Short Wave - Lessons In Being Alone, From A Woodland Snail

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

Bedridden with illness, Maine writer Elisabeth Tova Bailey found an unlikely companion — a solitary snail a friend brought her from the woods. Elisabeth spent the following year observing the creature and it was the inspiration for her memoir, "The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating."See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, everybody, Emily Kwong here. So a few months ago, my sister gave me this book. She pressed it into my hands while we were on the DC Metro and said, you have to read this. So I read it. The book, it's part memoir, part natural history. But surprisingly, it feels relevant right now with so many people in self-quarantine or social distancing.

It's almost like I have a better idea of how to slow down and live in isolation because of this book. Because this is a book about snails. It's called The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. And its author, Elizabeth Tova Bailey, she spent years battling an autoimmune condition, the result of a viral infection that kept her bedridden. And one day, a visiting friend gave her a pot of violets and inside the pot was a snail. There I was unable to get out of bed, unable to even sit up, and there was this living creature from the forest. Elizabeth didn't know what to do with this creature, but she started watching it.

It was quite curious about what was around it, that it made me curious about what it wanted to find when it went off on an adventure. And the next morning, she noticed that there was a tiny hole in an envelope she had left beside the flower pot. The snail was hungry. So, as she describes in her book, she offered it some flower petals and listened closely. I could hear it eating. The sound was of someone very small, munching celery continuously. I watched transfixed as over the course of an hour, the snail meticulously ate an entire purple petal for dinner. This snail was likely a neohelix albulabris, or a white,

light-lipped forest snail. And the recording you just heard is of a neohelix snail eating a carrot. The tiny intimate sound of the snail's eating gave me a distinct feeling of companionship and shared space. It also pleased me that I could recycle the withered flowers by my bed to sustain a small creature in need. The bond Elizabeth developed with this snail would help her through one of the most isolating periods of her life, lessons that might be of help. to us now. So today on the show, we're going to consider the snail, the amazing properties they possess, and what we can learn from one of the slowest creatures on Earth. So today we're talking with writer Elizabeth Tova Bailey about the snail she kept by her bedside. She made the

snail a terrarium, recreating its forest habitat in a glass container. She checked out gastropod books from the library. She basically absorbed everything she could about this new companion. Tell me something about snails that most people don't realize. Snails are extraordinary. When we think of them, all we think about is that they're small and slow, and we don't give them a second thought. Maybe we think that they might eat our gardens. Right. Well, they have incredible abilities that a human could only dream about or might show up in, you know, TV cartoons for kids. For instance, my species had 2,642 teeth. Whoa.

And that's not many teeth for a snail of the size. Some of the species have up to 10,000 or more. And the teeth are quite amazing. They're in rows, about 33 teeth per row and about 80 rows for the species. It's called a radjala. It's kind of like a grater. And when they don't actually chew food, they just kind of grate down through whatever they're eating, such as a mushroom. And they are their own doctor.

Can you share what you learned about slime production in snails from the chapter's secret recipes? Yes, slime is fascinating. And I couldn't believe I was going to be writing an entire chapter on slime, snail slime. But it was quite fascinating. The slime actually has a lot of healing properties, a lot of antioxidants in it. And they use slime for everything, for locomotion, defense, healing. courting, mating, egg care. Not only do they travel over and through it,

but it's also like glue, like super glue. That's why they can sleep upside down from a branch, oblivious to gravity, is because they can make a particular slime recipe that is stickier. It spends one third of its energy producing slime for all of these different needs that it has. It's kind of like something out of a superhero movie.

Exactly. They have all of these abilities within one organism. Yes. And so how can a human in any way think that we're superior to a snail? We can't hang upside down by our feet. We can't make new teeth when our old adult teeth wear out. You know, these are just sort of incredible abilities that go unnoticed by the average human. Absolutely. So the backdrop to all of this, of course, is that you were fighting in illness and you had to leave your farmhouse and move into a studio apartment to receive adequate care. And that's where you met and cared for the snail. And when you were there, you were fairly isolated too. I was. I was very isolated. I was living in the country on a dirt road. And it was. It was a difficult situation. What is the thing about extended periods of isolation that you didn't realize before you were put in that situation? Wow. The continuous nature of it, I think, when you don't know what's going to happen next, each day not quite knowing if anything will change, it's just that it continues day by day. and you don't know when it will end or when there will be more certainty. And so the snail glided into this life of nothing but time,

and for me became this wonderful, wonderful focus. What did the snail teach you in that time? I think that watching the snail adapt to its own changed environment, you know, here it had been out in this forest that had known all its life, and the next thing it knew, it was in this space that it could not see because a snail has almost no sight. It could not hear anything because a snail has no hearing. And so it immediately set about making a life for itself. It said, you know, the flower pot became its bedroom where it slept all day and it had these adventures.

And so it was fascinating to see this little animal that had also been doing. displaced the way I was displaced, basically setting up shop and doing whatever it needed to do to get by. And that was somehow really reassuring to me that if the snail could go on having a life, maybe somehow I would still have a life and a future too. Your book to me felt like a primer for this pandemic that I knew what to do because I had read this book. And the lessons that the snail had to teach, do you see them as having applications even in this moment? Absolutely, because those of us who have experienced lengthy chronic illnesses and a lot of isolation as a result, either because we were too ill to be able to be part of the healthy

world or for some people that they had a contagious illness, weren't living with families, we're all finding it absolutely fascinating to suddenly watch the entire globe have to suddenly struggle with the challenges of isolation and illness. The fear of illness, the fear of giving an illness to somebody, the fear of getting the illness

and how to handle the physical social distancing and self-quarantines. People are not used to, being quarantined. They're not used to having their freedom taken away as to where they can move in the world, especially if they're healthy. So I think what we're going through now is so difficult for all of us. On the one hand, there are those who are living alone, and so the isolation is almost magnified

because you have nobody to talk to you in the house. You know, you're really more cut off. And then there are those who are living in families where suddenly everybody's home when mostly people are usually at work or at school. And they're having very different experiences where they're not used to having to interrelate within the family 24-7. Absolutely. There's accelerated closeness in some ways and then total distance in other ways. Yes. You're reminding me of a phrase I've been hearing a lot on social media or on the internet in response to the coronavirus.

which is alone together. And it's so evocative of what you describe in the book as how snails will sometimes form colonies. They go about their own individual lives, but if they're in the same area, they will form a colony of elders and juveniles who largely lead solitary lives. Yes, snails are pretty much hermits. So they basically go around their life ignoring each other, even though they live in a colony. So they practice social distancing. They have a normal life of social distancing. They really are our model organes in this time.

Yes. They are sort of a good example of what we're doing, except we have these amazing methods of communicating by phone and the internet. But even so, we're really missing that more. physical nature of being in the same room with other people that is critical to our species and how it's evolved as a social community. What is your advice for people who have never found themselves in the situation before? As someone who has just lived it and thought about it so deeply?

I think it depends entirely on who an individual is. For some people, it's extremely. extremely helpful to maintain your habits and your patterns and be very organized and keep a routine. And I would say do whatever is comforting. If the routine and organization is comforting, do that. And if kind of trying to break away from what's out there by writing or reading or art directions or helping neighbors or helping elderly or other people that need help, do that. So I would just say do whatever it is in your life that can bring you any measure of comfort and a feeling of stability again. It sounds like you're saying and listen to your own body and what your needs are. Think about whatever you've done yesterday or today that was the most comforting thing in that day

and try to sort of increase that peace in your life in the days that go forward. Elizabeth Tova-Billy, science writer, snail observer, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. After our conversation, Elizabeth emailed me one more piece of advice. She wrote, The natural world is still out there, and the seasonal changes are still happening,

and they are a steadying force when our own human lives feel so uncertain right now. So while physical distancing is a thing, Elizabeth relishes the fact that we don't have to distance ourselves from nature. This episode was produced by Rebecca Vermeeras, fact-checked by Emily Vaughn and edited by Viet Le. I hope you get some sunshine this week. And thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

See you tomorrow.