The Snail’s Eye View
It’s been unusually rainy here the last few weeks. I say that even though I have never been here for an extended period and certainly not at this time of year, but I think I’m on safe ground saying that. We have had a few days like yesterday when it rained cats and dogs as they say. It was a rain that would have made people in the tropics wonder what was up. The nice thing is that the natural dryness of the climate is such that when the rain stops it stops quickly and dries out quickly. Right now, I am looking out on sunny hills with billowy cumulus clouds with only the slightest hint of nimbus to them above. Visibility is good out over the ocean, but I can’t quite see the San Gabriel mountains to the north. The biggest difference is that the window to the West does not have a snail making its way across it as it did this morning.
I am seeing and removing snails from all over the place. I have done some research, and this appears to be a normal part of spring in San Diego. These snails appear to be brown garden snails (Cornu apsersum, formerly Helix aspersa). I read that they can be good, bad and ugly all at once. They can be good because they do sometimes feed on insect larva and other snails (I never realized there were dueling snails, but it figures in a world gone mad). They can be bad because they do tend to eat vegetation (mostly at night when you can’t see them) and can damage plantings and even trees by chewing off bark. These little guys and their cousins the slugs (basically, a snail without a shell to hide in) drag themselves across all kinds of surfaces with their singular muscular “foot” and leave a slimy mucus trail that is noticeably silvery in the sunlight. I particularly notice the little buggers on the driveway, on the concrete paths and occasionally on the stucco sides of the house.
These gastropod mollusks tend to travel solo from what I can tell. I don’t understand the ones on the house and on my window. I assume the snails on the driveway and paths are making their way to greener pastures across the road, so to speak, but why on the house? Is there something to eat there that I can’t see? Are they like squirrels and trying to get inside through some little opening or other? If I were curious enough and brave enough, I might use this as an occasion to go under the house in the damp crawlspace under the house (remember, Californians don’t bother digging basements since frost lines are not a thing out here). I bet there are a bunch of snails down there having a real party right now. Since they like it dark and its dark all day, that’s just another quandary about those brave and daring snails that are climbing the walls. Maybe they feel our collective lockdown pain?
I have read that snails are hermaphrodites, which is to say that they have both male and female organs and can produce eggs and fertilize them all by their lonesome. That helps explain their solitary manner, but it has been observed by snail scientists that despite this ability, they tend to still copulate with a partner just for the hell of it. This quarantine is making me wonder whether homo sapiens could develop hermaphroditically and become snail-like. I once read a Kurt Vonnegut book called Galápagos about a very strangely similar set of circumstances that we find ourselves in now.
Galápagos is the story of a group of people who are shipwrecked on a Galápagos Island after a global financial crisis cripples the world’s economy. Some sort of disease (Coronavirus?) makes humans infertile all over the world, except for this small group on the isolated Galapagos Island. Gradually, Darwinian tendencies take their natural course and turns the humans on the island into some kind of a new species that resemble a furry seal, adapted to the environment to feed off ocean fish. I guess they still procreated the same way, more or less, but Vonnegut doesn’t specify that. He does say at a poignant ending to the book that they all still laugh when someone lying on the beach farts. So he concludes that humans will always be human.
So, back to snails, maybe I’m getting stir-crazy and thinking too much, but snails seem to have lots going for them. They are omnivorous like we are. They are both nocturnal and operate in daylight. They wear their skeleton on the outside, but it has some serious style elements that make me think it could be a very appropriate clothing for humans. They are very flexible, both literally and figuratively if one considers their sexual capabilities. They have been around for 550 million years where humans have only had 200,000 years. We are the evolutionary equivalent to the hare versus the tortoise-like snail. We have almost completely destroyed our environment in no time at all. I suspect morphing to something more snail-like might allow us to survive a bit longer that our current outlook affords.
There is an old joke about the two snails moving slowly down the road. A horse runs by them and several months later the one snail says to the other, “Did you see that horse go by?” Several months later the other snail says no. A few more months go by and the first snail says, “Sure you did, it was a white horse.” The other snail stops and turns to his partner and says, “Well, if all you’re every going to do is argue, I’m out of here.”
Everything is relative. We are learning for the first time in our lives to slow down and be more deliberate in our activities and our relationships. We have begun to realize that we were taking a lot of little things for granted and we were moving so fast that we were being very wasteful with our lives and our resources. Now we are getting the benefit of the snail’s eye view.