OCEAN CITY, Wash. — Some razor clammers take a methodical line, a slow, eyes-down stroll through the outgoing tide, watching for the telltale quarter-size divot that marks a clam’s hiding spot, 2 feet or so below the surface.

At age 82, John Lavender takes that approach. He walked the beach here Friday just after 7 a.m. with the cool calm of a clam digger’s wisdom, born of 50 years’ experience.

Then there’s Garrett Lavender, 12, his grandson. For Garrett, digging razor clams is all about the fast-twitch muscles: charge, jump, dig, shout. The extended Lavender family drove six hours from their homes in south-central Washington to be here.

“They’re faster than we are,” Garrett said, slamming into the sand with his shovel. Moments later he was face down, arm deep into the hole, grasping for his prize before it could escape.

Pacific razor clams are sweet and meaty, a seasonal delicacy that finds its place in high-end restaurants in Seattle and Portland, each two and a half to three hours away. They are also on the dinner plates of any recreational digger willing to buy a license and do some physical work in conditions that are sometimes cold and invariably wet. The season runs from October to May, with dates selected by the state based on clam stocks and when the low tides are right.

When the first clammers hit the beach here Friday around 6 a.m., two and a half hours before low tide — the key moment to strike — the temperature was in the mid-30s. Pretty nice, all in all. Not raining.

“I’ve been out here when it’s rain and sleet mixed,” said Mary Wyman, who came down from Whidbey Island, north of Seattle. Like most diggers, Wyman was using a clam gun — essentially a metal tube that, when shoved into the beach, pulls up a column of sand with a clam enclosed, if it has been aimed right.

The relationship of humans and razor clams goes back thousands of years around here. The Indian tribes that dominated this part of the coast lived well, and also traded well with inland Indians who knew a good thing when they tasted it.

European settlement in the 1800s took clamming to an industrial scale (though with a brief turn back to subsistence during the Great Depression of the 1930s when squatters lived on the beach in driftwood shacks, clamming to get by.)

Starting in the 1960s, however, recreational clamming took off, when “everyone wanted to be an Eddie Bauer,” as Daniel Ayres, a state shellfish biologist put it. Clammers going back to the land, or in this case, the beach, surged in number, according to state figures, hitting a peak of “digger trips” in 1979 as a wave of scruffy outdoorsiness and wide-wale corduroy filtered through the Pacific Northwest culture.

Thousands of Washingtonians still do it each spring and fall — buying a license and carefully clamming by the rules and the 15 clams per day limit. But for many it is now more of an epicurean thing, or a nostalgic echo of a life lived closer to nature, or to the counterculture.