The Ecstasy of Worms
It was a steamy morning in March, the sun inching toward the equinox and putting out enough heat to coax the winter’s waters out of the saturated soil. As I jogged through the park I noticed worms all over the asphalt pavement, hundreds of them. I had to do little shimmy steps and quick ball-changes to avoid flattening them. They seemed to be young worms, or at least small ones, only a couple of inches long and about the thickness of a round toothpick. They were emerging from the moist grass at the edges of the pathway, hoisting themselves over the asphalt lip, and taking off.
I did some mental calculations as I jogged along. If a worm is two inches long and the path is six feet wide, then the worm would have to travel thirty-six times its own length to get to the other side (six times twelve is seventy-two, divided by two is thirty-six). How far would that distance be for me? I am five feet nine, sixty-nine inches. I rounded it up to seventy to make the math easier. Thirty-six times my length would be 2,520 inches, or 210 feet, or seventy yards. To make the analogy more vivid, I imagined myself starting from the home goal post of a football field and wriggling to the opponents’ thirty-yard line without even using my hands and feet.
In fact, though, these worms were not racing hell-bent for the goal post. They were stopping at about the forty-five-yard line after their meandering journey, worming their way along to the middle of the path and then flopping over. Although I knew better, I imagined for a moment that they were sunning themselves, turning their blind faces to the ecstasy of warmth flowing over them, feeling the hot rough asphalt scratch their smooth bellies.
Why do they do it? What beguiles them to leave their moist burrows to venture out onto this hard, unfamiliar surface? Surely they would be safer at home in the dirt. I winced as I crushed a few; I tried not to, but they were so thick on the path. What is this hot seduction, luring them on at the risk of their lives?
Thanks to my high school biology class, I know perfectly well what it is: sex. Worms are hermaphroditic; their thick middles have two pores, one male and one female. Coitus consists of one worm twining around another, each releasing a sticky mucus that smears itself all over both their midsections. The sperms and eggs migrate through the mucus and somehow end up in the right places.
To make this work, the worms have to encounter one another, which isn’t easy to do in a hole in the ground only one worm wide. So they come up out of their holes, driven by the irresistible urge to procreate. But—here’s the ruthless beauty of it—worms are also photophobic; they can’t stand to be too long in the light. In the spring, when the ground fills with water, the worms, besides being horny, have to escape their burrows or they’ll drown. So they crawl up out of the ground at night en masse and twine around one another with shameless efficiency. Then they hurry back into their moist lairs, or at least the prudent ones do, the ones who, if they were human, would always carry a condom in their wallet and never lock their keys in the car. The cautious ones.
The others, blinded with lust maybe, or just more careless than the rest, find themselves still going at it as the eastern sky begins to shoot its deadly rays (Oh, no! This can’t be happening to me!). By then it’s too late, and they shrivel to death under the pitiless sun. I shudder as I imagine it. Maybe I did them a favor by stepping on them.
Of course I am anthropomorphizing. I should not assume a worm can make a prudent choice about something so urgent as sex. Who can imagine a couple of worms timing their coitus so as not to get caught out after light?
Not that humans are a whole lot better at this.
I once loved a boy desperately. He was dark-haired with a wide smile and dimples and a gap between his front teeth. He was fond of animals and children and radiated a confused goodwill. When he bathed me in that gappy smile, that unfocused warmth, it drew me irresistibly out of my dim moist solitude. I would have died to put my tongue into that sliver of dark space.
He had a girlfriend, Kristina, who admittedly outclassed me in several areas. She was older, prettier, thinner, and more experienced, and she had two adorable children. The only category in which I got a higher score was devotion. Sooner or later, I knew, he had to see the advantages of loving a nineteen-year-old slightly overweight fashion-challenged guitar-playing girl who wore thick glasses and who loved him to pieces. I was nice to Kristina; I bided my time.
This boy and I lived in the same rooming house, a rundown Seattle mansion filled with students from the university, plus a couple of others who had dropped out or washed out. The boy was one of those. I would play my guitar at night and sing “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” sending my heart out to him through the thin walls. On his good days he’d bring me cups of tea and little candies and tell me funny stories about his family. On his bad days he’d hole up in his room for a night and a day, emerging pale and silent to wash down another handful of the megavitamins with which he was desperately dosing himself.
One day he took a stroll across a bridge and ended up in the water. The rescue boat plucked him out and took him to the hospital, where he was revived. The next day I read in the newspaper that a “man”—that had never occurred to me, but he was twenty-one so I guess he was—had “plunged” from the center of the bridge. Distressed as I was, I admired the reporter’s finesse, the nice shimmy-step between the shocking intentionality of “jumped” and the pathetic carelessness of “fell.”
He called me from his hospital bed. He was feeling chipper, on top of the world in fact. I could feel his gappy smile warming me over the phone wires Oh god that feels good . . . Kristina wanted to come see him in the hospital, he explained, but she didn’t have a sitter. Would I take care of her kids for a couple of hours?
Of course. Anything.
For many years I have thought about that plunge. Renaissance poets have called sexual ecstasy “le petit mort”—the little death. What was he feeling at that moment, on the lip of the bridge? What beckoned him to the dark water below? Now, contemplating these hapless worms, I wonder if it was, perhaps, the terror of shriveling to death from love. Not Kristina’s, necessarily, and not mine, certainly, but the general intense unfocused pitiless life-force blazing through the universe—could it have been, at that moment, too much for him to bear? Did it drive him into the nearest moist burrow even at the risk of drowning?
I wish I knew what became of that boy when he grew up, if he grew up. As for me, I haven’t sizzled or drowned yet, either one. I have been stepped on more than once, at moments when I couldn’t seem to get the timing right. But I’ve survived. And still I crawl out toward the light. Because when I was young, the warmth of a gap-toothed smile was irresistible, and now I can’t go back down into the cold dark. It’s too late, and what good is a life lived down there, anyway? What’s to protect? All I can do is heave myself up over the rough edge and go for it. Even a worm knows this.
Gail Wells is a science writer and essayist living in Corvallis. Her latest book is The Little Lucky: A Family Geography (OSU Press, 2007), a memoir about a tumble-down old schoolhouse and a loving, troubled family. Her essay on nature-based spirituality appears in Cascadia, The Elusive Utopia: Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest (D. Todd, editor, Ronsdale Press, 2008). She is at work on a collection of essays about faith.
