"You must not throw stones into your neighbor's garden."

- French Proverb

Okay, so I have been guilty. I was out looking around the back yard last evening, and I must say that for so early in the season it is looking pretty snappy. The biggest bane of my efforts in the garden are the snails; this is remarkable in that whenever I mention them to other Portlanders and even to our immediate neighbors they look at me blankly, replying with the same comment "what snails?"

If I had not gotten this response from several sources whose integrity I truly do consider beyond reproach, I would have to believe that there is some great Portland conspiracy, to hide the fact that the snails do exist. In fact they abound, and apparently luxuriate themselves in only our garden. Now I have to insert here, that I am not talking about cute little pea-sized snails lazily attending to their business in the protection of a shady corner of the garden. I am referring to two-inch Escargot, whose jaws are wide enough to consumer an entire tulip plant in one salad-mouthful. I would have trouble convincing others of this since the snails generally disappear in the daytime, but for the slimy trails they leave behind, zig-zagging their way across the bricks of our patio and up and down the sides of the pots. In the morning, the trails gleam like railroad tracks, broad shiny interlacings betraying the snails abundance in what was apparently a midnight orgy on the bricks, a party of great proportion, of snails minuet-ing across the stones in the moonlight. Apparently too they like our hot-tub, as the trails frequently climb the wooden sides; occasionally I will find one floating helplessly in the hot water, cooked lightly but gently as he had sublimated in a silent midnight backstroke in the pool.

Left to their own devices, as I did the first year we lived here, the creatures multiplied into the thousands. The grass beneath our feet cracked with the dried trail of their venturings around their conquered kingdom of our back yard. It was at this time that I started asking the neighbors about them, and found that we alone were so blessed. At one point, seeing the massive size of them and knowing that in fact they were very well fed on some of the very best garden flowers, I considered harvesting them and selling them as a delicacy. But the cost to our yard was just too great, since there was hardly a broad leaf left in sight that had not been nibbled down to its bitter stem.

Portland is for the most part a very "natural" place. there is a general aversion to the use of anything foreign or chemical to be used to avert the native fauna. Instead there are recommendations for coffee grounds and dishes of beer. I tried these; we ended up with a much more aggressive strain of snail, more visible than in the past, no longer satisfied with nocturnal raids on the garden, but instead appearing at all hours of the day. They were high on caffeine and happy on beer, challenging me on the garden path like wild boars. I tried stomping the most aggressive of these, but ultimately realized that they had been there as a sort of Kamikaze weapon. for having sacrificed their lives they had left behind a glob of mucous goo that would dry in place like a permanent glassy reminder of their superiority.

I had begun a frowned-upon tactic of putting out slug-bait to kill the throngs; I practically had to do this in the dead of night out of the sight of neighbors who would have frowned upon the use of this chemical in the garden; but having realized that not one of the neighbors had so much as seen a snail in his yard, I deduced the fact that we had planted our yard in such a tempting smorgasbord, a virtual snail-picnic, that in fact we had attracted all the snails in Portland - enticing them into our back-yard like the Pied Piper. It was left up to me, I deduced, to do them in. I toyed with the idea of dumping them in the dead of night into the neighbor's yards and sealing off the borders with a line of liquid slug-bait to squelch their return; but somehow I felt this would come back to haunt me despite the neighbors' frowns at using a chemical. "don't throw rocks into your neighbor's garden"...

Slowly I have succeeded in reducing their numbers; the great Portland Snail Plague has been averted. I wake up at night sometimes and look out the back window at the moonlight tracing across the flower beds, the hum of the hot-tub a soft lullaby punctuated by the sound of the water tumbling out of the small fountain in the center of the yard. Looking out I often think I see them there, dancing on the brick patio and splashing in the warm water of the hot tub; maybe it is a shadow, maybe my imagination....but I think they are still there, quietly lurking in the bushes,growing even larger, larger still, just waiting for the right moment to reclaim their kingdom...