As wildlife encounters go, this one was about as exciting as one might expect of snails. In the time I watched, the most ambitious snail of the group (do we call them a herd? An ooze? A drool? An escargatoire, as one source claims?) traveled 5 to 6 inches. Most never moved. But I will not pass judgement and certainly won’t call them sluggards (being essentially a snail without a shell, the slug must surely be on the bottom rung of mollusk society). Nor will I assume the faster ones are gadabouts, creating bedlam in an otherwise well-ordered society. Maybe they just had more to do.

Looking back on the day, I realize it was the relative inactivity of the snail community that made it remarkable. Hoping to find meaning in even their smallest movements, I shrank my perception to see this world from a snail’s eye-view. In the blink of my imagination, I found myself in a wondrous land that could have been painted by  Maxfield Parrish (Google “Canyon, Mountains, Blue Stream”). I gazed, with a snail’s awe, across an irregular rocky plain—a sub-aquatic moonscape, which I have lumbered across countless times in the past, with all the care of a one-eyed giant. It is a dramatic landscape of towering cliffs with jagged edges and vertical scarps, chiseled from bare rock. Some of the aquatic mountains are separated by rocky plains; others by dark and menacing ravines.

Plants live here too. The fuzzy chara plants and a clump of red Ludwigia I once kicked from my shoe were now monstrous outgrowths that any adventurous snail—maybe one of this community’s beloved gadabouts—could make a career of exploring.

As I scanned this world I have so often Gullivered over, I was consumed by the notion that this is the only world these snails will ever know. Judging from the layers of crushed white shells over which the valley snails crawled, it was clear they had inherited this realm from countless generations of fore-snails who, themselves, might have known no other place.

Exactly when these snails arrived in the Ichetucknee is uncertain. What is known, however, is that they were instrumental in making the river ecology we know today. Their continual feeding of algae from the surface of submerged vegetation and other submerged objects has kept the growth of algae in balance. But now, with increasing volume of algae caused by excessive pollution of nitrates and other nutrients, the snails are having trouble keeping pace. To compound this problem, the population has declined by nearly 70 percent since the 1970s, according to Dr. Mathew Cohen at the University of Florida.  In some parts of the upper river, including at the vents of several of the river’s largest feeder springs, the snails are gone.

A study by the Howard T. Odum Florida Springs Institute in the summer of 2015 determined the average density of Elimia snails in the river to be 485 snails per square meter. That puts the estimated population of these little snails at nearly 33 million. Their combined weight would be around 9.9 metric tons.

When I meld these numbers with Dr. Cohen’s comment that today’s Elimia population is only about 30% of what lived here half century ago, I am reminded that change is the only constant in any river; that this is not the Ichetucknee my parents knew; that that Ichetucknee was a far cry from the one in which Chief Lucas of San Martin swam; and that one was different, still, from the one that cooled the throats of Hernando de Soto’s marauders.
 
With my knees beginning to ache, I stood. But, with the snail’s eye view still fresh in my mind, I could see myself from the snail’s perspective, rising like Godzilla over the mountains. Again the river guide—a self-aware, giant river guide—I looked around and took in the broader view of the liquid kingdom stretched out before me. I was humbled. How could I ever want more from my own vast world? I turned my gaze to the riverbed upstream and downstream of the little community at my feet, that now felt strangely familiar. Twenty yards away, through the clear water, I could see other submerged realms, other plateaus, other cliffs and other ravines. I could see other glistening white valleys bedded with the ancestors of those valley’s snails. Those were wondrous realms the snails in the little community at my feet would never see.

As I turned and headed up the grassy slope toward the dry upland and my home beyond, I was aware that I was entering yet another a world the little Elimia snails would never know and could never conceive. Nothing about this world could fit into their reality. How do I rate? How could I wish for anything more, when most of the snails I just left will be dead by the next spring of my life. A hundred generations of these snail’s descendants will live and die—many of them in this same rocky plateau—by the time my own days end. How do I rate?

Making my way up the trail, I passed through a broad tongue of shade cast from my right. I looked up to see I was in the shadow of an old friend, a towering bald cypress whose branches I’ve scanned many times, watching the comings and goings of crows and red-shouldered hawks and the robins and waxwings of winter and chasing squirrels. This tree’s knees and my own have met many times, causing at least one of us considerable pain.

As I stared up into the expansive canopy, I contemplated its ancient age. I wondered how many generations of people have passed through this shade over the centuries and how many more will come. How many of my own descendants will knock their knees on its? I wondered what worlds this mother of the forest will gaze upon that I can never conceive. I have nothing on those snails.