Girls are like slugs—they probably serve some purpose, but it’s hard to imagine what.
~Bill Watterson, in Calvin and Hobbes
Who could have dreamed them up? At least snails
have shells, but all these have is—nothing.
Small black antennae like fat pins wave
as if they could take in enough to get them through.
Turn them over, they’re the soles of new shoes,
pale and unmarked as babies. They flow,
the soil itself learning how to move and, moving,
almost staying still, their silver monorail
the only evidence of where they’d been.
And they die quiet, or at least (thankfully)
out of the human ear’s range, between two stones,
under heels, shriveling in salt or piss, at the tips
of sharp sticks. Fight back, I hear myself say,
do something. Don’t just take it. But they die
as they had lived, exuding slime…
~Brian Swann from “Slugs”
Summer rain is desperately needed in our corner of the U.S. It is typically a frequent visitor to the Pacific Northwest and is forecast for tomorrow which means we will soon be overflowing with slug slime and the lovely multicolored gastropod creatures that produce it.
As the first few shower drops fall, they appear out of the ground like seeds that plump and germinate miraculously overnight. The slug crop burgeons, and with it, oozy trails of glistening slug slime.
We live on a hill, which means I walk downhill to the barn for chores. On rainy days, the barnyard path includes a few slugs under each foot. That produces a certain memorable squish factor.
I’ve learned to don my rubber boots and just squash and slide. There will undoubtedly be more slugs to replace those flattened and lost to eternity, not unlike watching freeze-dried shrinky dinks spontaneously rehydrate.
We need the rain badly, otherwise I would negotiate with drought-stricken areas to transfer the raindrops elsewhere. Part of the deal is: the slugs must go too along with gallons of slime, containing a complex mix of proteoglycans, glycosaminoglycans, glycoprotein enzymes, hyaluronic acid, antimicrobial peptides, and metal ions of zinc, iron, copper and manganese. Surely someone somewhere would appreciate slime’s precious metals and sticky proteins!
Of course, I’m sure I’d miss them and their sticky icky gooiness. But it is time for someone else to figure out just what the heck is the purpose of slimy gastropods.
I’ve given up trying to figure it out…
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