When I was 48, one morning I killed 48 snails.

Normally I’m non-violent. I wince at even the mention of cruelty to a bird or mammal, and I don’t eat their meat (but that was a decision first made by my kids, and then continued because of my taste preferences instead of my philosophies). More than once I have caught and moved a bee, co-existed with a spider, admired a dragonfly.

But I will kill. Given a chance I’ll exterminate a mosquito or a wasp. And living in garden-loving Berkeley I have learned to loathe snails. I have edged my yard with the occasional toxin. I have hunted in the agapanthus.

I think it was that winter when I tried to take out at least 10 a day. I wondered how many citizens it would take, killing 10 a day, to wipe out the snail population in our town. I became snail vigilant, especially as I walked to BART each weekday morning.

That winter Wednesday, after rain and under clouds, snails were out aplenty. I must have crunched a dozen on my way to the corner with the stucco-fenced property. There was a mass of the pests, medium-sized to impressive, on the short white wall. I went at them like a kick-boxer, and I counted the corpses as they fell.

I cleaned that wall. But I didn’t make a dent in the North Berkeley snail population. Ever since then I’ve looked at them a little differently.

They look like silver perforation marks:
a dotted line of slime on old concrete,
a snail-laid trail of mirror dashes, sparks
of carpeting for moving pseudo-feet.
If I could tear the sidewalk on that line
and turn part in but keep this here with me,
a random trail determining what’s mine
and what is not, responsibility …
diminishes, and I could then allow
me freedom to insult, to litter, sneer
at anything and even raise my voice.
I’m tearing where it’s weakened, and that’s how
direction is established. There’s a near
description of a way to make a choice.