They seem suicidal during rainstorms. They’re frequently bisected in field and garden. They feed and yet they become food. Such is the life of earth-dwellers we greet anew in this season of soil’s awakening.
In the root zone earthworms wriggle, single-neuron brains firing as they munch residue, shimmy through self-made holes and busy themselves making little worms. It’s a dirty job, as they say, but the humble worm rightly manages to generate respect.
“Almost alone amongst his brethren, he does not inspire horror,” writes William Bryant Logan in his book Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. “In fact, the earthworm is almost alone among the invertebrates in the tenderness he inspires.”
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Most people with farmers’ souls can explain – some even with tenderness – the importance of worms to soil health and tilth. And they can do so regardless of whether the listener is enamoured with the subject. But if one ever needed a story proving the hardiness and tenacity of worms, it was evident in a news story earlier this month.
The Associated Press reported that hundreds of worms from a science experiment aboard the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia were found alive in the wreckage. The lowly worms had rocketed into space, lunched repeatedly on moss samples, and survived the tragic crash when other, far more sophisticated species did not.
“The C. elegans (not an earthworm species, but an example nonetheless) are primitive organisms that share many biological characteristics of humans,” AP reported. “The worms, which have a life cycle of between seven and 10 days, were four or five generations removed from the original worms placed on Columbia….”
Farmers and other soil specialists are not the only worm fans, nor has man’s relationship to them gone unnoticed in history.
“We are all worms. But I believe I am a glow-worm,” said Winston Churchill.
His counterpart in that era, Franklin D. Roosevelt, also had cause to ponder the worm: “I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird, and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.” Perhaps he was a late sleeper?
My own opinion, as an admirer of earthworms and their unseen yet magical touch, is more in tune with author William Cowper:
“I would not enter on my list of friends,
(Though graced with polish’d manners
and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.”
