I went fishing yesterday, tossing a bucktail into a channel behind West Wildwood. The sky was steely, a mist was falling, and the bugs enjoyed slurping hemoglobin from my scalp.

I didn't catch anything, which was fine with me--I have scallops from Walt the scalloper in the freezer waiting for next Saturday, and we have a chunk of last summer's fluke waiting for us as well.

While working the beach I stumbled across a couple of the holes we left clamming the day before--I fill my holes, but the bay was double-checking my work. A few feet from one of the holes I saw a grand-daddy of a quahog--a huge chowder clam just sitting on the flat exposed by the low tide.

A quahog that big may well rival me in years on this Earth. It didn't get that large by acting stupid, and here's hardly enough nervous tissue for clams to get senile. Still, there it was.

I went to pick it up. It resisted.
I went to pick it up again. It resisted again, as if glued to the beach.

I tugged yet a third time, and the sands shifted--the clam was stuck to the base of an old horseshoe crab, now buried in the sand. Her kicking legs pushed the sand next to the clam.

A large horseshoe crab may well be 20 to 30 years old.

Here they were, an old horseshoe crab tethered to an even older quahog, waiting for the tide to rise. The quahog, guided by millions of years of instinct, clams up tight at low tide. With the edge of the horseshoe crab wedged along it edge, though, it faced dessication.

I tried to remove the clam again, but dared not pull any harder than I did. I left the two critters there to square their issue with the next full tide.

Some things cannot be anticipated, and some things cannot be fixed.