The A Team

This morning I went outside early and found this slug checking out the compost bin. Here it is in all its glory: 7- inches long when at rest and prepared to eat anything in its path, probably including the compost bin if only it could get its teeth to penetrate plastic. The bane of northwestern gardeners, the slug comes in three main colors up here: yellow-ish (the banana slug, which is native), very black (an illegal immigrant), and the gray/darker-gray spotted slug (whose provenance is a mystery to me).

I used to plant flowers that I liked until I had a dozen dahlia seedlings consumed within the first 12 hours of their residence in my garden by the resident slug corps. That taught me a definitive lesson. You want to look at dahlias: go to the yard of someone who has the patience to deal with slugs.

But they are amazing creatures and the banana slug is the more appealing of the bunch if one can get over the destructiveness, the sliminess, and the all-over bonelessness of the critters. They do, after all, travel on highways that they make themselves as they creep by. Imagine if cars, e.g., could just lay down asphalt roadways as part of their functioning. I know, a bad idea.

In Eugene, Oregon, they have a big slug parade and festival every year with, I am told, a 40-foot plastic banana slug. They also elect a Slug Queen. Apparently, they don’t select a Slug King. Why is that?

The University of California, Santa Cruz, shares our northwestern damp and grey climate and also shares our slug population. UCSC was started back in the 70’s as a kind of post-60’s experimental university without a regular letter grading system, without sororities and fraternities, with a lot of emphasis on ecology, and without a big inter-collegiate athletic program. The school did have athletics, but it was pretty low key and most of it was intra-college. But when the school needed a mascot for a school team, the banana slug was informally selected by the students as the school's mascot. The clarion call, ‘Go you Slugs!' was exactly the kind of battle cry that marked UCSC as a 60’s kind of college.

But times changed, the greedy 80’s arrived, Santa Cruz students wanted regular grades so that they could more easily get into graduate school, and inter-collegiate athletics seemed to be a way of attracting more students and more money. The Chancellor decided that the school now needed a more dignified mascot and the team players themselves were persuaded that the UCSC Sea Lions had the right sound for winners like them. ‘Not so fast,’ said the students, who continued to yell, 'Go you Slugs!!’ at all games. Eventually, the Chancellor not only backed down but became a supporter, and the Santa Cruz Banana Slugs they officially became. And then, five years ago, a perhaps even more startling triumph for an old hippy school: The Readers’ Digest declared the Santa Cruz Banana Slug the ‘Best Team Mascot.’

The difference between the SC students’ affection for the banana slugs and my own disaffection doubtless lies in the fact that they are students and I am a gardener. Nevertheless, we both appreciate irony. I am, therefore, trying to think of the slug corps in my own yard as athletes, engaged in some sport that I do not yet entirely understand. I am afraid, however, the game is one that pits The Slugs against The Flowers. ‘Go You Flowers!’ I’ll be calling from the stands.