OPINION:
THE SOUND OF A WILD SNAIL EATING
By Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $18.95, 298 pages
At the age of 34, on a brief trip to Eu- rope, Elisabeth Tova Bailey was knocked down by a mysterious bacterial pathogen, resulting in severe neurological symptoms. It started with flulike symptoms. It developed into autoimmune dysautonomia, a dysfunction of the central nervous system. She could not walk or sit up in bed. A trip to the doctor was a monumental undertaking. Her heart rate, blood pressure and digestion went haywire. She also suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, “a badly named, postinfectious condition that involves permanently reduced blood volume, autonomic disorders, and genes that have been deactivated.”
Health, once taken so easily for granted, infusing life with certainty and purpose, was cut short. It is “shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties,” Ms. Bailey writes. She was now an invalid.
Those of us who have experienced the tremendous isolation a serious illness inflicts, even for a brief window of time, know all too well how it feels to get through each moment, how one moment feels like an endless hour, how “days slip silently past.” Lying in bed, Ms. Bailey’s body was useless, yet “the mind still runs like a bloodhound along well-worn trails of neurons, tracking the echoing questions: the confused family of whys, whats and whens and their impossibly distant kin how. The search is exhaustive; the answers, elusive. Sometimes my mind went blank and listless; at other times it was flooded with storms of thought, unspeakable sadness, and intolerable loss.”
One day, knowing how much the author loved the woods outside her 1830s farmhouse, a friend brought a snail in a flowerpot to keep her company. Why, Ms. Bailey wonders, “would I enjoy a snail?”
This is the story of the author’s encounter with a Neohelix albolabris - a common woodland snail. Homebound like the gastropod, she came to learn more about this unappreciated creature and to understand her own confined place in the world.
The snail became a refuge from her fears about her illness. Mesmerized, she began to watch the snail from her bedside. “Each evening the snail awoke and, with an astonishing amount of poise, moved gracefully to the rim of the pot and peered over, surveying, once again, the strange country that lay ahead. Pondering its circumstance with a regal air, as if from the turret of a castle, it waved its tentacles first this way and then that, as though responding to a distant melody.”
Worried that the snail might get lost or hurt, Ms. Bailey replaced the flowerpot with a terrarium, a more natural, woodsy world. She then began to study what snails might like to eat. She offered the snail a violet. Listening carefully as she watched the purple petal slowly disappear, she heard a sound that “was of someone very small munching celery continuously.”
After a steady diet of flowers, the snail was given a portobello mushroom. For several days, the snail happily slept beside the portobello, waking up to nibble “before sinking back into a well-fed slumber.” Fresh water was provided in a blue mussel shell.
Healthy people fall into privileged sleep during the night. For many of the ill, sleep is nonexistent. Once again, the little snail came to Ms. Bailey’s rescue. Nighttime was when the snail awoke, “as if this darkest of times were indeed the best of times in which to live.” A fearless and tireless explorer, the snail set off for an expedition in its terrarium, defying physics, gliding unfazed over fern fronds and branches. “With mysterious, fluid movement, the snail was the quintessential tai chi master.”
One evening, Ms. Bailey watched as it arched its neck over the curved edge of its shell, cleaning the rim, “like a cat licking fur on the back of its neck.” Then, quietly, it settled under a leaf and slept on its side like the author’s cat “when he would curl into a nap.”
Intrigued, Ms. Bailey combed through the scientific literature, eager to know more about her odd pet. As it turned out, the humble gastropod had been studied by a great many, from Aristotle to Goldsmith, from Huxley to Darwin, and the discoveries explained here make fascinating reading.
“Every single species of the animal kingdom challenges us all … with the mysteries of life,” wrote one biologist. “As the snail’s world grew more familiar, Ms. Bailey wrote, “my own human world became less so; my species was so large, so rushed, and so confusing.” Visitors could not relax. Ms. Bailey was a reminder of “the sharp edge of mortality,” the “holder of the silent fears” of those with good health.
Eventually the snail is so content in the safety of its ecosystem that it gives birth to 118 offspring.
Friends, amused by the author’s “snail reports,” accepted a few. The rest were released into the wild.
As the months passed, Ms. Bailey was able to sit up longer each day. Then she was able to rise from bed. Later, she was able to take a short walk. The snail was returned to its original habitat. In time, Ms. Bailey also returned home, to her beloved 1830s farmhouse and garden, familiar sights and smells. Her convalescence was over. “Survival often depends on a specific focus,” Ms. Bailey writes. “A relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility.”
In a mere 170 pages, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” tells of a remarkable journey of courage and resilience. Each chapter is preceded by a quote from poets, philosophers and scientists. Interspersed within the pages are beautiful soft-pencil illustrations. The simplicity of Ms. Bailey’s prose is very much like the haiku she quotes. It is nothing less than poetry. Long after you have finished this book, you will be thinking about its story and its message, about our natural world and our place in it. If I had only one book to recommend this season, to hush the frenetic activity outside our walls and within our souls, it would be this small, quiet masterpiece, already destined to become a classic.
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers is the editor of “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices,” published by the Library of America.
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