Story and photography by Alison Emblidge Fromme '04
"I can't let you into the country with those." The man at the U.S. Department of Agriculture checkpoint at the Los Angeles airport was talking about the freshwater snails-the all-important subjects of my master's thesis research-that I was importing from New Zealand.
I smiled confidently and handed over a letter from the USDA stating that I didn't need a permit. I also produced documents from the Centers for Disease Control certifying their harmlessness to human health.
He was not impressed, and my heart began to sink. He didn't care that I had faxed my paperwork to them ahead of time or that I had spent countless hours over the previous weeks driving all over New Zealand and Australia collecting these snails. And he certainly wasn't concerned that Prof. Mark Dybdahl, my advisor at Washington State University, would not be happy if I returned to the Palouse without our precious cargo.
I was not exactly an inconspicuous traveler. I lugged around a 55-pound portable freezer in a three-foot-tall, bright blue box. A little less obvious was my small soft cooler-the kind you might fill with sodas to take to the park-that held cold packs and a box full of snails wrapped neatly in paper towels. I didn't expect anyone to understand why I cared so much about getting my 8,000 or so snails into the country, but I had hoped that my paperwork would hold some weight.
Continued 
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