by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Algonquin Books, 2010
Elisabeth Tova Bailey was a vigorous, outdoorsy woman living in Maine when she contracted an enigmatic virus or bacterial infection, possibly while vacationing in a Swiss village or on the airplane trip home. Whatever that pathogen was, her illness progressed rapidly from flu symptoms to life-threatening “autoimmune dysautonomia,” which can cause paralysis of a person’s circulatory and gastrointestinal systems.
The aim of her beautiful and provocative new book is to explain why an illness that might have driven someone to the outer bounds of despair instead was bearable, mainly thanks to the companionship of a tiny companion.
Because her malady prevents her from maintaining viable blood pressure when upright, Bailey must remain prone. One day a caregiver, trying to cheer up an invalid who can no longer spend time gardening or hiking or sailing, brought Bailey a flowerpot containing some field violets and also an acorn-sized woodland snail.
At first alarmed at the thought of having a dependent when she could hardly feed herself, she soon discovered that the snail needed little care. And while the snail would sleep through much of the day, every night it would glide down the side of the flowerpot and explore its surroundings, foraging for edibles and returning each morning to the little patch of flowers in the pot.
Bailey observes the snail’s astonishingly diverse pursuits, through minutes and hours. With all her limitations, she can watch. She realizes that she probably wouldn’t even notice this subtle being, or be able to follow its panoply of activities, if she were leading a normal hectic life.
I feel eager to emphasize that there is nothing “cute” about the relationship between this storyteller and the object of her scrutiny, which she eventually determines to be a Neohelix albolabris, the white-lipped forest snail. Bailey has a poet’s skill with sensory description and textured phrasing, and in her graceful writing these are combined with a scientist’s attention to detail. And avid curiosity! In the midst of her sickness, Bailey is heartened and given a sense of purpose by the challenge of learning as much as she can about mollusks, which range from octopuses to minuscule shell-dwellers.
She is tremendously informative about gastropods, the snails and slugs that are mollusks with a single muscular foot, which are familiar to gardeners and naturalists in the Northeast.
For instance, the snail living at Bailey’s bedside had about 2,640 teeth. Snails estivate, which is a kind of trancelike resting state, or hibernate for longer periods of time. I found most startling that snails are hermaphroditic, so an individual may become a male or female as needed, depending upon the mate available, or may even self-fertilize their eggs if no mate is found. Bailey’s depictions of snails’ olfactory sensitivities and amorous “foreplay” behaviors are gorgeous, and she rhapsodizes quite persuasively on snails’ phenomenal capacity to produce mucus: “While my mammalian ancestors evolved dry skin to prevent dehydration, my snail’s gastropod clan went in a different direction, perfecting and luxuriating in the sticky thickness of slime.” Mucus is “the medium for everything in its life: locomotion, defense, healing, courting, mating, and egg protection.”
With discomfiting candor, Bailey confides,
There were times when I wished
that my viral invader had claimed
me completely. . . . Instead, the
virus took me to the edge of life
and then trapped me in its
pernicious shadow, with symptoms
that, barely tolerable one day,
became too severe the next, and
with the unjustness of unexpected
relapses that, overnight, erased
years of gradual improvement.
And yet, gazing at the snail in the little terrarium beside her, she could see that:
The creature seemed to defy physics.
It moved over the very tips of
mosses without bending them, and
it could travel straight up the stem
of a fern and then continue upside
down along the frond’s underside.
Its tiny weight caused the fern frond
to bend into an arc, yet the snail
was unfazed; it was perfectly
comfortable in any position and at
any angle or height…. No challenge
was too great; if the snail came to
an obstacle such as a branch, it
made a brief inspection and then
simply climbed up and over, rather
than taking a longer route around.
Each morning the terrarium
glistened with the silvery trails of
its nighttime travels.