Multiple choice: What’s the best thing in life?
A) Good health
B) Inspiring work
C) Friends and family
D) Hot bath on a cold afternoon
E) Cold lake on a hot afternoon
F) Kobayashi Issa, 1763-1828, Japanese
haiku poet
G) Snails
If you selected Issa, we should be pals, grab a drink, chat. If you selected snails, we should be pals, and you are correct. Congratulations!
Though they are undeniably scrumptious, I don’t mean escargots drenched in wine and butter. Nope. I mean terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusks living their diminutive lives out there in the big wild world beyond the confines of my stomach — the tentacled, slimy, shell-dwelling, hardly-in-a-hurry mountain snails (genus Oreohelix) of western North America, of the Colorado Rockies, of Crested Butte.
Do I specifically mean O. strigosa? Probably. Also, O. subrudis? Maybe. I’m no expert malacologist, no taxonomical whiz. Trying to pin a Latin binomial to our local snail populations, I recently found myself tabbing between a dozen websites, overwhelmed by jargon: flattened heliciform, irregular axial riblets and striae, relatively broad umbilical, dextral vs. sinistral. One study that slipped past the parental controls on my laptop included photos — plural — of Oreohelix penises. Color photos. Very zoomed in.
But let’s return to Issa. He’s one of the most charming guys ever — funny, humble, melancholy, compassionate, and earnest. In total, he composed over a thousand haiku on the itty-bitty creatures who typically receive zero love. Mosquitos: 150. Flies: 90. Fleas: 100-plus. Toads, a paltry 15. Snails, though, a respectable 54. Issa’s poems are in essence bows, micro-anecdotes of awareness and gratitude.
at my feet
when did you get here
snail?
This haiku — the sweetest little aha in the annals of literature — comes to mind during summery backcountry bushwhacking missions. I’ll be huffing and puffing up some steep slope, worrying about storms, or politics, or money, or pollution, or the Denver Nuggets’ past/present/future playoff performance, i.e. distracted, busy, elsewhere, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, my boots will punch the breaks, my brain will chill, and I’ll be looking down at an empty shell, 15 to 22 mm in diameter, sun-bleached and creamy white, its elegant spiral twirling me into the crystalline depths of the moment.
No snail. Now snail.
Yes snail. Cheers snail.
Such encounters resonate like a temple bell. They wake me, center me, teach me that at least half the beauty of beauty is the way it arrives: as a surprise, a shock to the system. When did you get here? When did I get here? What is this here, this patch of earth beneath me? Beneath us? Realizing a shared space, an intricate terrain thick with fellow beings — Issa captures it so well.
Last June, zigzagging the giant aspen groves of the Slate River Valley, I happened upon a shell bell — ding! — and three seconds later thought: Why only vacant shells, only ghost snails, and never once a whole-package Oreohelix, a gentle, juicy dude gliding along its freshly secreted mucus trail, slaloming in slo-mo the ground’s elaborate obstacle course of flowers, twigs, deer turds?
Answers readily presented themselves. Mountain snails are tiny and camouflaged. They reside under the leaf litter that carpets the forest floor. They favor the cool dampness of night. They estivate — go dormant — to survive dry, desiccating conditions and will stay hunkered for months if necessary.
But I also had to consider a compounding factor. Despite my appreciation of these animals, and despite years of dinging shell bells interrupting the self-absorbed zombie trance I too frequently mistake for consciousness, alas, my head likely remains inserted way the heck up my own personal (ahem) butt. I thought: Perhaps I’m oblivious? Perhaps they’re hidden in plain sight? Perhaps I need to intentionally search?
Ding! A different kind of bell, a different kind of awakening!
Without hesitating, I lowered to all fours, got my crawl on, and in a matter of minutes found hundreds of breathing, creeping, weirdly adorable mountain snails. Seriously. Hundreds. The scales that heretofore I’d not known to exist dropped from my eyes.
Hella snails. Ubiquitous snails.
Wow snails. WTF snails.
Rain, I’ve since learned, was the luck that allowed my impromptu search to sync perfectly with an efflorescence of Oreohelix activity. The morning had started overcast, escalated to a sprinkle, escalated to a downpour, backtracked to overcast, and then partially cleared, leaving the duff spongy, the canopy dripping. Humidity improves locomotion (less mucus required to grease the wheels, as it were, and thus less energy burned) and simultaneously replenishes the forest’s stock of tasty, nourishing fungi. In her memoir The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Bailey reports that even inside her house, the pet snail she keeps in a terrarium increases its roaming and munching on a gray, drizzly day. Picture dear Issa, the master poet-observer, pausing in his garden a couple centuries ago and inquiring with the softest voice…
in this falling rain
where are you off to
snail?
Far as I could tell, the snails of the Slate were off to the friggin’ races, which is to say the pale smooth trunks of damn nearly every single aspen between Cloud City and the Climax Chutes, Gunsight Bridge and the Alien Shack. I found them climbing and clinging, clustered and solo, dodging blotchy lichens and traversing calligraphic bear scars — 12 inches high, 24 inches high, rarely more than 36 inches high. Step after step, tree after tree: baby snails and adult snails, bold snails wagging their tentacles and shy snails retracting their tentacles, snails masquerading as mottled bark and snails parading in the open. WTF indeed!
Had I really hiked these rainy forests for a decade and consistently failed to notice this spectacle, this flourishing, this abundance? Had I actually managed to neglect this detail of my home habitat? Crazy that we may have 20/20 vision yet still stumble around blind. Crazy and sort of mildly shameful.
I strolled an hour, stopping to crouch, to count, to watch, to ponder, to listen — to hear shell bells dinging and dinging and dinging, the valley a chorus of calls to attention. And now there’s no closing my ears, no turning back. If it’s June, and wet, and I’m within a mile of an aspen grove, I can’t not hear Oreohelix beckoning.
Again, I ask you: What’s the best thing in life?
A) Everyday hyperlocal exploration
B) Removing your distracted head from
your busy butt and discovering one
of the innumerable earthly wonders
hidden in plain sight
C) Kobayashi Issa, 1763-1828, Japanese
haiku poet
D) Snails/photos of Oreohelix penises
E) All of the above
Extra credit: Read the Italian scholar Giovanni Francesco Angelita’s essay “On the Snail and That It Should Be the Example for Human Life” (1607) and respond with an essay of your own that argues for or against the title’s provocative claim. Nine paragraphs minimum. AI prohibited.