Encore
Howdy. Name’s Jack Wrigley. I’m a worm rancher. Own a five-acre spread up here in Vermont and run about 700,000 head of prime crawlers.
People always ask me how I got where I am. Started out in Montana but there was too much sky for my liking. So I figured I’d head East. I wandered a bit until I pitched up in a general store here outside Middlebury.
A few old-timers were jawing about the newcomers, how they were all into compost and were writing off for mail-order worms, of all things. Frozen in a box or something, dropped off by the UPS truck.
They just shook their heads, but I thought a bit. I reckoned there just might be a living in that. You’d have some skinny digger worms for the compost people, help ‘em turn over the organics. And at the same time, you could raise some fatter ones for bait. Later, after we started operations, I found we could even sell the really chunky boys, thick as your thumb, to some foreign fellas, no questions asked.
So, I saved a few bucks from odd jobs and got some starter stock. Sort of sharecropped a patch of land too steep for one of the local farmers to plant. Read a lot and mixed in my hard-won experience with cattle until I got the hang of worm wrangling.
That was seven years ago. Now there’s five of us in the outfit and a right sizable herd of Red Rumblers and Malaysian Mulch Masters. Hard to say how many exactly since you can’t really count ‘em eenie-meenie-minee-mo like you can steers. Got to put your ear to the ground when it’s real quiet and just make your best guess.
People don’t realize, it can be hard work, especially during drives. We do that twice a year, once for branding and again to herd ‘em under the barn for winter. Branding time takes a hot needle, a calm hand, and a keen eye – and a pretty simple brand; we’re the Double Dot.
We all sit around the fire, doing our branding and castrating every last one of the little two-way buggers, singing the old songs for a couple of weeks in May. The high point is the end of the drive when we roast up a heaping cup of “Green Mountain oysters.” That’s an acquired taste.
There’s danger, too, if you can believe it. Like stampedes. Could be thunder sets ‘em off, or heavy trucks on Route 9, but they start moving and they’re hard to stop. A big run can last for a week or two.
My best friend Willis used to work with us. Liked to sleep out in the field, rough, right on the grass. Willis snored real bad and his mouth was always open. One night the whole herd got moving and broke ground next to his blanket. He was never the same after that. A relative had to come and take him home on the train.
One of the boys, Giorgio, he’s got a magic way with restless worms. He’s a big fella, used to sing with the opera in Mississippi. Bass. Played Russian kings and stuff, he tells me. He can sit in a field and belt out “This Land Is Your Land” and calm a whole herd of het-up Buffalo Squirmers. Those low notes are the only thing that’ll penetrate.
Oh, had a call once from some Hollywood people. They were doing one of those Indiana Jones movies and they wanted to audition 1,000 of my biggest worms. They had a scene where the hero (Whatsizname? The one with the hat.) Anyway, he was going to drop into a big hole up to his armpits in slippery, squirming worms, so everybody screams. Huh! Same old slimy stereotype. So, I just told ‘em “My guys don’t travel.” And that was that.
I’d invite you out to visit the spread, but I can’t tell you our exact address. We try to keep our whereabouts quiet on account of some of the wilder animal-lover groups. Those people get all riled, but they wouldn’t know which end of the worm to talk to.
So that’s how it is with worm wrangling. It’s not for everybody. You got to have a heap of patience and faith in the unseen.
You gonna finish your pizza? Look just like mushrooms when they cook up, don’t they?
Image: StockSnap at Pixabay
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