Sunday, May 14, 2006

documenting life

Snail crossing the front step @ Jeff's ~ 05.06.06

I guess I'd never seen a snail up close and personal before. Because I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time photographing it, making a little video of it as it traveled along the step. Later in the day I witnessed it's (unintentional) death, crushed under the weight of a shoe. No, not my shoe, no video or photos of the horrific moment either. Yeah, it was just a snail ... but I winced and felt pain as I heard the crunch nonetheless.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, yeah, I understand what you mean. It's rough when you've forged a sort of personal thing, however one-sided, with something like that. I found a caterpillar in the snow last winter and brought it back to the inside garden here at work. Who knows what became of it? But I just couldn't walk away. I find myself these days trying not to step on ants (mind you, anything that lands or crawls on me is fair game; even I have my limits). But here you are, the one thing this snail could have encountered that wouldn't instantly eat it, and you wind up the cause of its demise anyway. I agree, even that is hard to shrug off. Maybe there's hope for our species after all.

Daisy said...

That's a really nice picture, and yeah, I understand about the snail. Like there's a small lizard living in my shoe rack; he's been there since he was a baby. And though it's pretty stupid, I look for him sometimes. :D

Anyway, nice pictures again!

katherine said...

Hi Lone,
For the record, I was not directly the cause of it's demise. lol. Funny how I feel the need to defend myself. Anyway, I was present for the event, but it was someone else's shoe that crunched the snail.

Since then I've been told that snails are a menace in our gardens. One well-known gardener in our area (he has his own gardening TV show) was even quoted as saying, I think you should stomp on them all! Crunch, crunch, crunch. That's something I never thought I'd hear from him. I'd maybe expect him to suggest we gather them all up and transport them to a save forest bed somewhere. But no, his response was to crunch them all.

katherine said...

Hi Daisy,

That's not stupid, he probably looks for you sometimes too. ; )

Thanks for the compliments on the photos!