Slugs

It was slugs all along and I didn’t know it. Slugs eating the leaves and flowers, slugs leaving shiny trails across spidery webs surrounding my beloved plants that had died or were in the process of dying.

But I didn’t think about slugs. They exist without minute or second hands, and their hours move so slowly that between our breakfast and afternoon nap, several slug days have elapsed. Underneath their phlegmatic exteriors, however, lurk the souls of agent orange. I didn’t believe it. I thought it had something to do with my neighbor’s garage.

The year he put in his garage was the same year I put in my raised flower bed, my patio, my perennials. I thought I’d be done with mowing forever, except for the three-and-a-half yards of lawn I kept for the sake of my dog, so she’d have a familiar spot to pee. My neighbor, not content with an ordinary two-car garage, built a two-story structure that ran the length and depth of his yard, from his back fence to pack porch. With table saws and mechanic’s tools inside, it wasn’t a garage at all, but a cottage industry in a building the size of two cottages stacked on top of each other.

As he and his helper were busy framing, they looked down on me laying my brick patio in a loose, basket-weave pattern.

“Hey, that’s kind of cute,” said my neighbor. “Yeah,” his helper said, “it’s real unusual.”

The brick came from old buildings in Chicago that had been torn down and sold by the truckload for a fraction of the usual cost of brick. It gave the patio an instantly aged look—with a couple of gargoyles, it would have resembled the bottom layer of a small medieval cathedral.

My neighbor would be able to see the patio from the loft of his garage where he kept his studio. He was, he said, something of an artist. I wasn’t so sure, looking at how the garage design evolved, a sort of plan-it-as-you-go structure with eccentric angles and a roof pitch that resembled a church. “I don’t want to have to mess with snow,” he said. He was thinking ahead; the seasons weren’t going to outsmart him.

A month after the garage went up, my nearby lilacs took on a peaked appearance, and the bark of our ancient honeysuckle began to look as scraggly as a sycamore. Cutting off the evening sun, the garage made it seem like daylight savings time had never arrived in my yard. I let it go with a shrug; I had better things to do than war with neighbors. The lilacs and honeysuckle, hardy and tenacious, held on.

The perennials held on also, and all summer along there was something in bloom: from the first crocus to the final sedum—tulips, iris, veronica, astilbe, Echinacea purpura, mondarda—all flourished. The daylilies grew so dense, bounded by a driveway and my other neighbor’s fence, that there were no weeds to pull at all. There was still yard work to be done, particularly when my wife ordered hundreds of spring bulbs that arrived in time for fall planting. (That was me in the back yard with a shovel, digging where my wife pointed, then burying the bulbs pointy-side up.) In spring, we wrote large checks for everything from basil to blue geraniums to fennel and cosmos (the name alone earning it a spot in my garden).

I used to think gardening was genetic, the result of peasant stock on both sides. But during the summer when I took my morning coffee on the patio, read the newspaper, and wrote in my journal, the garden was my own private outdoor café. I realized that gardening is related to decadence, especially a garden like mine where cats take refuge in the overgrown lemon balm as though it’s jungle foliage.

In the cycles of a garden, decay is a necessary ingredient, and if you don’t recycle dead plants once they’ve stopped growing, you have to buy decayed matter (real or artificial) from someone else. Having arrived at this conclusion, I felt a smug satisfaction in my original impulse for the garden: laziness and avoidance of mowing. The problem is, I have to turn my chair in a certain direction so I don’t see my neighbor working on his not-so-mint ’63 Chevy Nova. I’ve avoided putting up a fence between us. It would be an admission of defeat. On the other hand, it would prevent him from dumping snow from his driveway onto my rose bed in the winter.

When my plants began disappearing mysteriously last summer, I suspected his garage immediately. The marigolds, eaten down to mere stems, withered in a Sahara of photosynthesis. The hostas were full of holes. The sweet cicely, the meadow rue—my entire shade garden disappeared bit by green, shady bit. My wife said it was slugs. I held to the certainty that some varnish or spray my neighbor used had leached into my soil. Besides, I never saw more than two or three slugs at a time, and they weren’t doing much more than looking like fat pieces of snot.

As I listened to my pocket stereo while painting the house, a horticulturist on a phone-in program told gardeners what was wrong with their plants and trees. One listener complained that his hostas had been eaten down to nothing, and the dandelions flourished. “Oh,” the horticulturist said in the same perky way she discussed oak wilt and cutworms, “you have slugs.” The two or three slugs I had seen meant there were whole slippery battalions under the mulch. The horticulturist advised setting out a shallow dish of beer. How simple and devious.

That night, I set out a small bowl of Blatz under the purple coneflowers. The next morning, a hundred pickled slugs floated in an amber slug brew. As I dumped them on a concrete slab left over from the garage construction, they spilled out like a brownish-gray rainbow, almost as liquid as the beer.

The following night I set out two bowls; in the morning, each was clotted with brown and liver-colored slugs. They were like greasy, bloated Rice Krispies, each one beer-glutted to the point of death.

Next, I set out a half-full can of the cheapest beer available. An hour later, looking for an opening through the aluminum lip to heaven, slugs covered the can. Already half in the tank from fumes, they were inching ahead steadily, as unstoppable as hour hands, singing slug versions of Carmina Burana. A yeasty aroma wafted through the neighborhood, advertising all the beer they could drink, Free. They came by the thousands, their horns testing the air for directions to the slug fest. They crawled slowly over the rim and fell in.

I suppose advocates of one stripe or another will take issue with this whole-sale slaughter—after all, slugs are closer to mammals than insects. But I didn’t use the cowardly, fascistic tactics of gas or poison. (As the horticulturist happily explained, Diazanon crystals will kill slugs and every other tiny creature unfortunate enough to stumble along.) But Diazanon death, the slow, gruesome shutting down of the entire nervous system followed by agonizing seizures and convulsions, gives me the feeling of a cold wind blowing over my own grave. How much better, and in the grand scheme of things, how righteous to throw the slugs a party. Of course, in the morning, they end up on a concrete slab, the same result as they’d get with Diazanon, but I’m content knowing they died happy in a sort of slug singles bar.

My encyclopedia says that slugs are hermaphroditic and copulate reciprocally. They lack backbones and don’t know when to say when. As I stood on the back porch at dusk, I could imagine their ecstasy, having lost what little inhibition they possessed. My neighbor, a can of Milwaukee’s Best in one hand, squirmed under his Nova to perform his arcane rituals. He set the can near his head, right next to hundreds of slug cadavers and hundreds of other gray bodies hoofing it toward glory.

The realization struck me that a benign presence rules the universe after all, and I held up my own freshly opened can, toasting the slugs’ happiness and my own.

[Source: Minnesota Monthly, Summer 1995]