Before, During and After the storm

BEFORE DURING AND AFTER THE STORM

When I was a kid I had several glass tanks where I kept various aquatic creatures. I got frogspawn each year and raised tadpoles to froglets. I also kept newts which laid eggs which became baby newts. When these were able to survive on land I let them go in wetland areas nearby. Sometimes I kept them for a while and fed them on greenfly and white worms. I was interested in them. The glass of some tanks went green with algae. I had pond snails to eat this algae. I had several kinds-ordinary little pondsnails, some red ramshorns and some black ramshorns. As they crawled up the tank sides you could see a darker space at the top end of the underside of the snail`s body, (its foot) and sometimes you could see something within that what looked a bit like a tongue moving. This “mouth” opened and closed and you could see some kind of rasping equipment in use to scrape the algae off the glass. I read up about it, and discovered that this part of the snail is called the radula, and it scraped the algae of the sides of the tank with thousands of teeth, which, as they wear out are replaced by other teeth. Just as if they were tiny shelled sharks. They rasped little trails all over the tank sides, and you could see through these trails to the slightly yellow water behind them.

Later as a kid I collected land snails. I didn`t really like slugs..eww- but snails could be lovely- with their shells orange and black or black and white, or pink or dark brown. I devised a system for racing the snails, and we kids bet on them. I made an old darts board turned upside into the track. Interestingly, the least attractive snails- brown and black with sluglike bodies were by far the fastest, so they were worth a punt. With chalk I drew a circle in the middle of the board. The snails (all different) were put into the circle, and people chose. Then a glass of water was poured on them and they would start to slide across the board. Whichever got to the edge first won. When my father found out about our secret meetings he banned them., he was afraid my friends` parents would be cross that their kids were getting corrupted. However, even when the betting pool was closed down, I remained interested in these creatures. I enlarged my study to other molluscs when as a child my family and I spent a seaside holiday in Looe in Cornwall.Here I got interested in Limpets.I attempted to remove limpets from the rocks- just to see underneath them. I saw that these creatures could actually dig in to rocks. But how?

The rocks were spattered with indentations left by limpets who had moved on. That is to say limpets could actually chew through stone. They seemed just kind of squidgy and yuck, but one part was made of the toughest biological substance known….I studied mollusc mouthparts to see what they could be using to rasp through rock. Their teeth are mostly made of CHITIN, which is what the outer covering of insects is made of, and this is often reinforced with goethite, an ultra-hard iron-containing mineral. This makes snail teeth—especially those of limpets, the strongest natural material known on Earth. I was impressed.

And what`s all this got to do with a storm? Well some years ago, as happens, the person I loved most left me. There was a season of storms with mud and fallen trees and floods. The desolation around me echoed the desolation within me. The Pathetic Fallacy.

Around this time, in Autumn, I happened to exploring Greece on horseback, and when I was riding my horse on Mt Tzena, which straddles the border between Northern Greece and Northern Macdedonia. This is a wild mountain, but people let half wild cattle graze in the forest there in the Summer. The cattle had been driven down the mountain to the villages when Summer ended, but their dried droppings were abundant proof that they had been there. Then yet another storm broke. I found shelter for me and my horse in a shepherd`s summer hut.

In the morning we were surrounded by destruction. AND I saw snails.

These snails were of a species new to me, and I must admit they were quite nasty, both in appearance and habits. Apricot sized, with nondescript brown shells,

their beige crimplene bodies oozed snot-like slime in bubbles as they slid urgently in gluttonous haste to embrace and devour with voluptuous relish the rehydrated cow pancakes.

The snails seemed a metaphor for everything bad that had happened to me. They had been brought out by the storm because it had provided what they needed -a damp route to food that it was often too dry to reach.And I made a connection: I thought about the radula that each of those horrid brown snails was using with efficient and greedy energy. I thought about goethite, with a kind of dread. Those were nightmare snails. And I thought about why my poor broken heart was not healing..and I knew the snails were the explanation-

Because of the storm when he left me, and the days of rain that followed, my heart had become soft and dungy

Grey mycelia were strangling the spongier parts and sending forth tiny black fruiting heads of mould. The texture was

ideal for snails. No escape.

And even now when I think back to that storm I can still feel the rasping of those mollusc mouthparts, I feel the mucus- lubricated muscular wrenching

Of their cold bodies as they graze, grating the soft surface of my heart and creating cavities, penetrating and delving into these small craters

deepening them and widening them until I feel their sluggish clamminess seeping through to the ventricles and auricles. And my disintegrating heart keeps on pumping, while those implacable, voracious snails keep eating into the very reason that a heart might beat at all.