Of Snails & Men

Jeez, I turn my back for one second, and here we are already mid-May. I don't know what to say. Over the course of the past few weeks, I have felt myself slowly growing big with feeling at the realization that I am now officially past the half-way point in my trip. From here on, I'm running out of the forest, as the saying goes. Happily, I am pleased to report that I am only a little behind schedule. With luck, I will be setting foot on South American soil before the end of the present month.

Due to time constraints, however, I've had to make a few regrettable edits to my trajectory: plans at present have me skipping both Venezuela and Brazil. I have convinced myeslf that this is necessary if I want to make it to the bottom of Argentina within my remaining timeframe and at a pace I find reasonable. It could still be a bit of a push to make it, but I remain optimistic, as ever. For the moment, however, it will serve me to try and catch you all up on a few details from the past few weeks.

So, after a warm goodbye with my surrogate-family up on the farm, I set out down from the mountains of Nicaragua, and into the sweaty arms of the country's capital city of Managua, where I spent one realtively uninteresting night in a seedy ant-ridden hostel uptown. My room had a TV at least; I don't watch much boob tube on the road, but I was excited for a bit of world news as I settled in this night.

Unfortunately, all the world had to tell me was how oil from the then-new leak in the Gulf of Mexico had reached the shores of New Orleans, and that said leak would likely take months to seal up, and probably represented one of the worst natural disasters in American history. Well, there's always reading, anyway.

The next morning, I woke early and after quickly swallowing a greasy too-expensive made-for-tourist breakfast, I cabbed it down to the bus station, and caught the next one out to the famed volcanic island of Ometepe. I gather that this unique and beautiful location has recently been added to one of the many new lists of world wonders that seem to be emerging all over the place. World wonder or not, it was certainly a nice place to stay for a few nights.

As it happens, I was, at that time, preparing to put a number of things in the mail to friends and family, and my few days on Ometepe afforded me the time to prepare those parcels for their long journey. It was quite a beautiful place, complete with lovely beaches, and incredible jungle crawling with unique long-tailed birds, feisty monkeys, and all manner of distinctive insects. And as if that weren't enough, each night the skies would be filled with the incredible strobe of the vast lightening storms atop the two volcanoes that made up the island's bulk. There was one drawback however, namely, the peculiar character of the lake-water surrounding the small island.

Come afternoontime it would usually be getting oppressively hot out, and all around the waves would be there, jingerly rolling up to shore and looking inviting. I gave in a number of times, and was mildly refreshed, but I was always sorry. My brief dips always left me covered in what felt like a thin coating of wax which persisted despite ample scrubbing - I'm quite sure the shower-water came from the lake also - throughout the whole of my stay. In fact, to be perfectly honest, it was chiefly to find a decent shower, and take a dip in the salty Pacific that I eventually left Ometepe for the nearby sleepy surfer town of San Juan del Sur. But also, to pop my recently packaged items in the mail, and chill out for a few days.

As it happens, however, this quick pause wound up stretching into five days and six nights, due chiefly to a few complications regarding my mail, the details of which needn't be included here. It will suffice to say simply that over the course of my stay in little San Juan, there occured, among other things, aptly timed government holidays, missed emails, and power-outages, not to mention a few good rounds of phone-tag discussing various potential fees, required permits, personal favors, liability issues, and all manner of other imaginable delays. It looked like popping a few things in the mail would be a little tougher than I imagined.

The good news however, was that the business of trying to get all this mail off also involved a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, and so when I wasn't dashing about trying to make it happen, I had little else to do but relax and enjoy the numerous pleasures of beautiful San Juan. I was able to find a lovely little bookstore/coffeeshop/bistro type place where I convinced myself I had earned the right to enjoy some of the more expensive - and delicious - fare they offered there. And so I sat, and dug into a few of the books I'd been working on, and savored delicious gourmet coffee and plump breakfast bagels.

Additionally, the cool waters of the Pacific were a refreshing treat after a few days of sloshing about in the tepid brown volcanic soup of Ometepe, and I partook thereof at least once a day for the duration of my time in San Juan. (Perhaps my beef with the crummy water surrounding Ometepe was enhanced somehow by my having recently heard the news of the big spill in the Gulf?) It was on one such leisurely afternoon on the beach - stretching in the sun, poking around in the sand, and generally lolling about - when suddenlyI happened to notice some interesting little pock-mark disturbances in the sand, which seemed to reveal themselves just as the very tail-end of a wave ebbed back out to the ocean, and then to promptly disappear.



Now, anyone who has ever flopped around on an ocean beach for any length of time will tell you that the salty shallows are often a haven to all kinds of wee little lifeforms. I will not try to conceal the fact that I have always taken great joy in observing the workaday dramas of various tiny scraggling creatures, and I was reminded just then of how back in India, I had spent many a casual hour observing and playing with the little hermit crabs that populated the beautiful flat beaches of the Andaman islands. I knelt down and waited for the ebb of the next wave.

When it came, I leaned my head in close to see if I could get a good glimpse of what I expected would be some other species of tiny crab. What I saw when the water cleared up some however, was actually nothing crablike, but looked rather more like numerous little translucent bubbles resting atop the sand, which, just after the wave had receded, shrunk down until all that was left was a nondescript lump. That's odd, I thought. Why would the crabs be spitting out bubbles as the waves receded? Then it occurred to me that I had not actually seen a crab just yet, and so I decided to dig up one of the little rascals.



What I pulled out and washed off was actually a smallish snail with a rather long nose - if you could call it a nose - more like a kind of a longish set of wavy tendrils hanging out the front way, although he or she quickly retracted them. I dug up a few others just to make sure, and confirmed that this was in fact a whole community of such tiny snails. After surveying them for another moment or two, I realized that what I had initially mistaken for bubbles were in fact their tiny translucent "noses" which they were using as minuscule fishing nets.

So far as I can tell the strategy is this: after having burrowed themselves down such that their little faces lie just beneath the surface of the fine sand, they then sit concealed and wait for the waves to wash overhead, and ebb back out to sea, at which point they blow out their little tendrils which balloon open like a sail in high winds and presumably catch all manner of other yet tinier critters or some other brand of vegetable snail munchable. As the wave disappears completely, they pull in their catch, cover up, and wait for the next one. And so on all day long.

Sounds like a pretty sweet gig, but as I observed, there's actually quite a bit involved. For one thing, you've got to make sure you find that particular stretch of beach where the waves are just shallow enough for this particular kind of fishing. If you set up shop too far inland, the waves may be too small and infrequent to catch much, but if you're too far out, the current may be too strong, and you're liable to get pulled out and washed away the moment you throw out your nets - I observed many an unfortunate overzealous snail succumb to this fate.

But even if you find that sweet spot with plenty of shallow waves of workable depth, there's still the issue of tides. Depths change, and if you want to stay in the good fishing, you've got to shift along with them. This can mean a lot of commuting over the course of a day, but none of them seemed to mind all that much. And as I looked down at them fishing away, I confess to having been struck by the simplicity and the cleanliness of their little lives; no fretting about trying to get mail sent off, that's for sure. No huge oil spills to sop up either. It's a slow life being a snail, but it's a relatively harmless one too, and that's more than can be said of us lately.

I don't mean to harp on the foibles of human beings. It goes without saying that we goof up hugely from time to time, but I think overall we're a pretty terrific addition to the universe, however unpopular that opinion may be these days. Far more fashionable, it seems, is the view that human beings are some kind of planetary disease, a unique species of world-cancer whose sole prerogative is to produce food and preserve our selfish selves indefinitely and at at all costs - future generations be damned.

The world, it is sometimes said, would be better off without us. Shades of this view can be heard both explicitly and implicitly in the words of numerous scholars, pundits and various other doomsday announcers all over the place. All you've got to do is turn on the news:

... fossil-fuel addiction, oilspill in the Gulf, economic-crisis ...

... global warming, ocean-acidification, deforestation ...
... consumer-culture, obesity, moral devolution...
... greedy corporations, bloodthirsty CEOs ...
... crime, drugs, mental illness...
... poverty, disease, war...
... etc. etc. etc. ...

To anyone paying half attention, it would appear that human beings overall are just a nasty bunch of ignorant creatures involved in a nasty bunch of ignorant doings. But however compelling this view may be to so many, is it really true that the world would be better off without us? Are the snails more valuable citizens of this planet than we are?

To their great credit, snails do not often cause global environmental disasters, nor are they commonly referred to by seriously thinking people as some nasty type of cancer on our planet, at least to my knowledge. They seem to have got the sustainability thing down, as far as we can tell. Well done guys, we might take a lesson from you. Snails: 1. Humans: 0.

But apart from their admirable environmental practices, as a species, snails don't exactly contribute anything particularly valuable to the universe itself, do they? Relatively speaking. I mean, they're undoubtedly an important link in various food-chains, and an integral part of balancing whatever ecosystem, and all the rest, but that much can be said of just about any living creature.

However much pleasure we may take from their casual observation (and by "we" of course I mean "I") snails are just not all that interesting in the great scheme of things, and I suspect most people - excepting perhaps a few zealous biologists - would not find much tragedy in imagining a world in which no snail ever existed. For whatever reason, their exemption from the universe does not strike us as much of a loss. But why? Perhaps it is because we know of all kinds of other little semi-aquatic scragglers who seem to "count for" just as much as snails do? But if we try the same thought experiment with human beings, I think we actually get a much different result.

A world without human beings might very well be a "healthier" one in a lot of ways. It seems to go without saying that the the world would have been a touch better off without all our oilspills, nuclear leaks, burnt/burried garbage, and all the rest, but I think it's also pretty clear that it would be a far less valuable world. Obviously our house-keeping needs work, a lot of work, but whatever else I want to say about human imperfections, I still think we are quite obviously incredible creatures worth celebrating in a lot of ways, and that our omission from the cosmic roster would represent a monstrous loss in the overall value of the universe. In short, I think we "count for" a lot, and I think that for a few reasons, which I'll try to summarize here.

Part of it is that we possess a number of unique capacities and abilities. I know, I know, birds can talk and solve simple puzzles, and dolphins have sex for fun, and primates can do sign language and all the rest, but the best of them are still way behind even human children when it comes to things like linguistic ability, and the capacity for reason, logic and abstract thought. Not to mention the capacity for complex emotion, empathy, compassion, and love. And that's valuable stuff! That, I take it, is the kind of stuff that actually makes talk of value meaningful at all!

(How, afterall, could value even exist in a universe void of any and all creatures complex enough to formulate some idea or sense thereof, however vague? The extent to which the universe is more or less valuable, ebbs and flows, or so it seems to me, in proportion to the extent to which existing creatures are capable of having thoughts or feelings (or whatever you want to call them) of value, that is, insofar as they are capable of valuing things. I recognize of course that this is a deep issue upon which opinions vary greatly, but that's mine for the moment.)

I'm not trying to suggest that animals don't think or love or have value. I think it's quite obvious that they do, and that a world without human beings would still be a hugely valuable world. Non-human animals of all kinds bring immense value into the universe, and I for one would not want to live in a world in which they did not - indeed such a world is scarcely imaginable to me.

The point I'm trying to make here is simply that there is a whole lot of things we humans can do that no other animals can. For starters, we're the only ones who write and enjoy poetry and music, tell jokes and celebrate beauty, and think about what it means to be good. We're also the only ones who strive to understand the nature of the universe in all its aspects, consider at length the consequences of our actions and habits, and share bits of culture, happiness, inspiration and all the rest. Snails may not make much of a mess, but neither are they much concerned about the existence or nonexistence of any messes - that's also a uniquely human trait.

We muck things up, but we're also the only ones capable of truly understanding, regretting and (hopefully) rectifying our various muck-ups. Plenty of other animals surely care about the immediate well-being of themselves and their offspring, but how many of them could legitimately be described as caring about the well-being of the world itself? Of understanding that its very existence is a magnificent and invaluable miracle?

Anyway, part of the reason I've allowed myself to fall into this little diatribe on human value - apart from 1) trying to make myself feel better about that damn oilspill, and 2) the opportunity it gave me to nerdily post photos of super-cool snails - is simply to preface something I had wanted to bring to your attention a few posts ago.

A couple weeks back, while Couchsurfing in Antigua, Guatemala I had the good fortune of meeting an intriguing fellow by the name of Christopher Howe. The short video below does a fine job of explaining things, so I'll refer you thereto for the details of his project, but I think it goes without saying that the kind of thing we see in Chris' trip is a big part of what makes people valuable. You don't see snails doing this kind of thing, do you?

iAMwalking.org movie from Christopher Howe on Vimeo.

Pretty sweet, right? And I thought I had a long voyage. This guy's straight-up walking through the desert, collecting rainwater, eating cactus - and why? If we take him at his word, it's at least partly out of a desire to help other people "realize the potential of their lives" - to think about all they're able to do, and what they want, and to empower them to move toward actually creating the life - and world - they think best, or at least better. I love that one fellow's comment toward the end: "If he can do this... I can do something." Anyway, last I heard from Chris he was making his way through Nicaragua, but lord knows where he is now. His site was down for a while recently, but I'll drop him a line and post a link to his blog when it comes back up. Good luck Chris!

Anyway, to conclude my own little narrative, after five days in San Juan I was starting to get fed up with the run-around I was getting with my mail, and decided on a whim to take a late-afternoon journey into the nearby town of Rivas and see if things were any different there. Wouldn't you know it, I had all my parcels off in a matter of minutes, and for a remarkably reasonable rate at that. Free at last, I nipped back to San Juan, packed my goods and left the following morning on the first bus headed for the Costa Rican border. It was a rather poorly organized place, full of confusingly parked semi-trucks, dirt roads and dodgy characters, but I managed to get through relatively quickly, and grabbed the next bus clear across the Northern part of the country down into the capital of San Jose.

Again, I spent a single night in a relatively uninteresting uptown backpacker place, and left the next morning on an afternoon bus into San Isidro de el General, a smallish city in the Southern portion of the country where I had another Couchsurf lined up with some friends of the folks I'd stayed with in Antigua. Bubba, Dixie, and Liz - lovely folks all - welcomed me warmly, and I wound up spending three very enjoyable days in their pleasant company, and that of the four delightfully tiny dogs who command the lush bit of land surrounding their beautiful two story home set just outside of town.

I'll tell you, it took some doing to pry myself away from delicious home cooked meals and good conversation, but I managed to do so this morning and grabbed a bus over to the Pacific coast, and then made my way down to another quiet little surfing town by the name of Uvita. I think I'll put no more than a night or two in here before heading on into Panama sometime in the coming days. My chief concern at that time will be trying to find another boat-ride not unlike the two I had in Mexico back in December - I hear it's not uncommon for foreign yachts to take the odd traveler along into the Northeastern part of Colombia. More on that front however, as the month progresses. South America here I come.

I hope this letter finds you all well and happy.

Lots of love from sweaty Costa Rica!