Clams and elephants and opossums -

When I think of clams I remember a visit to a friend's family on Whidbey Island in Washington State around 1975. It was there on a stony beach that I was introduced to clamming. You brought a bucket and a shovel and walked along the shore. When you saw a thin geyser of water shooting up out of the beach (indicating a clam burrowing down into the sand), you dug as fast as you could. If you were faster than the clam, you could plop it into the bucket.

They kept the catch in a pail of fresh water for a day or two, which they said helped get rid of the gritty sand. Some have used cornmeal to fatten clams before they are cooked.

The family could tell I was not a true clammer because I was not interested in drinking the clam nectar that they all enjoyed, the liquid that remained after steaming the clams. But I am glad that I joined their family to learn about this way of obtaining food from the sea. I've read that clams were a mainstay in the diets of the indigenous peoples of the American Northwest Pacific coasts.

When I think of elephants, a couple of stories I read from National Geographic and from Smithsonian years back come to mind. One was of a domesticated elephant who painted - the brush held with her trunk. Her works included a credible red blur of urgency after a firetruck flew by, sirens screaming. She had a history of erratic behavior, and her human caretaker had given her the opportunity to paint as a way of relieving frustration and expressing herself.

The other story was of how at certain times in Africa, clans of elephants in the wild will travel long distances to one spot - was it an elephant graveyard? - meeting at the same time and place, as though for a preplanned gathering or reunion. (Perhaps they traverse the land in a line, with each elephant holding the tail of the elephant in front, as pictures sometimes show.) In the night, they dance beneath the moon, in a large circle, a kind of joyful thundering and stomping. The next day, they return to their distant homes.

I don't have many memories of possums - mostly of one rushing out of the carport when we drove in at night with the car headlights on. But, as with the elephants and clams, of late the possums have been insistently surfacing here and there - in magazines, on the net, from the primal memories of the mind.