On Snails

The snails in the South are small. They are tiny, brittle affairs with heads that are barely visible. They themselves are a rare sight—seemingly spending their whole lives in hiding. They are, as a species, very disappointing. 

I grew up in a small town that was the last stop before crossing the Cascade mountains. It was an hour or so from the Canadian border, where children grew up knowing what to do if you came across a bear, or a mountain lion, or even a mule deer buck. The world was wet and cool and green, and everything seemed to grow large except for the snakes and spiders, which weren’t dangerous anyway. Tourists were marked by umbrellas and raincoats. 

The snails in that town were large. They had big, fat shells that were usually the height of a standing quarter. Their heads were large enough that you could lean in and look at the dots of their pupils follow your movements from their twin stalks. The environment was perfect for them to flourish—especially when it rained—and flourish they did. 

After the rain I could walk out to my front porch and look at the tree beside it. It would be covered in snails. The tree often grew large enough that it pushed right into the porch, and then I could spot the snails feasting on its leaves and even hear them grinding away. The noise was a quiet scratch, scratch, scratch. I could flick thirty of them off the leaves on a single occasion and still hear the taunting scratch, scratch.

One day I saw my father pull into the driveway in his battered Volvo. The handles on all its doors were broken, so he would send one of my siblings out every morning to unlock the back and climb over the seats to open the front door for him. I watched him walk up to the porch and out of sight, and I ran downstairs to wait for him to come in. I waited until I was bored, then opened the front door myself. There was my father, flicking snails off the tree.

It was a game to us and no joke to them. Their eyes would cast you irritated glares as your hand came nearer, and then flick, they were gone. Sometimes their shells were hard enough that they hurt your finger, but you knew you were doing the tree some good. Even though the snails would simply climb back up its trunk and return to feasting, you had given it a respite. You can’t flick snails in the South. Flicking a Southern snail would kill it. 

Snails are one of the things that are different here. Another is the air pressure. Still another is the rain itself. The storms are heavier and more destructive. The snow does not stay more than a day. But the snails are different, and that is one of the things I miss. 

This post was a part of my final portfolio for a creative nonfiction course I took in college.