Like mavericks before them who divorced themselves from a mundane life, they equipped themselves with the tools of their trade and started out for the woods. Out there is where their treasure waited under the dirt.
The tools were simple. They found most of them lying around the yard: a wooden stob, a flat piece of iron—usually a broken piece of leaf spring from a rusted-out pulpwood truck, lard cans, and a love of autonomy. They loaded it all into the back of a pickup that blew smoke rings out the tailpipe and wheezed when it had to pull a hill. Inside the cab where the ants could get to it, they loaded several bologna sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and water wrapped in plastic milk jugs.
These were the “worm charmers.”
They rode into the woods seeking good luck, which was a place where wildfire had scorched and cleared the underbrush, allowing them to better see the ground. If they had a spark of good luck, it would come from on high as a lightning strike. To them, good luck sounded like a clap of thunder and smelled like a bouquet of chimneys.
And if they could not find such a spot, authorities sometimes accused them of taking a match and creating one, especially when a thunderstorm was not handy where the charmers could direct the blame and use as a scapegoat.
Once the spot was located—or created—they took the flat iron and pounded the stob into the ground until a few inches stuck up like a grave marker for a wiggler.
And without pomp, they dropped to their knees as if giving thanks in advance for the treasure they were about to find. Once on the ground, they took the flat iron that was a few seconds ago a hammer, and magically transform it into a fiddle bow of sorts, pulling and pushing it across the top of the stob. It looked like they were sawing a piney Stradivarius at about the same tempo of that hoedown classic, the “Arkansas Traveler.”
But the music they created sounded more like a hog grunting than it did any fiddle tune. I guess that’s why they became known as “worm grunters.” And on a still morning, especially if there was a wet fog for it to skip across like a stone across water, the reverberating sound could be heard from a quarter mile away. If local mamas hadn’t known the source, they would have gathered up their children and hurried them inside to keep the wild hogs from eating their babies.
The grunting created a vibration that wiggled itself into the ground through a partnership of muscle, iron, and wood. And like with any fiddle song’s ability to create movement on an American Legion dance floor, the ground started to move and come alive, not with buck dancers or two-steppers, but with wigglers and night crawlers.
The sight was enough to make a cynic believe in magic.
Once the worms were charmed, or if you prefer “grunted,” to the surface, the stooping, gathering, and putting the catch into lard cans began. They put 800 to 1000 worms in each can and sold them to bait houses along the rivers and lakes around my hometown, Wewahitchka, Florida.
One point of sale was a bait and tackle shop called “The Sign of The Shiner.” It was a cinderblock building on the banks of the west arm of the Dead Lakes. I worked there for Mr. Capps every Saturday for $1.25 an hour. That was big money for a 14-year-old in the 1960s.
I remember the “charmers.”
As a group, they were giddy and gritty and smelled like smut and independence—their clothes raveled and their lives revered. They wore dirt lines around their necks like a workingman’s jewelry as they delivered two or three lard cans every Saturday. Sometimes more if the river was high and the backwater fishing was good. Those conditions drew an army of anglers from Panama City in search of brim, bait, and beer.
Besides mowing grass, one of my jobs at the Shiner was taking the lard cans and dividing the contents into 50 and 100-count piles. I’d put the piles into smaller containers to be stacked and sold next to the pickled eggs and potted meat. That completed the holy trinity for anybody with a jingle in their pocket and a tingle in their eye because he or she was lucky enough to be going fishing that day.
It was like the adage about the chain gang and the rock pile—a place where you made “lit’uns out’a big’uns.” Only in this case, I made little cardboard cans of worms out of a big metal can of the same.
Mr. Capps, being a shrewd businessman and suspecting he had not cleaned out their pockets yet, would gather up a handful of chirpers from the cricket box and say to the customers, “Let’s see if the fish are biting today.”
With anglers following, he’d walk out of the pond where a contingent of bass, brim and catfish waited. Since they were veteran performers of this Disney-like show, the fish knew what to do when the crickets hit the surface. The water churned and splashed as the eddies whirled. It looked like a scene from a Tarzan movie when “Bwana” fell overboard into a churning mess of hungry piranhas.
“Yep,” said Mr. Capps. “They’re biting today.”
And the anglers would rush back inside the store and finish emptying their pockets. I think if some of them had been short on cash, they would’ve traded their shirt from another box of worms.
Though worm counting would be on a list of jobs I was qualified for, it would not be on a list of what I would call glamorous jobs. But I was content to have any work paying cash at sundown—an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, which I grew to learn was the creed of the working class.
Another thing I learned is contentment, or happiness if you want to call it that, has more to do with where your heart is than where your body, be it stooped over the ground picking up worms or stooped over a counter counting them.
Unless you are a gravedigger, you couldn’t get much lower socially than kneeling on the ground fiddling, grunting, stooping, and gathering worms. Or, in my case, counting them out into piles and making lit’un out’a big’uns.
But despite what society thought then or thinks now, I believed worm charming qualifies as a higher calling.
Modern times call it a fading past where uncommon “worm grunters” are being replaced by common “worm farmers.”
But as long as they had a thunderstorm or a match, charmers never had to chase after security, serenity, or tranquility.
Why would you chase after something you already have? Wouldn’t it make anybody happy to drive a stob in the ground, play it like a fiddle and have your livelihood levitate to the surface and dance before your eyes?
In North Florida, people can still witness worms dancing before their eyes. Every second Saturday in April, thousands of people congregate in Sopchoppy, Florida, for the annual Worm Gruntin’ Festival.
It’s a wiggler-wrangling sight to behold, where worms dance to a symphony of hog sounds.
Scientists have their ideas about why this grunting method works. One theory is the vibration mimics the sound of a worm’s #1 enemy, the mole. So, the worms come to the surface to escape what they think is the mole trying to get to them from below the dirt line.
You can believe it if they want to.
I prefer to believe it is magic.
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