I listened carefully. I could hear it eating. The sound was of someone very small munching celery continuously. I watched, transfixed, as over the course of an hour the snail meticulously ate an entire purple petal for supper.When my daughter was in grade nine, her science class was given an interesting project: Go out and collect live snails, samples of the soil and vegetation around where they were found, and bring it all back to make terrariums in 2 litre pop bottles. Kennedy was able to find two snails – which she named Machete and Satans Dissipple (after some misspelled graffiti she spotted on her snail hunt) – and, like the rest of her class, she made her mini-ecosystem and watched to see which setups allowed the snails to thrive, and which led to dead snails. I must admit that I was blasé about the fate of the snails – after all, in the name of science, Kennedy would dissect a fetal pig the next year – but after reading The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, dangit, I don't think I can be indifferent to the fate of snails anymore.
In this book, author Elizabeth Tova Bailey recounts a year in which she was bedbound by a mysterious illness. With barely the energy to turn herself over, Bailey was utterly unable to care for herself, and was obliged to relocate from her beloved old farmhouse to a room with stark white walls and a window too high to see out of. Understimulated, but unable to even visit with friends without becoming exhausted, Bailey was intrigued when one such visitor brought her an inspired gift: a pot of wild violets with a single snail tucked under a leaf. Watching the snail go about its business was soothing for Bailey, who now found her long sickbed hours more sufferable.
Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.Before long, Bailey had educated herself on the needs of her snail and a proper terrarium and diet were provided for it. This book is filled with Bailey's observations of the snail (she was even fortunate enough to discover it had laid eggs which then hatched into 100+ tiny snails à la Charlotte's Web), her experience with illness, and observations on how making this connection to a member of the natural world had allowed Bailey to feel reconnected to the world at large. As the book was written long after the year she was bedridden, Bailey was able to add in the many facts and anecdotes from science and literature that she eventually discovered, and her fascination with the tiny mollusks is certainly contagious. (These hermaphrodites shoot love darts at each other as part of their mating ritual?)
struck by a
raindrop, snail
closes up
– Yosa Buson (1716-1783)
Bailey's illness has lasted, to varying degrees of debilitation, for decades – what started as a viral infection and flu-like symptoms eventually led to chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition I don't really know anything about, but which Bailey defines as “a post-infectious condition that involves permanently reduced blood volume, autonomic disorders, and genes that have been deactivated”, and perhaps linked to tick-borne encephalitis (like West Nile or Lyme Disease) – and it's truly frightening to think that this could happen to any of us, at any time. But despite the medical mystery and the sensitively recorded snail observations, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating isn't a very deep book, and at 170 small pages, it just feels slight (it doesn't compare favourably to, say, The Soul of an Octopus for instance). I enjoyed what I read, but was left wanting more.
In the end, Bailey released her snail, and its offspring, back into the wild, and although she does give instructions on how to make your own terrarium, she would prefer you observe snails in their native habitat. And I'm happy to report that both Machete and Satans Dissipple survived their days in captivity and were also set free once more.
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.
