Your Friendly Neighborhood Snail

This story is about being a good neighbor.

Allow me to explain something about myself. I have a personality quirk that some people find endearing and refreshing and other people find bizarre and mildly annoying.  I anthropomorphize everything—especially, plants and animals but even inanimate objects.  I talk to things as if they might in some way be human. I had to apologize to my body the other day for thinking disparaging thoughts about it.  Yesterday I thanked my feet for being so awesome. I passed by a bush this morning with thorns and little white flowers and exclaimed excitedly, “Are you a blackberry bush?!” I didn’t see little budding berries anywhere. But before I went on my way, I reassured the bush, “That’s okay I love you just as well.”  Often, as I walk down the sidewalk, a little bird or a squirrel pops up near by.  I always greet them with a friendly “Hello!” A few weeks ago I was in Newport sitting by the sea watching a little bunny hop around and eat grass. I was quiet so as not to disturb her dinner.  As I watched her all I could think was, “I wish you knew how much I love you.” I have always felt a deep tenderness toward the world and all of its creatures.

Important caveat: I hate spiders and I wish they would all die. Same goes for cockroaches and every bug with way too many legs and no counteracting cuteness factor. I don’t talk to them.  I scream, run away and campaign among the other humans present for their immediate eradication. If I’m alone, I suck it up and kill them myself—not without a lot of swearing punctuated with a fair amount of squealing and yelping. 

Everything else in the world I love and adore and talk with like a friend. Generally, these sentiments remain unvoiced thoughts but I sometimes speak out loud to non-humans. This kind of conversational, relational way of being in the world is such an intrinsic part of my internal life that I often do it off handedly and I forget that it is a little uncommon and unfortunately strange to many people. Every now and then I become particularly self-aware regarding this aspect of my character. In those moments, I really crack myself up. I had one of those moments last night. 

The rain started yesterday morning but didn’t really come full force until the late afternoon. The rain had finally let up a little and a friend and I were walking to the T. I was going to my small group; he was going to look at an apartment. We’ve both now forgotten exactly what we were talking about because our friendly conversation was abruptly interrupted by a very serious crisis. As we neared the end of our street I spotted three snails that had crawled out of the hedge and onto the sidewalk. 

“Oh, my god!” I blurted out. “Help me get them to safety!” I reached down and picked up two of them.

“Get that one.” I told my friend.

With a raised eye brow and a bemused grin, he reached down and picked up the third snail. We found a patch of leaves beside the hedge to set them on.  As we carried out our rescue mission I explained to him that, being small, gray and incredibly slow, these poor creatures, which were attempting to get away from their now flooded hiding places, had only succeeded in making themselves vulnerable to death by squishing.  I have been painfully aware of their plight since, months ago, after a light rain, I was on my way to the airport and accidentally squished one with my suitcase right in front of my apartment.  I felt so terrible. So when I saw three more snails stranded on the wrong side of the hedge I knew what I had to do. 

“I feel so bad for them,” I told my friend. “It’s really a shame they don’t have the capacity for cognitive thinking.”

My friend laughed and agreed that it was indeed tragic that they keep making the same mistake over and over.  If only they could reason it out—“Remember the last time it rained and Joe crawled out on the concrete to get away from the water and that big thing came out of the sky and squished him . . . I guess we should just crawl up on a leaf this time . . .”  

My friend and I parted ways leaving the snails to fend for themselves. I went to my small group and after met a good friend for drinks, all the while the weather getting worse and worse.  There was even flooding in some areas of the city.  By the time I got off the last bus home it was almost one in the morning and the heavy rain had given way to a cool humid wind. I’d been wearing my sandals all day and they were starting to rub in certain places so as soon as I stepped onto my street I took them off and carried them in my hands.  I wasn’t five paces down the street when I realized that every snail on my block had crawled out onto the sidewalk. I bent down and picked up the first one I saw so that I could get it to safety only to realize that he had already been crushed.  No! I felt my face wrinkle up in agony. I searched the ground and found a baby snail near by unharmed.  I rescued him—and another one and another. I trotted barefoot down my sidewalk rescuing snails from their imminent doom. 

“What are you doing out here?” I asked them, like a mother scolding a four-year-old she’d repeatedly warned.  Tisk, tisk.  I set them gingerly out of harms way feeling a deep sense of affection for them and a profound sense of satisfaction in protecting them from a terrible squish-death.

The sidewalk was lit by street lamps but was still dark in places where trash cans or trees interrupted the light.  As I stepped into one of these dark patches I felt a crunch under my bare heel only a nanosecond before a short ear-piercing scream ruptured the silence of my neighborhood. I had squished a snail.  I almost dropped my purse as I jumped and flailed my arms. I would have been calmer if I’d seen a ghost.

It took a second to regulate my breathing again.  Then moving more carefully and watching the ground even closer I proceeded on my way though not without a lingering sense of grief and sadness.  Soon I found another group of snails. I picked up the first one, turned him to face me and lectured—

“What are you doing out here?! I just squished one of your friends!! You do not belong on the concrete.  You. are. a. SNAIL.  It is not safe for you out here.”

I set him down on some leaves and moved his friends over with him scolding them under my breath.  They all just sat there looking stupid.  Poor things. They can’t help it.  All in all I probably saved twelve or fifteen snails on my way home. God knows what I must have looked like to anyone peeking out their window just then. I must've looked like a Whitfield patient, walking crouched low to the ground barefoot  at one in the morning, talking to no one in particular, screaming and jumping for no apparent reason. 

My roommate and friend were still up when I came in so I told them about my walk home. My friend made a joke about building a tiny fence around the yard to keep the snails safe—which I actually think is a brilliant idea. And since it’s clearly hard for them to climb up on leaves and rocks to get dry you could also put in some big flat stones so they would have a safe place to congregate when it rains. My friend insisted that even liberal save-the-snails environmentalists would care less about snails than I do.  Maybe.  But only because they care about snails in a more broad global sense and I care about the practical well-being of the snails right outside my door. I don’t know much about snails in general. I just know the ones in my neighborhood often get squished on the sidewalk when it rains. I’ve never signed a petition to save them and I don’t know which species are endangered but I should. My moving the neighborhood snails to safety and Green Peace (or whoever)’s campaign to protect habitats and limit toxic waste in the environment are in principle the same kinds of actions.  We have a responsibility to care for and protect life in our literal neighborhood as well as the worldwide neighborhood of creation. We were meant to live together in harmony rather than opposition.  I will have to apologize to the snails on my street for not doing more to make sure the world is a hospitable place for them and their endangered cousins. I’m not yet sure how else I can help them.  For now it will have to be enough for me to offer as much squish-death protection as I can.