Happy as a clam… unless you’re the clam being eaten.

The town of Essex, Massachusetts, is located about 30 miles north of Boston and is known as the oldest continuously operating shipbuilding area in the United States with over 4,000 two-masted vessels having been built there. It is also located on the edge of an estuary – a place where fresh water from a river mixes with salt water from the sea. This estuary is on a flyway for migrating birds and also has a thriving clamming industry.

Today we took a boat tour of the estuary and out to where the river meets the ocean. Normally there would have been numerous boats harvesting clams from seabed traps throughout the estuary but for the past couple of weeks, there has been a “red tide” problem in the local waters and no clamming has been taking place. If you don’t know, red tide conditions somehow make the clams poisonous. However, Essex is also the place where the fried clam was invented and there are several well known restaurants in town whose existence depends on a steady supply of the critters. So, according to the captain of our tour boat, all the clams served in the restaurants during the time of the red tide are flown in from Nova Scotia and therefore are totally safe to eat.

Margaret, ears ever attuned to anything of an epicurean nature, had heard the fame of the local delicacy and was dead set on having some, red tide or not. Now I’ve never been much of a fan of seafood and my reluctance to partake of them was doubly dampened by the red tide situation but since there wasn’t a Jack-in-the-box or Burger King in town – and not wanting to starve to death – I had to acquiesce to her desires to eat at Woodman’s Restaurant, where the invention took place. The clam meat is deep fried and I must admit that it didn’t taste all that bad. Served with tartar sauce and a generous supply of fried onion rings, I wound up having a very tasty and satisfying lunch. I guess this just proves my theory that if you deep fry it, just about anything can taste reasonably palatable. However, as I ate them, I kept thinking back to the boat captain’s comments and hoped that they don’t have red tides in Canada. Estuary tour pictures in the gallery.