Digital Extra

Surf clams -- the ashtray souvenirs of summer vacation, the favorite bait of uncounted generations of fishermen, the breaded, fried clam strips of the grocer's freezer section -- lie in morbid rows by the tens of thousands.

Or more.

Nobody knows how many, said Arthur Ganz, principal marine biologist for the state Department of Environmental Management.

Millions?

"We're trying to quantify," he said, stooping to poke a stick through a pile of beach cobbles mixed with clams, crabs, shellfish and other victims of a poisoned sea.

But lobsters were his main concern. Nearby a group of volunteers followed as Ganz and fellow marine biologist April Valliere performed a recurring ritual.

Ganz picked up a frame of welded steel reinforcing rod a meter square and cast it at random. Whatever lay inside its perimeter was counted.

"Sixteen," he said, prodding lobsters. "Here's one still alive," he said, picking up a limp chicken lobster whose ventral flippers scarcely responded as he drew his finger along the underside of the tail.

"Maybe it'll help to put it back, I don't know," he said, tromping down the pitch of the beach. He slid the lobster into the path of a wave.

Behind Ganz and Valliere came a handful of volunteers with five-gallon buckets, picking up lobsters as the count proceeded.

The idea of the frame is to provide "blind transects" -- meter-square samples of the undersea carnage. Ganz worked the beach in 200-yard swaths, casting the heavy frame every 25 yards or so. The count ranged from no lobsters to more than a hundred. Valliere kept track of the inventory as Ganz called out what he could see. "It's a standardized process," he said, sniffing a bit in the freezing wind that swept along the shoreline.

The count will resume Monday, Ganz said. Because the volunteers cleared away the lobsters as they went, any found Monday will be counted as new victims of the oil spill.

"The more we look the worse it is," Ganz said. "It's pretty sad. And as bad as it is here, it's worse at Deep Hole."

Sad was a word sorely overused along the miles of beach being combed by volunteers shivering against the bite of the wind, many coordinated by the environmental group Save the Bay.

At Deep Hole, a stretch of beach a few hundred yards west but separated from the rest of Browning Beach by a seawall, David Nedwidek of nearby Perryville thought he had seen between 5,000 and 10,000 dead lobsters.

"This is where I fish nearly every day during the summer," Nedwidek said. "Most of them are six to eight inches. This one's a keeper. It's really sad."

But "keeper" became a meaningless term. A lobster here might be big enough to be legal, but the contamination would sicken anyone who ate it.

As a Coast Guard helicopter thumped overhead, Anne Garnett of Save the Bay instructed a gaggle of volunteers. She passed out plastic garbage bags to each.

"This is what we call the Dead Department," Garnett said. "The live stuff gets funneled through U.S. Fish & Wildlife. They have a rehabilitation center at Trustom Pond."

The "live stuff" means birds. There would be few live birds and little rehabilitation on this beach on this day.

Like the other volunteer parties working the beaches, Garnett's was picking up lobsters to avoid double-counting them as daily samples are taken.

"Plus," she said, "we don't want them getting into the food chain. It's so sad."

How does the oil kill the shellfish?

"Gets into their gills," Ganz said. "The gills are covered with oil, and they essentially smother."

Sunday's sampling revealed an ominous change from that of the day before.

"Most of them are dead Monday," Ganz said. "Sunday they were lethargic, slow to respond to stimulus.

As Valliere took notes on a clipboard, Ganz called out, "Spider crab, Jonah crab, rock crab, blue crab."

On a foot-long shard of driftwood someone had lined up eight dead lobsters, none over six inches in length, one only the size of a pinky finger.

But no gulls. Where were the gulls amid such a banquet?

"The gulls are already full," said Valliere.

Will the oil poison them?

"With what gulls already eat?" Ganz said with a laugh. He said he did not know.

Twenty feet from where the group stooped, counted and cleaned, a line of signposts told passers, "Tern nesting area. Please keep away."

It would have no effect on oil, but the high tide line had not quite reached the signs. Farther down the beach, at Trustom Pond, heavy earth-moving equipment had flung up a sand berm to keep the fuel out. How successful the effort was no one knew.

"There are tons and tons here" of surf clams, Ganz said, flinging the frame again. "This has always been a good spot for them."

Would this wipe out the population?

No, said Ganz, because surf clams live in water from just beyond the wave line all the way out to the continental shelf. It would take time to restore the local population, but the clams and lobsters would return.

"This one's an egg-bearer," said DEM biologist Scott Olszewski, holding up a female lobster near keeper-size.

"Here's a blue," said Valliere. She displayed the cobalt creature. "One in a hundred thousand, one in a million -- I'm not sure."

She stooped. "There's got to be 200 lobsters here," she said.

Ganz ground his boot into the pile of lobsters and starfish. A solemn skate stared up through dead eyes. A child's orange plastic turtle and wisps of discarded line decorated the mound, at a point of the beach near Potter Pond.

Ganz finished his count. One hundred and forty dead lobsters lay at his feet within the metal frame.

The culprits rested down the beach: The tug Scandia listed to port, wheelhouse burned out, stern awash in the surf. Its Plimsoll line, marking the hull depth from 10 feet to 19, stood out sharply on its bow. But the Scandia was not drawing even 10 feet on this day.

Sternward lay the barge North Cape, listing to starboard, hard aground on the unforgiving rocks of Nebraska Shoal.

A lighter, the Essex, lay alongside, pitching in the waves in contrast to the motionless North Cape. Men worked aboard both barges, pumping what oil they could into the tanks of the Essex. Two tugs stood just offshore, lines fast to the Essex, diesel engines ticking over, keeping the barge from slamming against the derelict as big swells swept in.

Oddly, there were nearly no traces of environmental disaster here. The smell of oil could be detected only occasionally, and only as the wind shifted and returned it to its source.

The stretch of beach here seemed clean. The surf had marooned only a few surf clams here, their fleshy digger "feet" dangling limply from gaping shells. A prod from a boot showed some life still there. There was no trace of oil on the beach cobblestones, some still gleaming white as new-fallen snow. A lone lobster lay supine on the firm sand, not far from the carcass of a tautog of about seven pounds.

The air was clear beneath a dark gray sky. Block Island hung dimly on the horizon, and the pinpoint of the Point Judith lighthouse glowed to the east. The raging elements that had driven the tug and tethered barge onto the lee shore on Friday were only a memory.

Only the two wrecks showed that something had gone terribly wrong here -- that and the forlorn parties of volunteers well to the east, working the beach, reaping a bitter harvest in a bitter wind.