- Jason waxes philosophical to Shin: "What is the source of all life? Water. Where does water come from? Water towers. What is the tallest structure in most towns? The water tower. What makes more sense—to worship a water tower or to worship an invisible, impalpable, formless entity that no one has seen since Moses?" (4.1).
- Shin's not immediately convinced (in spite of the nice use of impalpable, which swayed us).
- "'Prove me wrong,'" Jason says (4.6).
- Shin wonders if all water towers are gods then. Perhaps they are from another galaxy? He shares that he used to think the water tower was a spaceship waiting for just the right moment to beam him up and fly away.
- Next Jason gives us "Hunting the Wild Gastropod: A Primer," including steps one through five. He finds a white-lipped snail that pleases Shin, the "pod god"—Shin puts it in his collection jar, makes a note, and will later draw the snail as it was found.
- It was Jason who first got Shin started with gastropods, some two years prior. He'd commented, "wouldn't it be cool… to have a snail farm?" (4.49) and then Shin built the gastropodarium and became a snail expert.
- Back at Shin's the guys introduce the new snail to it's new home. The gastropodarium is a six-foot-long former fish aquarium, with a small pond, algae, swamp grasses, and a mossy hillside, plus other guy-stuff like an old whisky bottle and a fox skull. Home sweet home indeed.
- Shin points out that to the pods, he is God—that it's all a matter of relativity. Like Jason said earlier, "'you can't prove a negative… you can't prove that God doesn't exist, and you can't prove that the water tower isn't God'" (4.62).
- The guys return to the water tower, where Shin methodically measures aspects of the tower and uses trigonometry to determine the pertinent deets. Or, as he says, to quantify God.