April showers have brought out the slugs. Like a lot of common animals I have a history with slugs and it’s not all happy. When I was a kid my mother showed me how to kill slugs by pouring salt on them and I went up and down the sidewalk at night with a big container of the “when it rains it pours”, pouring it all over every slug I could find. The next morning I’d find shriveled leathery bodies like three-dimensional commas, an interrupted life sentence.
Why did I hate the slugs so much? I can’t explain it because I loved snails. I collected snails, built little terrariums for them in empty jars, and spent hours watching them. Slugs were just escargot liberated from the extra cargo of a shell. If anything they deserved more respect for daring to go bare, but I think it was the lack of a shell that bothered me. Snails are builders, architects. They make a refuge and carry it with them, and I could pick up a snail without getting slimed, although I also let them crawl up and down my arm. Slugs, I thought, lived up to their name: sluggish. Lazy. Fat. Stupid. Slugs are unstamped coins. Big, slow moving boats. Hit somebody hard enough and you say you slugged them. And according to the Oxford English Dictionary was an insulting term for people long before it was applied to the gastropod.
That’s imposing a lot on slugs, none of it true. Well, I don’t know about slug intelligence, but their bodies are all muscle, as some friends who decided to fry them up in garlic butter since it was cheaper than going to a French restaurant discovered, and slugs can move pretty quickly, although I guess they have enough natural defenses that most of the time they don’t need to. Most animals either know or, like my friends, discover that slugs aren’t that appetizing.
I’m sure I’d also feel differently if we lived on the west coast where banana slugs are found and are even a school mascot because they’re amazing. I’d probably feel the same way about them that I did about snails. And I’ve always found sea slugs fascinating, from when I first read about them in my Jacques Cousteau books to when, on a trip to Florida, I found some hanging onto a piece of driftwood. They had amber bodies and azure gills. I carried them to the house where we stayed in Florida in a bucket with some sand and rocks and seaweed and watched them for hours. They crawled all over their temporary plastic home, occasionally swimming by curling and uncurling until they floated up to the surface then drifted back down. The next day I took them back to the beach and released them to the sea, not wanting them to die in captivity.
They lived in salt, the same stuff I used to destroy their terrestrial cousins. I don’t know if that’s what changed my mind about the sidewalk slugs but after that I let them pass.
Doug and the Slugs—great Canadian band!
How have I gotten this far in my life without having heard of Doug And The Slugs? They really are amazing! Since you mentioned them I did a quick look and immediately landed on the YouTube video for “Too Bad” which is not only a great song but there was a treasure trove of information about the band.
Thank you for this very moving post, Chris. Now I’m going to take the word “sluggish” as a compliment.
Thanks for being sluggish enough to stop here.