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 4-6 metres of water, and the rake was angled beneath us at the end of a 12-metre 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
