The Snail Tale

A telling portrait of me and my relationship with humans from my childhood.

I was ~4 years old. We lived in Napa. My mother was cleaning the house and I asked her why she was doing that. She said the landlord was coming over and she wanted the house to look nice. I asked her why the landlord was coming over. She said ‘To put out snail bait.’ I asked her what snail bait was. She said it was a poison. I asked her what it was for. She said it attracted the snails, who ate it and became poisoned, and died. I said they were my friends and asked why the landlord wanted to kill them. She said that many people thought of them as pests because they eat plants in the garden. I went out in the backyard, got my wagon, and gathered every snail I could find. After about an hour, I had a vast number of snails in my wagon. I took it across the street to an open field to let them go. But the kid who lived underneath our house, and was a couple of years older than me had been observing me. When he saw I was in the field, he came over quickly and asked me what I was doing. “I am rescuing these snails from the poison,” I explained. “No you’re not,” he corrected. He flipped the wagon over and pushed all the snails out and started stomping on them and laughing. I began to cry and ran home.

My mother consoled me and explained that some people were ignorant and cruel, and the idea that others would try to rescue living creatures made them insane and violent.

We went over and retrieved my wagon.

She pointed out that some of the snails survived the assault, but I felt guilty and confused because I (probably largely informally) realized that in my attempt to save them I had inadvertently harmed them, and this conflict was particularly difficult for me to stomach.