CC&TheBear: The Snail End of Days

Growing up, my brothers and I were trend setters. We’d take up a weird habit or behavior and shortly after the entire neighborhood would follow. It’s funny how quickly things can change. Eric and I have noticed that we pretty much kill any trend that happens these days (most of our research is limited to restaurant attendance before and after we enter an establishment).

When I was around 5, we took on the lofty goal of collecting all the snails. There was a house around the corner that had an absurd number of snails in its yard. I think it had something to do with the combination of abundant water, excessive tree cover, and lack of snail concerns from the property owners. It should be clear by now that we didn’t adhere to property lines (see here). This had everything to do with the fact that my neighborhood was filled with children and we all roamed each other’s yards, and nothing to do with my parents’ attempts at teaching us the meaning of property lines.

My mom knew of our strange snail obsession, and decided to head off a repeat of the flower incident. My parents wanted us to understand the importance of obeying rules such as 1) Do not trespass on people’s property, 2) Do not take things from people’s property even if those things are only snails.

After much excited conversation with Brent, Eric, and me, my mom knew that we were quite adamant about the collection of shelled creatures. She took the three of us, along with some of the neighborhood kids, to talk to the owner of the snail sanctuary. Not that surprisingly, he was thrilled about the concept of some free child labor to help alleviate his snail problem. He told us that we were welcome to gather snails from his yard any time of the day, as long as were quiet about it and did not dig holes/tear up plants.

We were ecstatic.

Everyone in the neighborhood soon heard the news. We rushed home to amass our snail collecting supplies. The 1980s snail rush had commenced.

Every single child on the block rushed to the unsuspecting man’s yard, arms full of Tupperware containers. We picked through his yard until we were confident that we had all of the specimens in our possession. Unlike most of the children that quickly grew weary of this activity, my brothers and I kept at it like it was our job. Day after day we traveled to the snail mines to fill our quota (quota = we filled all the containers that our parents allowed us to use that day).

There was one other boy who tried to keep up. He became our arch nemesis. One day while we were out collecting, this sneaky sneak decided to take the easy way out. He wasn’t going to put in the time to earn his reward. He was going to take what was rightfully ours. He crept into our garage, where we stored our snail collection, and he made off with a few of the margarine containers that were holding our snails. Unfortunately for him, we were quite organized and knew immediately upon our return that something was awry.

We peered across the street and saw him sorting through his snail collection. And sure enough we identified a number of our snail containers in his garage. This was infuriating. Collecting snails had become our way of life, and he was taking them. He was stealing our way of life. Eric and I stormed across the street and took ALL the snails. We were going to beat him at his own game. He stood in horror as we made sure we had successfully wrangled up every last container and then returned to our yard.

This pretty much ended the era of the snail. We had crushed the snail dreams of our arch nemesis and the other children had long since given up on their snail dreams. We would have continued scrounging for snails for the remainder of our lives, but our dad put a stop to that. It turns out that snails can’t survive long in margarine containers – without food or water. My dad walked into the garage one morning to a horrible, overpowering stench and immediately knew that our snail harvesting was to blame. He opened a few of the containers to investigate.