Slug Love
One day in fourth period pre-calc, my high school math teacher mentioned offhandedly that slugs were probably a good source of protein. We pooled our money, and Mr. Robertson—both highly rational and underpaid—accepted our challenge. For twenty-nine dollars and eighty-six cents, he swallowed a slug whole.
A native Northwesterner, I’ve grown up around slugs, observed the wrath they inspired in my gardener father, had the disconcerting experience of stepping on them barefoot in the dark. Beyond their usefulness in tests of bravery, I’d always figured slugs were slugs. They were repulsive. They were pests. End of story.
* * *
My fiancé, Adam, is from a small town in Michigan. After meeting in South Dakota we came to Eugene to pursue graduate degrees in fields that couldn’t be more different. Adam is getting his PhD in geology, a practical field offering promising job prospects in both the public and private sector. I, on the other hand, am working toward my MFA in creative writing, a fact I can neither rationalize nor deny.
The geologist in Adam is drawn to the Northwest’s dramatic mountain ranges, evidence of ongoing volcanic activity along the subduction zone we call home. Oregon’s expansive old-growth forests have also captured his interest. Shortly after our move, Adam and I were hiking along Kentucky Creek in the Siuslaw National Forest. Adam walked ahead, stopping to photograph the iconic Northwest scenery: ribbons of light filtering through branches draped in green-gray moss, moon-white mushrooms laddering the side of a decaying stump, and everywhere, a knee-deep sea of quietly rustling ferns. Then Adam paused again, crouching low and aiming his camera at something I couldn’t make out. A rough-skinned newt, maybe? Some small but spectacular wildflower?
Catching up, I grimaced. “Really?” I said. “A slug?”
I explained to Adam that a slug like his plump brown subject was nothing to marvel at.
“But it’s huge!” he cried.
“They’re everywhere,” I responded with righteous distaste. “You’ll see.”
* * *
Adam began to see things my way a year later when we started our own little vegetable garden. The modest compost pile by our back door lured slugs in droves. Soon they began to sample our produce, leaving ugly pits in the sides of our strawberries and turning our lettuce to lace. As Adam prowled our yard with a sharp stick in hand, I realized any mystique the Northwest’s outsize slugs had once held for him was long gone.
We complained to other gardeners and the advice poured forth as if from a burst dam. Line your beds with copper, they said. It delivers a mild electric shock. Of course, they added, make certain your beds are slug free when you do this, or any slugs curled up in your cabbage will remain in residence perpetually.
Lure them into vats of beer where they’ll get drunk and drown, other friends suggested. But make sure they can’t climb out. Otherwise, you’re just luring them from your neighbor’s garden to yours and supplying them with beer you’d be better off drinking yourself.
Some suggested chemical pesticides, but warned that our dog could eat the poison and die. Or our dog could eat a slug that ate the poison. And die? we asked.
Yes, they said, and die.
No thanks.
Over drinks, one friend turned to me and said simply, “It’s an ongoing battle. You’ve just got to accept that.”
I considered this a fatalistic view. These were slugs, for God’s sake. Mere slimeballs. My high school math teacher had swallowed one whole. I could beat them and I would.
* * *
But as the weather got wetter, the slugs became more prolific. We were losing the ongoing battle. Then one rainy evening, entering our house through the back door (by the compost pile I’d stubbornly insisted on maintaining), I noticed something strange.
There were two slugs dangling from our siding by a thick thread of mucus. They were intertwined, and as I crouched, watching, they continued to wind around each other, spinning in the air like acrobats.
“Adam!” I called. “You’ve got to come see this!”
He crouched next to me on our slime-streaked doorstep, and for the next fifteen minutes, we looked on in awe.
From behind the heads of the entwined, spinning slugs, two large, white ribbons of flesh unfurled. Then, unbelievably, these organs—already almost half the size of the slugs themselves—began to expand, opening into pretty scalloped spoons that soon intertwined as the slugs had, forming a perfect white spiral, which hung like an ornament beneath the slugs’ still-suspended bodies.
Already Adam and I were stunned. But the show was not over. Soon the slugs’ entwined genitalia began to fan out, forming what can only be described as an improbably large, improbably beautiful iridescent flower. We discovered later it is at this juncture, when their genitalia combine to produce a sculpture any artist would envy, that the slugs exchange sperm.
“They appear to be hermaphroditic,” said the scientist.
“It’s a metaphor for love,” said the writer.
As the flower fell away and the genitalia retracted, our faces glowed like those of two people who have just seen an orca breach or watched the sun set behind Haystack Rock.
* * *
But how, in all my years living in the Northwest, the slug capital of the United States, had I not beheld this dazzling spectacle before? Whenever I’d seen slugs wound around each other on the ground or on the side of a building, I’d assumed that was as exciting as it got.
Immediately, we googled slug sex. We discovered we’d been fortunate enough to stumble upon the brief, luminous climax of what can be a lengthy process involving hours (or hundreds of days in slug time) of nibbling and dangling and twirling.
So, I started calling people. “We saw slugs mating!” I’d exclaim.
“Gross,” was the typical response.
“No!” I’d insist. “It was fascinating, poignant, aesthetically striking!”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah! You see, first they dangle from a thread of mucus.—”
“Actually,” my victim would say at this juncture, “I have to go.”
At least Adam understood. He’d become fascinated with slugs all over again. And this time, I was on board.
* * *
Since our experience, I’ve done some research.
Slugs are indeed hermaphroditic, and after copulation, both partners lay a set of eggs. In a pinch, slugs can also self-inseminate.
Descendents of mollusks, some slugs retain a vestigial shell under the flap of skin draped over their backs. Slugs’ mouths, located on the underside of their bodies, bear as many as 27,000 rasping teeth. Adults can eat forty times their weight daily.
Most of the slugs we find in our gardens today (including Limax maximus of the acrobatic sex act) are exotic species that hitchhiked here from Europe. The natives, like the banana slug (Ariolimax columbianus), do comparatively little damage. The world’s second largest slug species at a maximum length of about ten inches, the banana slug prefers to reside in the forest, where it consumes primarily fungi and decaying vegetable matter. Interestingly, the slime of the banana slug contains a neurotoxin meant to deter prey. If you lick the critter’s underside (we’re talking a generous, wholehearted lick), your tongue will go numb.
But is this enough to redeem the slug? Natural Novocaine aside, what use are they?
Slugs serve as decomposers, recycling nutrients back into the soil. They also provide sustenance for animals such as ducks, snakes, and frogs. At Princeton University, scientists are using slugs’ brains to gain insight into higher animals’ learning processes. And at the University of Washington, the study of slug slime is helping researchers understand disorders such as asthma, gastric ulcers, and cystic fibrosis, all of which involve impaired mucus function.
* * *
I’m not going to lie. I haven’t become a slug-loving fanatic. I won’t start carrying them around on my arms or keeping them as pets. I probably won’t even attend the coronation of Eugene’s next SLUG (Society for the Legitimization of the Ubiquitous Gastropod) Queen.
But my slug experience has reminded me of an important artistic axiom, coined by Virginia Woolf and recited often by my creative writing professor, Ehud Havazelet: “There is a dignity in everything that is looked at openly.” Now, Professor Havazelet meant for me to apply this to the characters in my stories. But I think it applies here, too. Just as close, careful, open-hearted observation can make any character a portal to our shared human experience, all nature’s organisms, no matter how apparently despicable or off-putting, are more intricate and complex and worthy of attention than we might first expect. Even slugs.
So, while you will not find me turning our fledgling garden into a slug sanctuary, I have recaptured some of the childlike wonder that seized Adam at Kentucky Creek. I’m in the process of relocating our compost pile and lining our beds with copper, but I’m also keeping my eyes open, searching out beauty in unexpected places, waiting for nature to prove me wrong again.
Leslie Barnard will complete her MFA in creative writing at the University of Oregon this month. She received the Penny Wilkes Award for Writing and the Environment in 2008 and recently published a short story in Harcourt’s anthology Best New American Voices 2010. She lives with her geologist fiancé and Doberman–chocolate lab dog and is working on a collection of short stories.
