Into Woods

by Bill Roorbach

  Our beeline has brought us across Harrington Bay to several hundred yards off Foster Island. Truey lifts the motor and we skim onto the mud. Again we sit and watch. You can see disturbed places in the exposed muck. “That is yesterday,” Dicky says. “That is us.” The wind is so strong I have to pull my San Francisco Giants cap down to my eyebrows, cock my head. I don’t know why San Francisco—it’s just a hat, but Dicky looks at the logo all day rather than in my eyes, asks me on the way home if it’s a Chinese character on there.

  “See them two?” Truey says. He’s pointing out men I hadn’t noticed, crouched men chopping at the mud much closer to shore. I don’t at first see their boat, and ask how they got there.

  “Canoe,” Dicky says.

  “Wouldn’t be in a canoe today,” Walter says. He hops out of the boat, overboard into the mud. From the bow he collects his sandworm hoe (what climbers might call a rake)—five claw-curved steel tines nineteen inches long, these welded onto a bar that is welded in turn onto a post that impales a wooden handle about nine inches long. The angle between handle and hoe is sharp; at work, one’s knuckles are just behind the tines. Walter has shaped his handle to fit his stiffened fingers; the carving is artful: skin-smooth, oiled, comfortable. Next he hefts his wormbox, a homemade fiberglass case like a carpenter’s box mixed with a budget cooler, fitted at top with the wooden handle from a broom. Attached to one end is a big old coffee can—a vessel for bloodworms, which sandwormers view as incidental, but which bring ten cents each—it’s not like you’re going to throw them away. He slides the box along the mud, leans forward, moves fast enough to keep from sinking beyond the point of suction. I study his style. He’s a strong old guy, moves with grace through the mud.

  “Watch him,” Truey says, “he’ll dig all around the mussel beds,” this with a mix of affectionate pride and irritation at his dad’s predictability. And sure enough, Walter is into the edges of the mussel bed, which is slowly coming exposed with the tide. He operates knee-deep in the muck, digging and stepping, moving his wormbox along beside him. Each big flip of mud seems to produce a worm. He holds them up one by one for me to see.

  “Rattlesnake,” Truey says, making fun, since Walter claims the mussel-bed worms are bigger.

  “Tinker,” Dicky says.

  “Shitdigger,” Truey taunts, and we all briefly laugh. I miss the switch back to grim, find myself laughing alone.

  Walter slogs speedily off across the mud to the next mussel bed. Dicky and Truey and I wait. We wait a little more. Truey points out the bloodwormers again. “Man in the red is the fastest wormer Downeast,” he says. “You watch him go.” It’s true, the man is chopping three strokes a second, stepping along the mud, a hundred yards ahead of his partner, hundreds of yards from his canoe.

  “That fellow lost his son this spring,” Dicky says. “Day pretty well like this.”

  We watch the man work. He does not straighten periodically as his partner does; he does not rest.

  “Six hundred pounds of wrinkles,” Truey says. “Boy and his partner. Was he twenty-one yet? Six hundred pounds of wrinkles in the bottom of their canoe. Six hundred pounds.”

  “Got turned by the wind,” Dicky says. His own son is twelve, and for now Dicky gives him half the summer off. “The boy was not a swimmer. Though his partner made it all right.”

  “They should have went to college,” Truey says. He’s eyeing me closely, this professor, right here in his worm boat. Dicky, too, more subtly.

  This is a test. I don’t give a twitch, not a smile. I say, “That’s a sad story.”

  We watch the bloodwormer, watch him digging like hell, plopping worms in his bucket, chopping the mud.

  Dicky says, “College is not for everybody.”

  “True,” I say.

  I’m off the hook.

  The wind has picked up. It’s singing in my ears, watering my eyes. I’m thinking of the boy sinking in his boots. I ask what wrinkles are, exactly. Truey sighs, twirls his finger to draw the creature in the air, makes me to understand that wrinkles are those little spiral-shelled snails, what I have always called periwinkles. He says, “The Japanese eat ’em. I wouldn’t go near ’em.” You can’t quite tell if he means the snails or the Japanese. His sons are babies, still, two and four, products of his third marriage.

  “Nor is worming,” Dicky says. Nor is it for everybody, he means.

  We watch the sky, watch the tide, sit in the boat in the wind. No warning and the guys are overboard, grabbing their worm boxes and hoes. Truey asks if I’m blooding or sanding. I say sanding—of course—and they give me a hoe and a bucket. I pull my women boots up to my thighs, tie the ties into my belt loops, and step overboard. I sink. I step. I’ve got the bucket and the hoe. I sink, step, sink, step, suckingly follow the men. Step, sink, looking for the little round holes that signal sandworm mud. When Dicky crouches to the task I watch him. Strike the tines full depth into the mud (nineteen inches!), two hands to turn the heavy gray stuff, a quick grab to pick out the worms, one or two or three to every dig in this spot. Good mud. Three or four digs, then step.

  “The trick is to keep moving,” Truey says. The two of them are off, leaving four-foot wide swaths of turned mud behind them, digging, digging, plucking worms, sliding the worm-boxes—lean forward steeply and step—dig right, dig left, dig middle, pluck worms, step.

  I use two hands, grunt and turn the mud. My back already hurts. Two worms. I tug on one where it’s escaping back into its hole in the mud and it breaks, pull on the other more carefully and it comes free—a foot long, orangey brown, cilia down its length, appearance of a flattened and softened centipede, perhaps a half-inch in diameter, diameter turning to width as the worm flattens trying to locomote out of my hand. Dicky has given me his gloves, so I’m not worried about the stingers hidden in the retracted head. I put the worm in my bucket. One. Next chop and I note the tunnels the worms leave—slightly discolored tubes in the mud. The worms can move very quickly into the un-dug, disappear. You chop and grab. You don’t wait around. Two. You step. Three. I’m doing fine, not stuck, proud of my new boots. Chop, two hands. The stuff is heavy. I’m glad I’m strong, wish I were stronger, remember how I’ve bragged to Juliet that I’m in great shape. Four, five, six.

  “Those little digs’ll hurt your back,” Truey advises, kindly. He’s ten feet ahead of me already.

  Dicky has walked to a new spot, far to my right. “Try to make it all one scoop.” He shows me—swoop, scoop—plops worms into his bucket.

  I make a big dig, do it right, turn a great chunk of mud, watch the hole grow wet, look in there for movement. I pull out an odd, long, flat worm that just keeps coming—three feet long, at a guess.

  “Tapeworm,” Truey says. He very nearly smiles, because tapeworms are ridiculous, useless.

  I dig again, showing Truey every worm I turn, trying to get the sense of an acceptable size. The worms expand in length then quickly retract, so you can’t really put it in inches. You just have to know. Truey okays a couple, shrugs at a third. The shrug is as negative as he’ll get with me. Next worm is a blood. Truey turns back to his work: the tide is only low enough for two-and-a-half or three hours of digging this far out on the flat—you can’t socialize. I examine the bloodworm, which is wholly different from a sandworm. No cilia, for one thing, and it’s all pink translucence, smaller than a sand, more substantial than an earthworm, something deeply red beneath the surface of its skin. This one is smallish, not quite six inches, with a thickening at the head end, a bit of flattening at the tail. I roll it in my fingers. Abruptly, the head shoots out, a moist pink cylinder an inch long, ugly and sudden, un-benign, bulging and unfolding till the stingers show, four grasping needles in the circle of the nasty mouth. Walter has told me that if they get you in the webs between your fingers your whole hand’ll blow right up. I haven’t been worried till now—how bad could a worm bite be? Bad, is the answer. I let the worm grasp at the air a moment, then throw it in with the sandworms in my bucket
—a mistake, as I will discover: the bloods bite the sandworms in half, making them worthless.

  Step and dig, dig and step; my legs are growing exhausted, forty feet from the boat. The digging style Truey showed me seems to be saving my back, though. Dig and step. I’ve lost count of my take, but it looks like a lot in there—a crawling, wriggling, spiraling mass, sunken in the quart of seawater I’ve added to the mix. There’s quite a bit of mud in there too. Incredibly, I don’t turn up a single clam. Incredibly, I forget about my assignment. My notebook never comes out of my pocket. I’m worming.

  The wind is getting stronger yet, and colder, takes my San Francisco Giants cap. I lunge for it, fall in the mud, get the hat, put it dripping on my head, manage to stand by leaning hard on bucket with one hand, rake with the other. I wish for the sandy flats Walter has told me he used to work with his dad, up past Portland by George Bush’s place, all along and up to Kennebunkport. You can’t get near there now.

  Step and dig. Dig and step. It’s getting harder and harder to lift my feet. I keep needing to stand straight, but it’s standing that gets you stuck. Suddenly, a mudhole boils in front of me. Before I can react, an eel pops out, leaps from his hole and into my face, struggles away, gets a few feet and pauses, gills gaping. I give a little scream of surprise.

  “Oh yes,” Truey calls. He’s farther away from me yet.

  “Mud eel,” Dicky shouts in the wind.

  The seagulls descend, laughing. The eel slithers back in my direction.

  “He’s a meal,” Truey shouts. He means the eel, for the seagulls.

  I stop and watch the spectacle, seagulls, eel, the wind, the waves away off where the mud stops, the plane of dramatic clouds, the salty and sulfuric smell of the mud, the men working methodically away from me. I’m this close to having some sort of college-professor epiphany when I realize I’ve gazed too long. I’m stuck.

  I look back at the boat—it’s far. I look at Dicky and Truman and know I’ve got to get out on my own. I hear in my head the Midcoast boys’ derisive laughter. I struggle. My mud muscles—some rare strands in the sides and tops of my thighs—are exhausted, can’t do it. I pull with my hands on the lip of my right boot, get it to move a little. I pull on my left, but my foot leaves the boot and won’t go back in. I remember Truey’s story about Crawford Peacham’s moronic son—how the dumb kid got stuck and they had to cut his boots off ’im. How the kid was covered with mud, mud in his nostrils, mud in his mouth, mud halfway up the frukkin’ wazoo. I wriggle and pull and both socks are off inside the boots and both boots are stuck and I’m not connected to them except at the calves, where I’m firmly laced. I fall over, go up to my elbows in the mud, then very slowly up to my biceps. Both arms, both legs. Soon it’ll be my face. Deadline two weeks gone. I’m sinking.

  “He’s stuck,” Truey calls.

  Dicky looks back, and just when you think the laughter should erupt the two of them are dropping their hoes and coming at me, almost racing. Truey gets there first and without a word pulls my arms out, stands me up, then puts his strong hands under my knees and yanks me free a leg at a time, oblivious of the gazes the bloodwormers downflat turn our way.

  Dicky makes a forward-leaning race to the boat, pushes it over the mud in a mighty effort, brings it right up behind me so I can sit on the port gunwale. The two of them inspect me a moment, then go back to work without a tease of any kind. I sit in the boat a long time, getting my socks back on, getting my boots readjusted, resting my thighs and my back, getting the mud off my face. The whole time I keep my eye on a certain small hummock of mussels, watch it closely the way as a stock boy I used to watch the clock at the A&P, watch relieved as the hummock sinks in the returning tide.

  “Did he quit?” Truey shouts over the wind.

  “I think he quit,” Dicky calls back. There’s no doubt I better go back to work. I climb out of the boat, dig my way close around it in a big rectangle, afraid to move far from the safety of its gunwales. I chop and step and pluck and pull. It’s like digging nickels out of the fetid mud, pennies. It’s like freelance writing. Forget it.

  Near Ellsworth, back in April, back when the deadline for my article was still months off, back before I’d found Truey and Walter and Dicky by telephone, back when I didn’t know how many television stations and local papers and even Yankee Magazine had done stories on worming using the same Midcoast boys repeatedly, back when my ridiculous plan was to go out on the flats alone, hoping to meet fellow wormers, back then I drove down to a town near Ellsworth that I shall, with no great prejudice, call Wormville, drove all morning to pop into the Town Hall in this little coastal town—Town Hall being a well-kept colonial-era house—popped in, all fake confidence, all grins and swagger, to ask about a worming license.

  ’Who’re you digging for?” the Wormville Town Clerk said, all smiles herself.

  I faltered a little at the unexpected question, said, “Just digging?”

  Now the Town Clerk was all frowns. She listened to my convoluted explanation of mission skeptically (UMF professor, writing about working men in Maine, meet the real guys out on the flats), but in the end she had to hand me a license application—all Maine residents are eligible—one form for all of the many Maine-coast commercial fisheries.

  Later, over a lobster lunch at Ruth and Wimpy’s incredible Lobster Shack, I would check off the box for marine worm digging, add my birthdate, height and weight. Later still I’d cheerfully write a check for $43.00, cheerful because Harper’s would pay (and pay for my worm rake, and various horrid motels, and maybe a dozen lobsters at Ruth and Wimpy’s, at least that, even if the story got killed), cheerfully mail the whole thing off to the department of Marine Resources in Augusta, which (as I would note with my newly acquired wormdigger’s churlishness) isn’t even on the coast. But right now, having provided me with all I needed to get started, the good Town Clerk of Wormville walked me to the Town Hall door and pointed across the street to one of the few other commercial buildings in town, a modern, one-story affair with a pair of handsomely carved-and-painted wood signs: the first, Gulf of Maine Bait Company; the second, Gulf of Maine Wreath Company. She said, “Before you go drowning yourself on the flats you’ll want to talk to Nelson Forrest,” and was rid of me.

  I walked over and was intercepted in the parking lot by Nelson Forrest himself, energetically on his way somewhere else. I rather nervously explained what I was after, using the whole professor bit, interested in the work, etc., still saying nothing about Harper’s, or any national article. But here, finally, after two weeks of fruitless phone calls looking for sources, looking for reporterly access to the world of worming, I had someone live to talk to. Mr. Forrest seemed preoccupied, even a little annoyed, but once he got me in his office—thin paneling, tidy old desk, real oil paintings (appealingly amateur), smell of the sea, a phone, a fax—he leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, became voluble, answering questions I hadn’t asked: “State law says the worms must be dug by hand.” He’s well tanned and much creased, his eyes blue as the sky over Cadillac Mountain on Mt. Desert Island (pronounced dessert as in deserter), which is due south, just across Frenchman Bay. To folks in Wiscasset, Wormville is Downeast. To folks Downeast, Wormville is Midcoast. Wiscasset might as well be Massachusetts.

  Mr. Forrest stares intently at me, talks rapidly, explains the business, answering his own questions: “We pay ten cents a worm for bloods. Six cents for sands. Up in Wiscasset they’re paying twelve cents, but they have less shipping cost.” The diggers, whom Forrest carefully calls independent contractors, bring the worms to one of ten or fifteen dealers—places like Gulf of Maine Bait—for counting, starting about an hour after low water (“They’ll stagger in for hours after that,” he says, then corrects himself: “Well not stagger, exactly”). On vinyl-covered tables the men (and a few women) count bloods rapidly into wooden trays of 250, then fill out a card:

  250 BLOOD WORMS

  dug and counted by:

  _____________________
______

  Forrest also deals sandworms, but far fewer: “I hate sandworms; they’re so frigging fragile. They’ll die if you look at ’em.” He transfers the worms to newspaper-and-seaweed-lined cardboard flats, where they rest in the walk-in cooler to wait for the worm van, a service provided by several independent shippers (Great Northern Seafood, for one example: “Worm Transit, Maine to Maryland”). Nelson’s worms—3,000 to 15,000 a day—are driven to Logan airport, and from there flown to points south (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina), west (California, especially Sacramento) and east (Mediterranean France, Spain, and Italy). “It’s a unique business. You tell people you sell worms ... they look at you.” The wholesale buyers are either distributors who service bait shops or the captains of fishing charters. The final price out there in the world—some guy fishing for sea bass or spot or weakfish or flounder—is in the range of three to four dollars a dozen. Mr. Forrest nods proudly: “They do catch fish. See, they’re two-thirds blood. Maybe it’s the scent, we don’t know.” His competition, in his estimation, isn’t other worm dealers, really, but twenty-four other ocean baits including eels, sea clams, herring, and squid. Of these, squid is probably the most effective, and, unlike worms, can be frozen for shipment, then frozen again by the fisherman after partial use. “Worms aren’t the distributors’ favorite,” Mr. Forrest says, “they die, they’re expensive ... but they need ’em.”

  Terrible years, good years, the business seems to go on, though not like the old days. Nelson Forrest, who has never dug worms himself, wriggled into worming back in 1972—boom times. He shakes his head about the terrible years of the late eighties—tiny worms, and not many—won’t venture a theory as to where the big ones went, though (like every cycle in business and nature), the sea-worm cycle does have its theorists. Pollution plays a role in many of these visions, overharvesting in others. Global warming gets a nod, and one strident wormer I talked to up near Wiscasset invoked Chernobyl (but oddly not the defunct Yankee nuclear facility, which is right in Wiscasset’s backyard). Some don’t see doom, particularly, just the well-known fact that sea worms are unpredictable. Some years there are plenty of big ones, the kind the fishermen like, some years there just ain’t. Nelson Forrest would like to see some conservation—maybe close the mud in winter, maybe think more about size limits. “It’s a constant battle to keep the guys out of the little ones ... and we don’t buy on Sundays.” He pauses, considers. “Though that’s no conservation measure; the guys just refrigerate Sunday worms, bring ’em in Monday.” Then he shakes his head, lights the fifth cigarette of our conversation. “When I started, I worried I’d be out of worms in ten years.” He looks at me carefully, to see that I’m not missing the point, shakes his head again: “But we’re running out of fish first. The fish are gone. Pollution, commercial overfishing, this frigging economy—they do destroy sportfishing.” And where sportfishing goes, the wormers will go.