Slug Hunting

Slug Hunting

We know it’s here. It leaves a slimy trail on our living room rug. But we've yet to catch it in action.

Our hunt for the elusive slug began a few weeks ago, when the weather here in Scotland turned unseasonably warm. By warm I mean it got up into the 70’s, and the sun came out from its usual cloud cover. It’s typically cool, overcast, and rainy here in the summertime, but this year we've gotten pretty close to what I remember from the Southern United States as being downright hot and humid. Only the main floor of our century-old stone manse stays cavernously cold all year long, and so the slug must appreciate our natural indoor air-conditioning as much as we do.

I grew up in the South with toads on the sidewalk, snakes in the yard, and ants in the kitchen. We also suffered cockroaches that would scatter as fast as lightening when you flicked the lights on. Occasionally we had mice in the house and opossums in the garage, and in Minneapolis there were raccoons that inhabited the sewers—I know because my dogs would sense them down in the storm drains and bark at them, and I could barely make out their beady little eyes shining fearlessly up at me.

When it comes to non-humans abiding in our Glasgow hame, my partner and I are—fortunately—not squeamish about the same critters. John hates spiders so I handle them, and my height allows me to reach the ones on the ceiling. I on the other hand can’t stand mice, and John doesn't mind setting traps or, more importantly, emptying them.

But this slug is getting the better of both of us. A couple times, when we've each woken up in the middle of the night, we've armed ourselves with flashlights and stealthily gone downstairs to the scene of the slime. Like a pair of private detectives we get down on all fours and train our searchlights over the rugged terrain expecting to find our culprit with its tentacles held up begging us, “Don’t salt!”

Nothing. Not a slug in sight. Only the tail-tale sign of its having come, crisscrossed the floor numerous times, and mysteriously vanished.

Now there’s a reason why a slug is called a slug and not a snake or a springer or a swift: it’s not a fast mover. It’s sluggish, hence its name. So why can’t we spot it in slow-motion? Even if it heard us coming down the steps, how could it make a speedy get-away?

Maybe the slug is a shape-shifter, a magical creature that can transform itself into another creature, say, a spider, scurrying under the floorboards. Or it might turn into a swallow and head for the window, which would explain the opaque imprints on our panes—perhaps they’re on the inside and not the outside. Or the slug could morph into streaks of silver, darting every which way.

One thing's for sure, this heat and the slug will be gone quick enough.

Land of the Fearful and Home of the Bravado

Land of the Fearful and Home of the Bravado

I am not proud to be an American.

Let me say it again, so that any U.S.A.—or U.K., for that matter—government entity can be sure there are no typos in what I mean: I am not proud to be an American.

Following the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012, and the tragic acquittal issued by a jury of Americans to the shooter George Zimmerman in Sanford on July 13, 2013, I am ashamed to belong to a country where the scales of justice are calibrated to support one person’s fear over another person’s freedom to walk down the street.

Add skin color (the fearful person is white, the dead person was black), racial background (the fearful person is a multi-ethnic American, the dead person was an African-American), age (the fearful person is an adult, the dead person was a teenage minor), occupation (the fearful person was training for a career in criminal justice and was coordinator of the neighborhood watch program, and the dead person was a high school student), and circumstances (the fearful person was in their vehicle and had a gun, the dead person was on foot and did not have a weapon), and the question is not “What’s our country coming to?!”

The question is “What’s our country been and how do we want to live differently?!”

European explorers were not good guests where they went—uninvited—to erect systems of exploitation of both natural resources and native people. They used religion and politics to justify economic abuse of foreign environments and their inhabitants. And after claiming for themselves these new worlds—stealing them from the folks who lived there—Europeans have not been good hosts. We keep on bullying. Our national security interests—fear by another name—continue to outweigh other peoples’ freedom to live their lives.

I am not proud to be an heir of this history, but I cannot deny that it is my history. I come from various northern European clans who wanted a better life for themselves even if it meant making other peoples’ lives hell. My great-grandmother Biddle was a piano teacher, in Florida, and I have one of her newspaper ads offering lessons “For Whites Only.” Her son, my grandfather, over the course of his 99 years never quite made the shift from using the n-word to using the term “negro” that Civil Rights leaders used in the mid-1900’s. I only heard Granddaddy Biddle refer to black people as “nigras.”

His son, my father, broke out of that mindset somehow. My dad grew up in the Jim Crow South, in small towns in the Carolinas where my grandfather served as a Presbyterian minister and my grandmother served as a traditional minister’s wife. Needless to say, back then the schools were racially segregated and miscegenation was against the law.

But then a strange thing happened. Some Southern white people and some Southern black people—all Presbyterians—somehow got the idea of letting white teenagers and black teenagers—Presbyterian youth—spend time together in a church camp setting. One of the leaders at these interracial youth events was the Rev. Benjamin Mays, a Baptist minister who was President of Morehouse College and a mentor to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from King’s student years at Morehouse.

For the life of me I can’t imagine what possessed that group of organizers to go against their deeply-held religion—the white Presbyterians would certainly have been indoctrinated about the Bible supporting white supremacy—and to cross widely-held social and political divisions that were believed to have been divinely mandated since the beginning of time. What were they thinking, to risk putting black and white teenage girls and boys in a room together?! If they stopped being afraid of each other, they might start to love one another, and where would that lead? If they got to know each other as children of God, as sisters and brothers in Christ, that could give way to thinking of one another as fellow citizens—all equally due their civil rights.

At least one of those white youths chose to live differently than his ancestors. According to my mother, my dad’s parents always regretted sending him to those interracial events as they believed “that’s where he got off on race.” I am proud to be his daughter. But until every black youth is free to walk down the street—any street in the U.S.A.—without fear of getting shot, we have to tell the truth, the whole truth, about our country’s history, and we have to live differently.

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Read “A Prayer for My Son and Black Boys Everywhere” by Jane Steiner, posted Monday, July 15, 2013 (myextendedtable.blogspot.com).

Co-existing with fears

Co-existing with fears

I grew up unafraid of bears. Three of them lived in my bedroom closet: a mommy bear, a daddy bear, and a baby bear. Every time I went to bed I’d say good-night to them.

In kindergarten I learned the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. That is, I learned to tell my version of it. On Parents’ Day, I got to use the flannel board and felt characters to illustrate how, after Goldilocks runs off in fear, the momma bear set about making a new batch of porridge, the daddy bear replaced the chairs, and the baby bear made up the beds. The moral of my story was that it isn't finished until everything is where it’s supposed to be, like the bears in my closet.

On family camping trips and when I worked in Yellowstone National Park and Denali National Park, I learned that real bears were to be respected from a safe distance. We put our food in bear-proof containers and stored them outside our tent, we didn’t sleep in the clothes we had cooked in, and we tied bells to our packs while hiking so that bears could hear us coming and leave us alone.

I have only seen grizzly bears in their natural habitat from far, far away, which is a good thing, and to my knowledge they’ve only heard me from afar. They are near-sighted, we employees were told during our orientation, and so if you surprise a grizzly it will want to get a closer look, and then if you try to run away it will run after you, and if you do live to tell the tale it is guaranteed to have an unhappy ending. The park rangers warned us not to hike with food on us or if we were menstruating as grizzly bears have a strong sense of smell and are attracted to the scent of blood or anything edible. The moral here was let live and live.

The same goes for fears. As children we grow up with fears, and somehow we learn to cope. These child-appropriate coping mechanisms aren’t always suitable for adulthood, however.

Here are tips for co-existing with fears, based on advice about co-existing with bears issued by the State of Maryland Wildlife and Heritage Division of the Maryland Department of National Resources:

1. Do not feed fears—feeding fears may place you or your family, friends, and neighbors in danger as they lose their instinctive role and become unpredictable.

2. Don’t tempt fears by leaving or providing fuel within easy reach. Store all fuels and wastes properly.

3. Do not approach any fear in the wild. Maintain a safe distance between yourself and any wild fears to avoid threat or instigating a confrontation.

4. Be alert in areas where fears may be active, especially areas frequented by fears.

Facts about Fears:

Fears normally retreat before you even realize that they are there.

Fears are intelligent, have good long-term memory, and are capable of recalling the location of plentiful fuel sources even years later.

Moral of this story: they all lived happily ever after, with fears in proper perspective.