The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (10 page)

20. WINTER SNAIL

closing the door
he drops off to sleep
snail

— K
OBAYASHI
I
SSA
(1763 – 1828)

T
HE MONTHS PASSED
, and leaves of flaming reds and oranges floated past my window, scattering and drifting. I was well settled at home, so the snail’s single remaining offspring came to keep me company. This time the terrarium was a huge antique glass bowl with a forty-eight-inch circumference—it created a wonderful green spherical world. The juvenile snail was about one-third the size of an acorn. It took to sleeping during the day inside a hollow, rotting birch branch, which provided a perfect dark, damp hiding place. Occasionally I’d use a flashlight to look in and check on it.

As the days grew short, the winter’s stillness was broken by the abstract, shifting patterns of white snow in air. I watched the flakes change their shape and size, moment to moment, as they played on the wind. They would rush downward, only to rise on an updraft, swirl gracefully around, and then descend once more, vanishing into the older snow that banked the house. Periodically, howling blizzard winds would hide the dark green spruce woods from my view and leave behind an even thicker snow covering.

Beneath this white blanket, wild snails were hibernating, snug in their burrows. Did they dream while they slept, and if so, were the dreams composed entirely of smell and taste and touch? Or had they drifted into a sleep so deep as to be without thought or memory?

Inside my house the weather conditions were quite different. The oil furnace kept the air warm and dry. Instead of digging a hole and hibernating, my young snail estivated for several weeks at a time; it would either disappear inside the hollow birch branch or dangle upside down from the underside of a polypody fern. When it woke, it would eat mushroom and soil, drink water, and rasp at the inside of the mussel shell for minerals. Then it would head for the dark birch hollow or climb back up a fern frond and estivate again.

There was a paradox of speed in relation to distance and time that began to intrigue me: in contrast to its slow locomotion, my snail’s life cycle was quick. In seventy years it could produce seventy generations, compared to the three generations a human might produce. Although the snail moved more slowly than a human through the physical world, it traveled more quickly than a human along its pathway as an evolving species.

My snail’s quick life cycle also brought to mind a paradox within my own human world. While some aspects of society—such as technology and communications—were continually speeding up, other aspects, such as health care, moved at a pace even slower than my snail. During the months that I waited for appointments, underwent tests, and tried new treatments, my original snail laid its eggs, hatched its young, and returned to the woods, where it searched for a mate. Then, in late fall, it went into hibernation.

As the winter months passed, I noticed a change in my snail-watching behavior. The previous spring, when I could do almost nothing, spending time with a snail had been pure entertainment. But as my functional abilities improved just a bit, watching a snail began to take patience. I wondered at what point in my convalescence I might leave the snail’s world behind.

T
HE ORIGINAL SNAIL HELD
a place in my heart forever, and while I was fond of its offspring, it was often estivating, and I was often distracted by other things. Friends would stop by and take Brandy out for a winter hike on the woods’ trails. From the window I’d watch as my dog bounded exuberantly through the snowdrifts. For sheer pleasure, she’d nosedive into the deep snow, rolling onto her back for an icy bath, her paws waving ecstatically at the winter sky.

Neighbors checked in on me, bringing the recent local news: a cow had taken off and was eventually found wandering through the woods, and folks out skiing behind their own house on an unseasonably warm late-February afternoon had popped off their skis, stripped down to their undergarments, climbed up a large boulder covered with leafless vines, and sunbathed, only to find days later that they were unexpectedly itchy—a rare outbreak of midwinter poison ivy. And there were stories I’d missed while I was away: a neighbor’s dog had arrived home one spring day with a wild turkey egg, unharmed, held gently in his mouth.

I was grateful for, and appreciative of, my closest friends and neighbors, but I still missed the outer layers of society—the acquaintances with their dual air of familiarity and mystery, and the interesting newcomers, who enliven everything. Each relapse shrinks my world down to the core. And each time I’ve started to make my slow way back, over many years, toward the life I once knew, I find that nothing is quite as I remember; in my absence, the world has moved forward.

T
HE BANKS OF SNOW
were melting away, and the air hinted of the coming spring.

The young snail was still estivating on a fern frond. Thinking that it would be hungry when it awoke, I put a fresh mushroom in the terrarium and wondered if the snail would sense the lengthening days. I was eager for open windows and the chance to be outside, even if just a few feet from the house. I wrote to one of my doctors:

I could never have guessed what would get me through this past year—a woodland snail and its offspring; I honestly don’t think I would have made it otherwise. Watching another creature go about its life . . . somehow gave me, the watcher, purpose too. If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in my life mattered, so I kept on . . . Snails may seem like tiny, even insignificant things compared to the wars going on around the world or a million other human problems, but they may well outlive our own species.

21. SPRING RAIN

in this falling rain
where are you off to
snail?

— K
OBAYASHI
I
SSA
(1763 – 1828)

T
HE FIRST COLD
rains arrived, and as the weeks passed and the weather warmed, the spring peepers and wood frogs began to sing in the evenings. With the increased humidity, the young snail woke up, climbed down from its fern frond, and became active again. It would soon be mature, and the time had come to release it to the wild so that it could establish a territory and search for a mate. Life without a snail was hard to contemplate. I would miss its quiet presence, but I knew the spring showers would ensure an ample supply of fresh food, giving it the best chance of survival.

I wrote another letter to my doctor:

We have rain again today. I’ve been looking out the window from my daybed, wishing I could do what I’d do if it weren’t for this illness, which is to put on my boots and raincoat, grab a shovel, and move dozens of plants around. One spring, in a rain shower, I dug up all my tulips in full bloom and wandered around the yard holding them by their two-foot necks, with the bulb and roots dangling down and the tulip flowers staring up at me with their big Cyclops-like eyes. I decided, based on color, just where to relocate each one. If you move plants in the rain, they hardly even know it, and they did just fine. Today is a perfect snail-letting-go day.

Hatched and raised in a terrarium, the young snail had been served the finest of portobello mushrooms and fresh water in a blue mussel shell. It had never encountered the dangers that lurked in the woods. It would have to survive on its own ingenuity, and I hoped that it would find its new home an interesting and delicious place, both familiar and very surprising.

I could now occasionally manage to walk the short distance to the edge of the woods. One evening, after a light rain had turned to drizzle, I carried the young snail to a spot beneath some large hardwood trees backed by a stone wall. Placing it gently on the ground, I watched as it came partway out of its shell. Its tentacles lengthened, twitching with interest, and it moved them this way and that in response to the abundance of fresh odors. It explored some dead leaves, some dark green moss, a bit of lichen, and the big root of a tree. I watched it glide slowly through the dusk and vanish into the dark.

For the first time, the young snail was in a world without boundaries. I wondered what it would think of this unexpected freedom. What kind of nighttime adventures would it have while I slept, and where would it hide the next morning for its daytime rest? How would it choose a territory in an endless wilderness?

22. NIGHT STARS

Humanity is exalted not because we are
so far above other living creatures, but because knowing
them well elevates the very concept of life.

— E
DWARD
O. W
ILSON
,
Biophilia,
1984

M
Y GARDENS WERE
awakening, and whenever possible I was outside on a chaise longue with Brandy at my side. We watched the sunlight find its way through the branches of the crab apple tree, dappling the blue squill and crocus, and we looked for the pointed noses of tulip leaves as they emerged in the perennial beds. Each week more perennials came into bloom, and the hedge that bordered the garden began to fill with nesting birds. Having flown several thousand miles, the ruby-throated hummingbirds appeared and took up their usual summer residence in the old apple trees. They spent their time zooming between the flower beds in front of the house and the patch of poppies in the back, competing for nectar in midair with the multicolored butterflies in an ancient interspecies dance.

I could close my eyes and feel the sun warm my whole length and the wind ruffle its way over me. My ears filled with the dozy hum of bees and those tiny and odd insect sounds that rise up all around, the sounds mingling in my mind with the good, deep smell of earthy life.

S
PRING TURNED TO SUMMER
, summer turned to fall, the snow came, and the snail and its offspring were still much in my thoughts. The original snail had been the best of companions; it never asked me questions I couldn’t answer, nor did it have expectations I couldn’t fulfill. I had watched it adapt to changed circumstances and persevere. Naturally solitary and slow paced, it had entertained and taught me, and was beautiful to watch as it glided silently along, leading me through a dark time into a world beyond that of my own species. The snail had been a true mentor; its tiny existence had sustained me.

Late one winter night I wrote in my journal:

A last look at the stars and then to sleep. Lots to do at whatever pace I can go. I must remember the snail. Always remember the snail.

EPILOGUE

Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually,
without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

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

M
Y SNAIL OBSERVATIONS
are from a single year of my nearly two decades of illness. I have merged that story and a few nonsnail stories with my later scientific readings. The research for this book and the gradual process of its writing matched the slow pace of its protagonist and were just as nocturnal. I found myself, once again, following the snail deep into its life.

While I was snail watching, there was much I did not know about my small companion, and there was just as much I did not know about my illness. I was curious about my snail’s species, and solving that puzzle would take several attempts and the help of a few experts. Even more challenging was the mystery of the pathogen that had forever changed the course of my life, and I would track down the likely culprit. There was also the unknown future—my own, and that of all living things.

A Q
UESTION OF
S
PECIES

The snail and its offspring were wild creatures. They represented half a billion years of gastropod evolution. I wanted to understand their place in such a venerable lineage.

From a book by John Burch,
How to Know the Eastern Land Snails,
I learned that my snail was of the subclass Pulmonata, having a lung and making temporary epiphragms for dormancy, instead of the permanent operculum that is attached to the foot of snails of some species, allowing them to shut their door each time they withdraw into their shell.

There are sixty families of Pulmonata land snails in the world, encompassing some twenty thousand species, and so I continued on, discovering its order—Stylommatophora (eyes at the tips of the tentacles, mostly terrestrial)—and family—Polygyridae (reflected shell lip and large size).

As to genus and species, I was at a standstill. It would take an expert to make that final determination, based on information I didn’t have, such as whether the interior of the shell had a toothlike “nub,” which I couldn’t have seen with a live snail inside.

I contacted Tim Pearce, assistant curator and head of the Section of Mollusks at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, as well as the biologist Ken Hotopp at Appalachian Conservation Biology. In a series of e-mails, Tim and Ken discussed the identifying details they could glean from my photos. They considered shell depth and number of whorls and even the color of the eye granules at the tips of the tentacles, until finally an agreement was reached on the snail’s genus and species:
Neohelix albolabris. Neo
for new,
helix
for spiral, and
albolabris,
meaning white-lipped.

“White-lipped forest snail” is the common name, and these North American natives roam the humid woodlands as far south as Georgia, as far north as Ontario and Quebec, and west to the Mississippi.

I
NVISIBLE
B
OUNDARIES

The earth is home to millions of potential pathogens, of which a thousand or so depend on human hosts. The pathogen I contracted was, in its own way, an author; it rewrote the instructions followed within every cell in my body, and in doing so, it rewrote my life, making off with nearly all my plans for the future.

My illness had started with flulike symptoms and some paralyzed skeletal muscles. Within weeks it had turned into systemic paralysis-like weakness with life-threatening complications. After a slow and partial recovery over three years, I had successive severe relapses. Specialized testing brought a diagnosis of autoimmune dysautonomia, a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, which can cause paralysis of the circulatory and gastrointestinal systems.

Dysautonomia can make it difficult for a person to stand or sit upright because the blood vessels cannot maintain circulation against the pull of gravity. Astronauts experience this problem when returning to the earth’s gravitational field. At one end of the “orthostatic intolerance” spectrum is syncope: a person might stand up but then immediately faint. At the other end of the spectrum are cases like mine: in an upright position, the body just gets weaker and weaker as it tries unsuccessfully to maintain blood pressure. The ability to be upright is a recent evolutionary adaptation, and it is still surprisingly fragile. The weight of the world doesn’t pin me down figuratively; it pins me down literally. Horizontal surfaces are forever my flotation cushions through life.

I was also diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a badly named, severe, postinfectious condition that involves permanently reduced blood volume, autonomic disorders, and genes that have been deactivated.

Seven years into my illness, further testing would reveal a clearer diagnosis: I had an acquired mitochondrial disease. Mitochondria are the “powerhouses” in each of the cells in our bodies, and they are found most densely in skeletal and autonomic muscle tissue. They metabolize nutrients and oxygen into energy in an intricate two-hundred-step process. Each of us is born with a number of unique genetic mutations, and we “acquire” additional mutations throughout our lives. A particular mutation, “unmasked” by a particular pathogen, may result in a mitochondrial error, which can then cause metabolic disease.

In my case, the pathogen may have been the virus that was spreading through the small European town I visited. Or it may have been something in the hotel water I drank one night. There was also the sick surgeon next to me on my flight home, though by then I had already succumbed to strange and severe symptoms. Fifteen years into my illness, I would learn about tick-borne encephalitis (TBE), a member of the Flaviviridae family, which includes West Nile virus. Lyme disease can be a coinfection with TBE, though if so in my case, it resolved. TBE is not yet known to have crossed the Atlantic to North America, and my United States doctors, at the time, would not have recognized the symptoms. But its bizarre, biphasic onset matched my illness presentation: flulike symptoms, followed several weeks later by systemic paralysis-like weakness and autonomic dysfunction, with a poor long-term prognosis.

C
ODA

Pathogens, those critical ingredients in the primordial soup from which life originally emerged, helped shape all species, and it was because of a pathogen that I had found myself nose-to-tentacle with a snail.

While illness keeps me always aware of my mortality, I realize that what matters most is not that I survive, nor even that my species survives, but that life itself continues to evolve. As the Holocene mass extinction rushes on, which species will be left? And what new creatures will evolve that we cannot now imagine—for what creature could ever have imagined us?

At the moment, we humans are lucky to coinhabit the earth with mollusks, even if we are a recent presence in their much longer history. I hope the terrestrial snails, secreted away in their burrows by day across the earth’s vast landscapes, will continue their mysterious lives, gliding slowly and gracefully through the night, millions of years into the future.