Stepping Lightly

It's not a good day for a run, but in my desperate attempt to fight off the holiday 5 (pounds), I force my way out the door and down the hill. It rained all last night but the skies are partly cloudy, alternating between big black clouds ready to explode and bright blue holes promising sunshine and warmth. It's a crap shoot.

As children we are told not to go swimming for an hour after we eat. Well I'd like to add to that axiom, no running until at least an hour after the Venti from Starbucks. I'm not sure what throwing up coffee looks like and I do my best to keep it that way. As I slosh along the dirt part of the bike trail that snakes the Yorba Linda river I glance down and see bumps on the sandy gravel. I stop, gladly, and take a closer look at the creatures that have made there way out of the earth during the heavy rains. There are thousands of tiny snails that are carrying what look like tiny sea shells on their backs. They are very small and cute and slithering all over the tails I am running on. Dam, I wonder how many I've stepped on. I touch one gently just to see him (her?) slide back into their shell.

As I proceed on my pathetic run, I stay to the left of the trail, the snails seem to be staying to to the right (clearly they are not British) and I gingerly hop about doing my best not to kill a momma or poppa snail. I am reminded of a science fiction movie I saw a while back where a company has developed a time machine and they send hunters back in time to shoot dinosaurs. In order to not change history or evolutionary development they only shoot dinosaurs that are trapped in tar pits and just about ready to die, and they have to stay on a special path so they don't touch any plant or animal. Of course one of them unknowingly steps on a butterfly, and the path of evolution is dramatically changed (the butterfly effect).

Why does that only apply to life on earth millions of years ago? What if by stepping on one snail now I am wiping out the future overlords of our planet millions of years from now. After humankind dissolves it could have been the dawn of the age of snails. Big six foot snails that keep the few remaining humans as pets. "Look they are soft all over, Ha, Ha, Ha". Stairs will no longer exists, every store will have ramps and very slippery floors, salt is a chemical weapon. A whole new class structure will exists determined by shell markings and the twist direction of the shells.

As snails have evolved their shells have twisted more and more. The snails with more twisty shells will colonize the forests were the "non-twisties" are hopelessly in need of snails capable of oppression. The direction of a snails twists can be either left or right, but within a species the direction is always the same. To put it mildly, the male and female "gear" of the left twisting snails do not match up with the opposite twisting gear of the right twisters. Lefts can only hook up with lefts and rights can only smooch on rights. Of course should they figure out some way they could, they will pass laws to make sure that the lefts and the rights can not marry. Somehow knowing all this, I still can not get myself to step on any of them, I have doomed the plant.