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DAVID BENTLEY'S WEEKLY COLUMN |
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STRANGE ACTIVITIES
Thirty-seven. There were thirty-seven snails on the fence. I know because I counted every single one. It was 6 a.m., and I was walking into town to get a newspaper and a breakfast sandwich. I pass that wooden fence frequently, but I’d never seen even one snail on it before. That morning, however, it was covered. The sky was cloudy, the temperature was a bit nippy, the grass was wet with dew, and thirty-seven snails appeared to be climbing up and over the fence. I saw every size imaginable from the tiniest baby to one that could only be categorized as the Paul Bunyan of snails. They were all over the fence. It looked rather like a platoon of army recruits scaling an obstacle course wall. The boards between the fence posts started about four inches off the ground. How the snails got scattered all across the breadth of the fence going straight up was beyond me. Yet not a single snail was moving parallel to the ground or headed back toward the earth. The fence was too high to see over, and I couldn’t go into the yard it surrounded. Therefore I couldn’t tell if any snails had made it to the top and were then descending the other side. Only one seemed to be resting at the summit. Was he the winner of some sort of race? King of the mountain, as it were. Perhaps this was a secret rite of spring not intended for human observation. Maybe they were merely playing a game of follow the leader. As mystified as I was by the early morning antics of those snails, I wonder what other beings must think of the human behavior they observe. Many of the activities in which we engage, absent any explanation, must appear just as strange as thirty-seven snails climbing a fence.
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SAN JUAN ISLANDER © 2008 |
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