I drove out to a place I'll call Duffy's, where shuckers remove the meat from scallops, for delivery to restaurants and fish markets. Duffy's consists of a couple of small, unpainted one-story buildings on a sandy hill of scrub pine. At nine in the morning, there were about a dozen cars in the gravel parking lot. A steady clattering noise came from the open doors of the larger building; it sounded like a waterfall, but not of water-crockery perhaps. I approached the building-a powerful smell extended into the parking lot-and looked in through a door. The walls were white tile. In the center of the room, a dozen plump burlap bags sat on a duckboard platform. Around the room, waist-high, ran a varnished wooden counter. Seventeen people, of all sorts and ages- young women, longhairs, old geezers-stood elbow to elbow at the counter, working rapidly. In front of each was a pile of scallops; next to it was a shallow white plastic pail; below were a big garbage can and a larger white plastic pail. The workers wore rubber boots, rubber aprons, rubber gloves, and something-a bandanna, a cap-to keep their hair back. Each held a shortbladed knife with its handle wrapped in tape. The noise was thunderous and continuous.
I watched a dark-haired girl of about twenty. She would grab a scallop in her left hand and insert the blade of the knife between the shells; flip the scallop open and send the top shell flying into the garbage can; insert the blade under the black edging of tiny tentacles that encircle the bottom shell; scoop the tentacles and the attached entrails out in one sweep and into the garbage can, leaving the white adductor muscle-the edible "meat," or "eye"-which she flicked a foot and a half through the air into the plastic pail on the counter. The whole process took a little over a second, and then she grabbed the next scallop. When the pile of scallops on the counter was gone, she walked to the center of the room, picked up a new sixty-pound bag, walked back, flung it up onto the counter, dumped the scallops out, and started in again. When the pail was full, she poured it into the larger pail under the counter and resumed her work.
By nine-thirty, the last bag on the duckboard was gone-the shuckers had been shucking since six-thirty that morning-and it was time for the weigh-in. The workers dumped their garbage pails into bins outside and carried their large white pails to the adjacent building, where a young man waited by a scale that hung from the ceiling. The shuckers stood in line, laughing and talking, and each in turn poured his pail into a larger pail that the young man then hooked onto the bottom of the scale. "Forty-four pounds," he might announce, and a woman with a pad and pencil would write it down. The next boatload of scallops would not arrive until the afternoon, a worker told me, so the shuckers would now be paid-they get a dollar a pound-and would have time to go away for a while. Wailing for their money, they sat on the fenders of cars, smoking cigarettes and talking.
I saw the dark-haired girl, and asked her how long she had been working at Duffy's. "A couple of months," she said. I remarked that it must be pretty tiring. "You get used to it," she said. "At first, I didn't know so many things could hurt. Your back kills you; your neck is stiff; your legs ache; it feels like your whole body is falling apart. You wake up in the middle of the night with your knuckles throbbing. And you've got blisters, of course, on all your fingers and along your palm. But that comes partly from gripping your knife too tight." I told her I admired her speed.
"The point is to go as fast as you can," she said. "A lot of us sing to ourselves to keep a rhythm. I prefer 'Rockin' Robin' and 'Yakety-Yak-Don't Talk Back.' They work best for me. Also, everything has to be just right-the placement of your garbage can, the meat bucket, how close the pile of scallops is to you. You should never have to look. The faster you are, the more money you get and the more admired you are. The person with the most pounds is the 'high-liner' of the day. There's no prize-just admiration. There's the challenge of competition, and you feel especially good if you beat out some guy who's been doing it all his life. Of course, he'll always say, 'I got a bad back,' or 'I came in late,' or 'I got a bad bag,' which means he had to throw away a lot.''
The girl laughed, and went on, "You try to stay ahead of your neighbors, and if they're ahead you watch and try to figure out why. When you're first starting out, they'll show you how to do it, but they'll show you really fast-to impress you. Once you get going, it's hard to slow the process down and explain it to somebody else, it becomes so smooth." I asked her how she liked the work.
'I like it," she said. "One thing is, you get paid in cash. So you always have money in your pocket when you leave, no matter how little. If you want more money, you just try to work more and faster, but you can only work when the boats come in. You feel independent, and it's a skill. There's an art to it, so you can feel proud of it. You get to know people, and build friendships. Some of the shuckers are townies, some are drifters, some are old lobstermen or clammers or fishermen. Sometimes, there are people who are too weird to do anything else-but they're accepted here. You can be a person of very few words and be a shucker; nobody bothers you. You eventually become buddies with quite a few people, because you've all been through the lousy work together. There's a lot of banter and joking around; that's nice. And a real community spirit. People help each other lift bags, share bags, carry buckets, and so on. Camaraderie."
I mentioned the continuous noise. 'It's better than the slamming of a hydraulic press on an assembly line," the girl said. "And, at least, scallops are half alive. They don't have much personality, but you get somewhat acquainted with them. There's the surprise of opening the bag. The shells have subtle colors and variations of design. And sometimes you find sea urchins and starfish and a big array of slimy creatures. The worst is the sea cucumber. There is nothing more disgusting. It has no head, no tail, no top, no bottom-no identity at all. Just purple-and-pink mush. You don't know what it is, but you know it's alive!"
She laughed again, and said, "I like living here, too. I like the quiet and the water all around, and the early-morning hours when only you and decent, hardworking people are up. I admire the shuckers and the fishermen- they're people who put their bodies and themselves on the line, doing hard physical work. Also, the people are loose. It's 'Hey, hey!' around here, instead of 'Is Pierson getting his raise before I get mine?' They always ask if you're hung over. The harder you work the harder you play, and this is a small town with not much to do. So people get incredibly drunk at night. But after spending the night passed out in a telephone booth or something they turn up for work the next morning."
The word went around that it was pay time, and the shuckers filed into the larger building. The girl jumped off the car. "One thing about shucking is you get into a kind of meditation," she said. "You look at what's come out of the bag, and daydream about what's under the ocean. You get a great sense of peace." She went into the building to pick up her pay. In a few minutes, she was out again, tucking money into the pocket of her jeans and grinning. "Forty five bucks," she said. The soft sound of guitar music came across the parking lot; a girl was sitting on the hood of a car playing a guitar, and others stood around listening. A light rain began to fall.