Sandy Chowder

Emmett Walls’ wife used sandy clams in her chowder.

I went across the sound to have dinner with them and my soup was crunchy and had the effect of grinding my molars if I attempted to chew any of the large bits of potatoes, celery or clams in it.

In order to have totally avoided this unplesant sensation, I would have had to simply swallow whole spoonfuls of chowder brimming with pieces of ingredients large enough to choke me to death.

Therefore, it was a must to do at least some cursory chewing. My skin crawls just recalling it, the bits of sand getting into the teeth, the grating, gnashingness of it all.

When you make chowder with fresh clams, you have to keep the clams alive in a big tin vat of clean seawater overnight so they will open up to do their business while nobody is watching and, when they do, all that sand will come out of them.

If you do not “wash” the live clams in this manner, you’ll be in for a sand-in-mouth experience. This applies to clams you intend to eat raw, or steamed, as well. It’s just that the trapped sand effect becomes much more pronounced in chowder. When eaten raw or steamed, the clams are usually slipped right down one’s throat in a single slurp, often with a dip of drawn butter, or a cocktail sauce, or perhaps a mixture of Marie Sharp’s Habenero Pepper Sauce and 100 proof Russian vodka. In this manner, one does not really chew them as much as greet them with a mild squeeze of tooth and gum before allowing them to pass. Thereafter, the trapped sand moves rapidly to the gut, where it may have an overall cleansing effect over a period of hours.

However, when boiled in a chowder, clams shrink and, if they are sandy, you are going to get that hideous sand crunch and grind, oh dear Lord!

Thank God there was plenty of cold beer at the table so that the sand could be washed down as fast as possible after partially chewing a spoonful of the offending chowder. Even if the swishing of the beer in the mouth has the tendancy to cause an inordinate amount of foaming action that can leak out around the lips giving one the appearance of being a hydrophobic dog.

One of the terrible things about all this is that Emmett’s wife is actually named Sandy.

At one point, she got up to go into the kitchen and Emmett whispered to me, “There’s sand in the chowder, eh?”

I said, “Sandy’s sandy chowder.”

I didn’t find the quip that particularly amusing, but it certainly struck a chord with Emmett. He began to laugh like a jackal and, of course, I followed right along in one of those silly moments where you loose all control for no explainable reason.

Sandy came out from the kitchen.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I lied. “Just thinking about something.”

“Then why are both of you laughing?” she asked.

Emmett said, “We think alike.”

I said, “Thanks for the Sandy, chowder. I mean, the chowder, Sandy.”

She said, “You’re welcome.”

Emmett fell over on the floor in tears.

News to me, boring to them

Since I set up this connection recently, I have been learning about various things over the Internet. One of these things is that I read secret, invisible people are somehow “tracking” me when I get on my computer and use the Internet to look at various sites of this web thing people call the Internet.

I think, “if this is really true, dear Lord, how bored, or perhaps confused, these spies must be.”

I don’t know who might ever read this and I suppose I don’t really care. I am not going to “track” who does. I wonder how on Earth I’d even go about that. So, the idea that some unknowns out there are “watching” me, or some such thing, is a source of amazement, if not amusement, due to the fact I can’t imagine what these nefarious souls might learn about me.

For example, last night, I got on the computer – I guess it’s called, “going online” and I logged into a web spot I found after entering a search term on Google that said “silicon bronze boat screws.” It was McFeeley’s. Once there, I ardently looked at a variety of square head boat screws and dutifully wrote down prices, including shipping, which is only a partial solution for me, as nobody delivers over here to the place on Blind Channel. For that, I have things brought over to town on the other side, a ways off across various bodies of water, and I have to take the Big Boat over to fetch the items, whatever they may be.

But, that is besides the point. I was saying I went “online” and the first place I went was to look at silicon bronze boat screws on this McFeeley’s website. Then, after I finished that up, I brewed up some cinnamon apple tea and poured a shot of Grand Marnier in it and floated a slice of a really good orange I had in the cup and went back over to the computer.

I decided to look around on the Internet, a term that is, an acquaintance told me the other day at the coffee and pastry shoppe over in town, called “web surfing” and for what reason it’s called that, I really don’t know.

I sat down with my cinnamon apple tea laced with the brandy and the orange slice and commenced web surfing, or surf webbing, whatever, and I entered the search term, “lonely Irish boatbuilders” which I presently am, so I got the Internet, and found an interesting site concerning the building of the ancient Currach, a lightweight wood frame over which the tanned hides of beasts were stretched to create quite a seaworthy vessel that is native to the area where I was born, the west coast of Ireland.

It is said that Saint Brendan left the shores of my home area and discovered North America by sailing Currachs across the sea to what is now Newfoundland and possibly even further along than that. This is true, the Irish did discover America, but, as in many other things, this feat was marginalized, as Brendan, being Irish, was clearly not into self-congratulation and there was little in the way of public relations, or newspapers, at the time to make the event very widely known. Even if he were a sort of early times publicity hound, he would have been dismissed by his own countrymen as a teller of tall tales, if not an outright imbiber prone to making up fantastic stories to keep his drinking mates entertained.

I further noted that there is a place I must visit on Great Barrier Island in New Zealand called the Currach Irish Pub and they apparently have a Currach built, they say, by three Irish men from Dingle, that bears the name An tOileanach, which is the Irish, or Gaelic, as it’s called, for “The Islander.” It was sad to read that this Currach is out of the water and on display at the pub entrance, but, then, one can’t expect a hide boat to remain seaworthy indefinately, as the hides rot, not too differently to the way we humans rot away in bits and pieces as the years march past until we actually disintegrate altogether after we’re planted.

The tea and brandy was so good, I decided to have another.

Upon returning to my computer to resume webbing, or whatever, I entered the search term “Madeline Higgins,” which is the name of my lady who left Blind Channel for Vancouver and possibly some other place to go to work again as a nurse. I wanted to see that if in the few weeks she’d been gone, she had made a name for herself in the city.

I was aghast to find a website associated with a Madeline Higgins that was not my “Maddie Higgs” as I often referred to her, but to another gal over in Ireland who refers to herself as “madhiggs.”

“What! Small world!” I shouted out, waking the two dogs, who both promptly got excitied and came over to nuzzle my hand so as to prompt me to let them outside for a romp, which I did. I did not stay long in the Irish “madhiggs” spot, as she was not my “Maddie Higgs” and I had no interest in her. Apparently, my Maddie had yet to make herself noteworthy enough in the city that she had risen to the level of being noticed by the Internet. That, I concluded, was a good thing.

I decided to try a bit more webbing about, but first, I had to let the dogs inside because they were assaulting the door with their paws, which leaves deep marks. Back at the computer, I typed in the term “Gaelic Football” which I am fond of (as was the Irish lass “madhiggs” whose spot I had just checked out, which is most likely why I typed in Gaelic Football on my own.)

I read up on what was new in the sport and moved along, typing in “talking fish” as my next area of inquiry. The reason for this is that I have been gifted since my first memories of the ability to speak with fish. I have been laughed at, thought a fool and accused of insanity by various people whenever I have mentioned this abilility out loud over the years.

Yet, it is true. Fish chatter in my midst and I can understand them and they have acknowledged my presence, as well. I have had fish volunteer themselves to my hook in order to consummate a bond between myself and said fish that the fish indicated was okay, becuase the fish’s spirit would immediately be returned to the sea to live on in a new fish.

Fish discuss many important things, but this is all for another day.

I hit the enter button on the keyboard to see what my inquiry “talking fish” might bring from the Internet and I was promptly tossed for a long loop by this BBC news item from Sunday, March 16, 2003:

‘Talking fish’ stuns New York

Some Hasidic Jews reportedly believe people can be reincarnated as fish.

A fish heading for slaughter in a New York market shouted warnings about the end of the world before it was killed, two fish cutters have claimed. Zalmen Rosen, from the Skver sect of Hasidic Jews, says co-worker Luis Nivelo, a Christian, was about to kill a carp to be made into gefilte fish in the city’s New Square Fish Market in January when it began shouting in Hebrew.

“It said ‘Tzaruch shemirah’ and ‘Hasof bah’,” Mr Rosen later told the New York Times newspaper.

“[It] essentially means [in Hebrew] that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is nigh.”

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“AH – HA!” I screamed. “See?!? I am NOT ALONE!!!” I stood up so fast, I knocked over my chair, scaring the shite out of the two dogs and sending them into a frenzy right after they’d settled back down from the last exclamation that made them have to go outdoors to do their business.

I was so shocked that I grabbed the Grand Marnier and began directly bottle-waddling it as I wandered off to bed to muse the implications of the carp revelation (I normally converse with salmon.)

Now, if as I have been told, there are people secretly tracking me from inside the Internet, that is what they learned last night.

May God help them.