The best way to play in gutters in a rainstorm is barefoot, with rolled-up pants and an unzipped rain jacket and no hat. The goal, of course, is to become as thoroughly drenched as possible, and the best way to accomplish this is to run around yelling and splashing whoever else is playing in the gutters (brothers are especially useful here). Racing leaf boats into storm drains and jumping in puddles are part of it, too, but most important of all are the creatures that come out when it pours.
In the small island town along the Salish Sea in northwest Washington where I grew up, winter was one long rainstorm. In particularly good storms, before the trees started blowing down and after the constant drizzle turned into pelting rain, the gutters were my kingdom, and they were always filled with worms.
It is still somewhat of a mystery why worms emerge from the soil during and after heavy rains. It used to be considered a life-saving tactic to escape drowning, but worms actually need moisture to breathe. They can’t drown the way humans can. Now, it’s thought that emerging from underground when it rains may be because it’s easier to move long distances on top of wet soil than through it; or, alternatively, it could be because rain vibrations sound very similar to the vibrations produced by underground predators like moles.
Whatever the reason, for a long time worm-filled gutters were one of my favorite things in the world. Between the ages of five and 10, I collected fistfuls of worms from the gutters at home, carrying them around until my hands were covered in mucus from their writhing bodies. Then I would release them—into buckets of dirt if they were injured, and into garden beds if they weren’t.
I was perhaps a bit of a weird kid. In elementary school, I suffered recurring bouts of a strain of strep throat found only in dirt. Sea stars fascinated me, and finding a salamander was one of my highest ambitions. Once I caught a young wild rabbit in a butterfly net. For a while I even harbored a secret desire to tame a deer and ride it, which I gave up only because I eventually grew too large for a deer to theoretically carry me.
I collected frogs, too, when I could find them, and kept them in five-gallon buckets filled with water and floating logs until feeding them became too difficult. The 1971 edition of “Shelf Pets: How to Take Care of Small Wild Animals,” a book I read cover-to-cover multiple times, recommended training captive frogs to eat pieces of raw meat dangled on strings, but I never succeeded with this. I fed them tired houseflies instead, a food item that took a lot of time to catch and that the frogs, predictably, weren’t even very interested in eating.
Really, I was interested in anything that squirmed, crawled, hopped, or slimed. Beetles, ants, caterpillars, slugs, snails: the smaller, the stranger, the more overlooked or outright hated, the better.
———
In the beginning, though, I mostly concentrated on worms. At home, rainstorms meant hours of screaming, splashing fun, but at school rainstorms were more serious. Like most elementary schools in my area, mine had a large field, tetherball courts, a swingset, and several slide and monkey bar complexes. It also had a large expanse of blacktop, and that was where the worms came, and that was where the worms died.
The feet of six- and seven-year-olds are not kind to worms on asphalt in the rain. The need for a worm rescue squad was obvious, and throughout the winters that was what my friends and I were: the worm protectors, the worm ambulance, the worm emergency room surgeons.
We had 50 minutes of recess a day: 10 in the morning, 30 after lunch, and 10 in the afternoon. Every minute of it was precious—we raced each other out of the doorway each time the bell rang, and our destination was always the crumbling corner where the blacktop met the field. We even had a secret hand signal for it: two hands together to form a triangle, with the thumbs wiggling in the middle. In the fall and spring the field was where we played tag and tackled each other and ran around stealing each other’s hats and jackets and shoes, but in winter it was a mess of mud and the yellow-jacketed supervisors shouted us off. We spent a lot of time standing on the edge of the blacktop, daring each other to run out onto the field. We called it “Corner,” and to us it was a holy place.
It was our field hospital. After we’d run over the blacktop, snatching worms out from under the stomping feet of the basketball players, the girls hurling tetherballs at each other’s faces, the huddle of four-square players and the small children playing hopscotch, we brought them back to Corner. If they were uninjured, we tossed them onto the field or into the woods on our way back to class. More often than not, though, they were wounded, seeping blood or cut in half or spilling intestines, and Corner was where we treated them.
Our tools were scavenged playground items, hidden beneath the crumbling asphalt until we needed them: the tools of healing, of hope, of utter necessity to the surgical procedures we undertook. Bent paper clips for forceps, broken shoelaces for bandages. To us they were precious, and with them we poked intestines back into bodies, wrapped torn skin and cut off the truly trampled parts. More times than not the worms lived.
But while they will forever be my first love, worms have an annoying tendency to disappear into the dirt when it isn’t pouring—which even in the Pacific Northwest is often enough to make them disappointing long-term pets. When I entered middle school and recess suddenly wasn’t a thing anymore, my days of dedicated worm-rescuing were effectively over.
———
It was in garden snails that I finally found the perfect pet. Like worms, they came out in the rain, but better yet, they were around the rest of the time, too. Their shells were the perfect size for a ten-year-old’s hands, and they were much more personable than worms. For one thing, they actually had eyeballs and a visible mouth, and for another, I could bring them to my favorite parts of the backyard for out-of-the-cage exercise and enrichment.
Sometimes this included snail racing, an activity my uncle once suggested, possibly as a joke (but then again, he’d been infamous in his youth for breeding rats to feed to his snakes, one of which once escaped and spent several years slithering around my grandparents’ house, so maybe not). Regardless, I accepted snail racing as a legitimate pursuit and initiated it regularly. I marked the shells of my favorite snails with permanent markers to tell them apart, place several in a circle I drew in the grass, and then watch, with the endless curiosity of childhood, for the first snail to make it out. Often they would fall asleep, or begin eating the grass, or glide around in circles without ever really going anywhere. When my brother and I both entered contestants, any and all forms of snail encouragement, such as gently prodding them with a stick, was off limits. Sometimes the races took hours.
———
That was more than a decade ago, in a small island town where the rain and the snails were plentiful. I’m almost halfway across the country now, in a once-upon-a-time frontier city where moisture is a foreign concept, winters mean snow and sun, and the only worms are invasive and rarer than the rain.
But strangely enough, most of the good friends I’ve made in college have similar strange animal origin stories. They grew up in West Coast cities and in the suburbs of Chicago, in California and in Colorado. We’re all biologists, a sort of people I’ve learned are uniformly strange, and it would be fair to say that our childhoods of digging in the dirt and overturning logs and watching tidepools for hours are the reason we are who we are today.
At age seven, a friend of mine fit ten banana slugs into her hand and proudly showed them to a camera; another one drove across half of Ireland to return an occupied seashell to the ocean. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that they’re the ones responsible for getting me back into snails.
———
For most of my late childhood I kept salad tubs upon salad tubs of snails—probably 50 or so snails all told, plus maybe hundreds of their babies. I kept them in cycles: the line of salad tubs alongside the garage grew and grew, until cleaning them all became an ordeal, until a windstorm blew off the lids or until I decided that caterpillars were more interesting for a time. Then I would release them or they would escape, and my mother would be angry and our garden would be full of snails and empty of plants. The snails who hide in the rock walls of her vegetable garden today are probably descendants of mine, she says, and I’m still blamed every time the bean seedlings disappear overnight.
Over time I’d start collecting them again, until snail bins lined our patio once more. I gave up snails for the final time halfway through high school when my parents finally agreed to get a dog, but at the age of 20 in an apartment dorm room I share with a remarkably tolerant roommate, I’ve become a snail owner once again.
Their home is a two-gallon glass jar I found at the inestimable local treasure palace more commonly known as the Arc. The jar is slightly over a foot tall, with a metal lid I’ve drilled holes into and a metal spigot at the base. Meant to hold lemonade or mint-flavored water for fancy parties, it’s now filled with several pounds of dirt, clumps of grass, succulents I rescued from not-quite-frozen soil at the onset of a recent snowstorm, and 35 baby snails taken from a friend’s overpopulated terrarium.
That I can have snails at all in Colorado is surprising, to say the least. Cornu aspersum (which roughly translates to “spotted horn shape”), the common garden snail, belongs to Western Europe and the Mediterranean, but it was brought to California in the 1850s for escargot. Since then, it has spread throughout much of the US and the world; it can be found on every continent except Antarctica, and on most major islands as well. That snails are plentiful in my hometown is no surprise, as snails love nothing more than moisture, and moisture is something the Pacific Northwest has in excess. But Colorado is not known for its humidity. Instead of Cascade concrete, it’s known for Rocky Mountain powder, the fluffy, dry snow that’s a result of low moisture and lower temperatures. Snails do not do well with this either.
In more temperate regions, snails can be more or less active all year. In colder and drier regions, however, they enter periods of hibernation during excessive drought or cold. When hibernating, they draw back into their shell and seal the entrance with a thin layer of mucus, a behavior I observed in the heyday of my snail-raising years during infrequent periods of freezing cold, and incorrectly took to mean death.
During this time they’re able to prevent absorbing too much water, or too little, but most impressively they’re also able to avoid ice formation in their tissues by altering the chemical makeup of their blood. Common garden snails can survive in temperatures as low as 23 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course, Colorado winters can get much, much colder.
Still, it’s thought that these snails have traveled to Colorado in nursery stock multiple times over the past two centuries, and evidently through some trick of magic or biology they’ve managed to stay.
And, in early fall before the first freeze, in the front range city of Colorado Springs, on a college campus below America’s Mountain, my friends found a small population of snails living in a garden bed.
Being biologists and animal-starved college students, they took the snails home and kept them in homemade terrariums. They misted them several times daily, smuggled single leaves of spinach out of the dining hall to feed them, and criticized each others’ snail parenting techniques. Predictably, one day they came back to find a jar full of babies.
———
Before I really understood what sex was, I knew what snails making babies looked like. I would find them on rainy days beneath dripping leaves, in rock crevices or, often, simply in the middle of the patio. They would be curled around each other, eyestalks retracted, neither one moving for hours as a huge ball of milky, bluish, glistening mucus grew between them. It was a weird thing to watch, and at the time I didn’t even appreciate the full complexity of the affair: not only is an enormous mucus ball part of snail sex, but the whole process is initiated when one of the snails spears the other with a calcareous “love dart.” Supposedly this improves fertility and sperm acceptance, but mostly it sounds kinky and painful.
Once I’d figured out that the snails who engaged in this strange ritual would lay eggs several weeks afterwards, I would wait for them to finish, checking back every half-hour or so, because snail mating takes a long time. Sometimes I would come back too late, and have to search for them in the damp darkness with a flashlight, and sometimes I wouldn’t find them. If I did find them, though, I added them to one of my terrariums and marked their shells with Sharpie symbols. Then, when I spotted a marked snail laying eggs in my terrarium, I would triumphantly write “F” for female on her shell, and the other snail of the pair would get an “M” for male.
When I needed to keep down my population of baby snails, which was all the time, all I needed to do was put the “F” snails in one salad tub and the “M” snails in another. For some reason, though, it never really seemed to work out, and my baby snail population was always on the rise.
It turns out that common garden snails are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning they have both male and female genitalia. While they prefer to reproduce sexually, and do so several times a year, they’re also able to self-fertilize. Basically, they’re veritable baby-making machines, and a single snail can churn out hundreds of baby snails per year. Segregating by gender is useless, because snails don’t even have a gender.
This is all a long way of saying that, at some point, my friend’s snails got together (or self-fertilized, who knows) and deposited 80-something pearly white, moist, rubbery, pea-sized eggs in a gelatinous underground mass without her ever noticing.
When baby snails hatch (a few days before they hatch, the eggs become increasingly transparent and hard, and gradually it becomes possible to see the tiny body of a snail inside of them), they are translucent and slightly bigger than a peppercorn. It’s difficult to pick them up without crushing them, and when they emerge from their shells, it's possible to see through their flesh. They’re brownish and difficult to see until they move, but when you have a glass jar filled with slightly less than a hundred brownish translucent blobs with eyeballs on stalks, not only is their existence painfully obvious, but it suddenly hits that you’re a snail parent, and it’s up to you to raise the next generation of invasive garden-destroying pests.
———
I have always thought that baby snails are the cutest creatures in existence. When I tell my friends that human babies repulse me but that baby snails are beautiful, even the ones who grew up collecting worms and now keep snails often stare at me in horror.
Most people, though, seem to lose that horror after watching baby snails in person or letting them crawl across their hands. Something along the lines of, “Oh, that one is eating its own poop but it’s so cute!” seems to be a standard response.
Even typing in “cute baby snails” on Google Images alone can sometimes win my case, because baby snails are undeniably awww-worthy. Whatever biological impulse humans have that causes them to think most young mammals or any sort of big-eyed creature are cute, adorable, or even precious, baby snails seem to trigger it too.
Snails have eyeballs that travel slowly up their eye stalks as they wake up. The eye stalks grow slowly from their fleshy bodies like seedlings emerging from the ground, sped up a thousandfold, and the eyeballs themselves, to the naked eye, are the approximate size and color of pepper flakes. As snails mature, their skin becomes darker and their shells harden and become opaque, but when snails are young their shells are thin and faintly striped, and it’s possible to see their lungs pumping.
The baby snails living in a lemonade jar on my desk are several weeks old at this point. Some are pinky-nail sized or even slightly bigger, while others seem not to have grown at all. They enjoy eating lettuce leaves, dandelion leaves, spinach leaves, grass, or even shredded carrot. They’re not very fond of kale. As recommended by “Shelf Pets,” their food is liberally sprinkled with cuttlebone to aid in shell growth.
When baby snails eat, their radula (a hard, toothed structure they use to scrape food into their mouths) is visible, as is the food as it travels up their body and into their shell. When they crawl along the glass, the muscles of their foot pulse and they leave a small trail of slime behind them. When they poop, which is often, it comes out in coils of bright green or brown or orange.
Among my friends, the proper techniques for effective snail parenting have become a fraught topic. Genuine disagreements arise over the right amount of moisture to add daily, the amount of time food should be left in the terrarium, how long it’s safe to leave them alone over breaks. There’s a not-quite-overt competition over whose snails look the healthiest, whose babies grow the fastest. Maybe someday we’ll even start running snail races.
My snails are most active during the night, but the bigger ones seem to spend half the day eating as well. They’re not the most exciting of pets: they’re not cuddly, they can’t be taken for walks, they don’t really have individual personalities, and they will probably never even be aware of my existence. But in some strange way, their very impartiality is comforting, and when they eat (eyestalks partially retracted, radula rhythmically scraping, heads bobbing slightly with every indication of enjoyment), it’s hard not to feel a small burst of satisfaction.
I watch them as I do homework, and as they slime their unconcerned way around the lemonade jar on my desk. Their pale, pulsing bodies are the last thing I see at night when I reach out to turn off the lights, and the first thing I see when I roll over to turn off my alarm in the morning. They’re wholly alien, incomprehensible, small and slimy and unlike me in every way possible, but we live in the same room, and in that there must be some small bit of shared kinship.
When I’m in need of company, homesick, animal-deprived, or simply longing to disappear into childhood again, I mist their terrarium, and the baby snails come out in force. They’re half a world away from where they’re supposed to be, but perhaps water triggers their ancestral memories of home.
Mommy Issue | December 2019