dive. I burrow a deep square on all sides, surrounding the geoduck with a sludgy moat, until I’m up to my elbows in water and sand.
I come up for a moment and take a deep breath. I shift my weight onto my knees, get back into position, and slam my hands inward through the sand as fast as I can to trap it before it can escape. The geoduck senses it, and with a squirt dives below the surface, eluding my hands, and its elongated neck slides through my fingers as I try to get a grip on it. I gasp, spit, and then slowly stand back up and shake off both hands.
It escaped. My guess is that it was afraid of being eaten. That is a fear I have never experienced. Of being eaten. And though my guess is that they don’t experience fear like a human experiences fear, they must experience something, or else they would not dive the way they do. The geoduck experience must be much different than the human.
By speaking about geoducks as being part of underground societies, I’ve created a world in which geoduck existence is exciting, has meaning, and has a purpose—if a geoduck were human. Naturally, for a human, having purpose is defined by human parameters and experience, so in order to believe that a geoduck has purpose, I have to make it seem more human. The geoduck must have society, have thoughts, be spying on us, and have some greater plan and strategy in order to be important.
Geoducks, however, have their own experiences that I don’t have a clue about. And for me to create an imaginary world to make them seem important discredits the fact that they are already important—but not because they are similar to me. They have meaning because humans are not the players, and the geoducks are not our pieces. We are both pieces, and must view each other as such. In the same way Hamlet spoke, “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm,” the atoms that compose that geoduck may be the same that made Bathsheba’s body so irresistible to King David. I am made of the same matter and live in the same world. In chess, the king needs the pawn, and the pawn needs the king. Though some pieces wield more power than the others, none of them ultimately can determine the fate of the other outside of the boundaries of the board.
Geoduck existence does have meaning, purpose, and possibly excitement. But it is not for me to understand what that looks like or feels like. Nor is it for me to justify its existence as worthwhile or worthless based upon my conclusions within the boundaries of the board. I must assume that because it exists, outside of my control, it must have a place. So if I have a responsibility to the geoduck, it is to find out and preserve what existence it seems to have already been given, and to respect that existence as important. I believe that there is more to this geoduck than we might see. But I’m outside of the boundaries when I began to project human characteristics on a geoduck to give it meaning.
Vanity. The more I peel back the layers of my existence the more I am convinced that vanity is part of every atom that makes up my body, and every thought that I think. I wonder at what point the atoms in the clams we eat become distorted with it.
Ingestion. Can a geoduck be vain? Only if I eat it.
I laugh and am silent and look out towards the mainland, but can only see a few hundred yards as the fog is now here. I turn around and walk back up the tidal flats to the beach, back up to the party. I am offered an oyster on the half-shell, and I pass.
Copyright © 2008 by Ross McMeekin
