The Humbling Power of PAIN
THE BAD PAIN STARTED in my right arm soon after dinner. By the next morning, it hurt for me to make a fist. I was on the chronic-injury ride.
One of my sons and I had been bull raking from a skiff near an island in Narragansett Bay, scratching up baskets of wild hard-shell clams on a winter day. Bull raking, a method of manually harvesting shellfish with a metal rake and basket attached to a long aluminum pole, can be hard work. On this afternoon, early in 2019, we were working in 16 to 20 feet of water, and the rake was angled beneath us at the end of a 40-foot pole. I dragged it through the silt-and-gravel sediment by squeezing my hands over and rhythmically pulling on a metal T-handle, cutting furrows as we drifted downtide.
The ritual went on for hours. I’d jerk the rake for about five minutes, until the basket felt full, then retrieve the rake to the surface and dump its contents on a sorting
