The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (3 page)

4. THE FOREST FLOOR

I have set myself a goal, a certain rock,
but it may well be dawn before I get there . . .
If and when I reach the rock,
I shall go into a certain crack there for the night.

— E
LIZABETH
B
ISHOP
, from “Giant Snail,” 1969

D
ESPITE ITS SMALL SIZE
, the snail was a fearless and tireless explorer. Maybe it was searching for a trail back to its original woods or hoping to find better fare. Instinctively it knew its limits, how far it could travel during the night and still return home in the morning. On the crate’s dry surface, the pot of violets was an oasis, offering water, food, and shelter.

Setting off on an expedition, its tentacles stretched out in anticipation, the snail appeared confident about where it was going, as if what it was looking for was just a few inches farther along the crate. Watching it glide along was a welcome distraction and provided a sort of meditation; my often frantic and frustrated thoughts would gradually settle down to match its calm, smooth pace. With its mysterious, fluid movement, the snail was the quintessential tai chi master.

I began to worry about how far the snail might go in the night, the difficulties it might encounter in its travels, and what risky thing it might choose to sample for a meal. Ink, pastels, and label glues didn’t seem like good forage for a snail. This brought to mind a children’s verse from the A. A. Milne poem “The Four Friends,” about an elephant, a lion, a goat, and a small snail named James. “James gave the huffle of a snail in danger / And nobody heard him at all.” I didn’t think that a snail could make the sound of a huffle—but I didn’t want to find out.

Though the bed-and-breakfast arrangement in the flowerpot had worked for a while, I wanted the snail to have a safer and more natural home. There was a barn attached to the studio where I was staying, and in one of its dark corners my caregiver found an empty rectangular glass aquarium. This was soon converted into a roomy terrarium filled with fresh native plants and other materials from the snail’s own woods: goldthread—aptly named for its colorful roots—holding its trio of delicate, paw-shaped leaves high on a thin stem; partridgeberry, with its round, dark green leaves and its small, bright red berries, which lasted for months; the larger, waxy leaves of checkerberry; many kinds of moss; small polypody ferns; a tiny spruce tree; a rotting birch log; and a piece of old bark encrusted with multicolored lichen.

Gulls flying over the coastline sometimes drop mussels, and in the woods one often finds the empty blue shells where they’ve landed in the moss. Such a shell, with its silvery inside, now served as a natural basin for fresh drinking water. With an old leaf here and a pine needle there, the terrarium looked as though a bit of native forest floor, with all its natural disarray, had been lifted up and placed inside. The moist, lush vibrancy of the plants reminded me of the woods after a rainstorm. It was a world fit for a snail, and it was a welcome sight for my own eyes as well.

Within moments of moving into this rich kingdom, the snail came partway out of its shell. Its tentacles quivered with interest and it set off to investigate the new terrain. It crawled along the dead log, drank water out of the mussel shell, investigated the mosses, climbed up the terrarium’s glass side, and then chose a dark, private corner and went to sleep nestled in some moss.

While the snail slept, I explored the terrarium from my bed, letting my eyes wander through the miniature hills and dales of its fresh green landscape. The variety of mosses was so satisfying, from a deep, loose softness to dense mounds with fuzzy and velvety textures. Their hues ranged from bright grass greens to deep dark greens and from sharp lemon greens to light blue greens.

Polypody ferns gently arched their beautiful four-inch fronds, their youngest fiddleheads still tightly curled. In my woods at home, along the brook, these ferns live on the sheer sides of granite boulders. They survive on a margin of rock where the air is humid and alive with the brook’s energy, their rhizomes finding sustenance in cracks and crevices. Buried beneath winter’s ice and snow each year, they magically send up new fronds every spring—a primeval perseverance.

The fresh terrarium at my side was lovely all by itself—a green and growing ecosystem; that it provided a magnificent backdrop for the humble brown snail was all the better. While the snail must have missed its familiar woods, the terrarium at least offered a more comfortable and natural world than the flowerpot. The snail would be safe in the terrarium, safer even than in the wild, as there were no predators hiding behind a leaf or swooping down from the sky.

As my snail watching continued, I wanted to know more about how to care properly for my small companion. My caregiver unearthed a decades-old paperback book titled
Odd Pets,
by Dorothy Hogner. In addition to providing basic information on snails, Hogner suggested feeding them a diet of mushrooms.

There were some fresh portobellos in the kitchen refrigerator. A single portobello was about fifty times larger than my snail, and so my caregiver cut a generous slice and placed it in the terrarium. The snail loved the mushroom. It was so happy to have a familiar food, after weeks of nothing but wilted flowers, that for several days it slept right next to the huge piece of portobello, waking throughout the day to reach up and nibble before sinking back into a well-fed slumber. Each night a surprisingly large portion of the mushroom would vanish, until, by the end of the week, the very last piece had disappeared.

5. LIFE IN A MICROCOSM

Everything in the world of Things and animals
is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.

— R
AINER
M
ARIA
R
ILKE
, 1903,
from
Letters to a Young Poet,
1927

T
HE SNAIL CONSUMED
an entire slice of portobello every week. As I watched it eat, I noticed that it nodded its head gently up and down. Did this mean that it approved of its dinner? When I examined what remained of the mushroom after it had dined, I could see a pattern of fresh teeth marks—very fine little vertical striations, as if made by a tiny comb.

Half the fun of having the snail as a companion was that it kept finding new sleeping places. So there was an ongoing game of hide-and-seek in the terrarium. It would blend so well into the woodland plants that I’d have to sleuth out its latest hiding spot. If the day was cloudy or rainy, the snail awoke and was active, and I was amazed at how fast it moved. I’d see it in one place at one moment, and then my mind would wander off and I’d have to search the terrarium to find it again.

The creature seemed to defy physics. It moved over the very tips of mosses without bending them, and it could travel straight up the stem of a fern and then continue upside down along the frond’s underside. Its tiny weight caused the fern frond to bend into an arc, yet the snail was unfazed; it was perfectly comfortable in any position and at any angle or height. Its balance, too, was impeccable. It could perch on the very edge of the mussel shell and from this precarious position reach casually across open space to eat some of the mushroom without falling or spilling water from the shell. No challenge was too great; if the snail came to an obstacle such as a branch, it made a brief inspection and then simply climbed up and over, rather than taking a longer route around. Each morning the terrarium glistened with the silvery trails of its nighttime travels.

I was fond of the elegant way the snail waved its tentacles as it moved serenely along, and I loved to watch it drink water from the mussel shell. Several times I was lucky enough to see it grooming; it arched its neck over the curved edge of its own shell and cleaned the rim carefully with its mouth, like a cat licking fur on the back of its neck. Usually the snail slept on its side, and at these times the striae, perpendicular to the spiraling whorls of its shell, reminded me of the pattern of stripes on my old tiger cat, Zephyr, when he would curl into a nap.

Though holding and reading a book for any length of time involved levels of strength and concentration that were beyond me, watching the snail was completely relaxing. I observed without thinking, looking into the terrarium simply to feel connected to another creature; another life was being lived just a few inches away.

While the snail and I each had our routines, we also both appreciated adventures. When a visiting friend or relative brought something to add to the terrarium, the snail was always intrigued. Whether it was a half-rotten lichen-covered branch, a piece of birch bark, a clump of moss of a different species, or perhaps a leaf of lettuce or a slice of cucumber, the snail received the gift with tentacles aquiver. After conducting a careful and thorough examination, it then tasted anything that might be edible.

My own adventures were more challenging. After weeks of never leaving the bed in the room where I stayed, a trip to a doctor’s appointment was a monumental undertaking. I traveled horizontally in the car, and given the physical stillness of my usual daily existence, it was astonishing to see the treetops rushing past overhead at what seemed like a furious speed.

Wheeled into the doctor’s reception room, I’d find myself surrounded by quietly waiting patients. We had each journeyed to this office from our own distant planet of illness. Though strangers, we became instant, silent companions. We were here for the same purpose: to describe our alien experience to the doctor in hope of survival advice. The chance to be with other patients brought a catch to my throat; despite our individual ailments, we shared the burden of illness. Yet even here my participation was limited, as I was too weak to sit upright for more than a few minutes. As quickly as possible I’d be taken straight back to an examination room so that I could wait lying down.

Though I could recline in the back of a car for these occasional outings, there were few other accessible destinations. Offices, stores, galleries, libraries, and movie theaters are not designed for horizontal people. The most satisfying adventure was when my driver had errands to run and I could lie in the back of the car in a parking lot and watch my own species bustle about its business. This brought a sense of connection and contentment, yet was a striking reminder of how entirely cut off I was from the most basic activities of life.

6. TIME AND TERRITORY

The velocity of the ill,
however, is like that of the snail.

— E
MILY
D
ICKINSON
, in a letter
to Charles H. Clark, April 1886

I
NCHES FROM MY
bed and from each other stood the terrarium and a clock. While life in the terrarium flourished, time ticked away its seconds. But the relationship between time and the snail confused me. The snail would make its way through the terrarium while the hands of the clock hardly moved—so I often thought the snail traveled faster than time. Then, absorbed in snail watching, I’d find that time had flown by, unnoticed. And what about the unfurling of a fern frond? Its pace was undetectable, yet day by day it, too, reached toward its goal.

The mountain of things I felt I needed to do reached the moon, yet there was little I could do about anything, and time continued to drag me along its path. We are all hostages of time. We each have the same number of minutes and hours to live within a day, yet to me it didn’t feel equally doled out. My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what time I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose.

I eagerly awaited visitors, but the anticipation and the extra energy of greetings caused a numbing exhaustion. As the first stories unfolded, my spirit held on to the conversation as best it could—I so wanted these connections to the outside world—but my body sank beneath waves of weakness. Still, my friends were golden threads randomly appearing in the monotonous fabric of my days. Each visit was a window that opened momentarily into the life I had once known, always falling shut before I could make my way back through. The visits were like dreams from which I awoke once more alone.

As the snail’s world grew more familiar, my own human world became less so; my species was so large, so rushed, and so confusing. I found myself preoccupied with the energy level of my visitors, and I started to observe them in the same detail with which I observed the snail. The random way my friends moved around the room astonished me; it was as if they didn’t know what to do with their energy. They were so
careless
with it. There were spontaneous gestures of their arms, the toss of a head, a sudden bend into a full body stretch as if it were nothing at all; or they might comb their fingers unnecessarily through their hair.

It took time for visitors to settle down. They sat and fidgeted for a while, then slowly relaxed until a calmness finally spread through them. They began to talk about more interesting things. But halfway through a visit, they would notice how little I moved, the stillness of my body, and an odd quietness would come over them. They would worry about wearing me out, but I could also see that I was a reminder of all they feared: chance, uncertainty, loss, and the sharp edge of mortality. Those of us with illnesses are the holders of the silent fears of those with good health.

Eventually, discomfort moved through my visitors, nudging a hand into motion, a foot into tapping. The more apparent my own lack of movement, the greater their need to move. Their energy would turn into restlessness, propelling their bodies into action with a flinging of the arms or a walk around the room; a body is not meant to be still. Soon my visitors were off.

My dog, Brandy, was a mix of golden retriever and yellow Lab. Even at eight years of age, her energy was extreme compared to my own. It was incredible that I, too, had once moved through life with such exuberance, with her at my side. From my bed I could give her scraps from my dinner and manage a few strokes of her soft ears. I loved her so, and her intense longing for more made me ache to leap from bed, fling open the door to the outside world, and escape, the two of us heading, once again, deep into the wild woods.

W
HEREAS THE ENERGY OF
my human visitors wore me out, the snail inspired me. Its curiosity and grace pulled me further into its peaceful and solitary world. Watching it go about its life in the small ecosystem of the terrarium put me at ease. I began to think about naming the snail, as it was an individual with its own unique character traits. I had learned in the book
Odd Pets
that snails are hermaphrodites, which narrowed the options. But a human name didn’t seem to fit. The snail was not just an individual creature that I was coming to know. It was introducing me in spirit to its entire line of gastropod ancestors, which, I guessed, reached far back in time. Looking into the terrarium was like entering that ancient era. From my recumbent bedside view, the ferns and mosses appeared as miniature forests and fields, and as I watched the snail go about its life, it seemed as if it lived in a timeless world without change. I liked the sound of the word “snail” every time I said it; the word was as small and simple as the creature itself. It is a word from Old English, with an earlier derivation from the German
schnecke,
for snail, spiral, or spiral-shaped yeast bun. So in the end I decided not to name my companion but to continue to refer to it as “the snail.”

G
IVEN ITS TINY FOOTPRINT
, the snail had plenty of territory in the terrarium to survey in minute detail, finding endless nooks and crannies of interest. I, on the other hand, rarely moved beyond the familiar section of my sheets. Occasionally, when the snail slept and an urgent need for change—no matter the cost—swept through me, I would slowly roll from my right side over to my left side. This simple act caused my heart to beat wildly and erratically, but the reward was a whole new vista. The other side of the room was spread out before me like a map with countless possibilities of faraway adventures, including the most tantalizing of things, a window and a door.

Nothing, of course, was in reach. I could just see into the corner of the bathroom, where I knew, if I could only look farther in, I would find a claw-foot bathtub. Just to think of a bath, the kind one can settle into as if it were a relaxing, normal routine, caused an unfathomable longing. Across the room there was a shelf that held many books, each cover a different hue, their titles of possible interest if only I could decipher them, but the distance was too great. There was a window I could look out if only I could stand. And there was the door, the door to the outside world.

Was this truly a door that I would someday open and walk through, as if walking out into the world were an ordinary thing to do? I would look at the door until it reminded me of all the places I could not go. Then, exhausted and empty from my audacious adventure, I’d make the slow roll back toward the kingdom of the terrarium and the tiny life it contained.