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September/October 1998 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor's Notebook Feature: Worm-picking Our home and native tongue À la carte

We're warm and windless in the cab of the truck and the pickers are bobbing points of yellow light, off in the middle distance. Nick is explaining how his people are sometimes menaced by coyotes, about the drunk drivers he sees weaving down country roads at closing time, about the men who attacked his truck with beer bottles and baseball bats on a farm north of Pickering. He did what he had to do that night, he says. One man's hand was injured in the melee, but all criminal charges were subsequently dropped.

As we chat, three other unmarked trucks come plodding and bouncing up the farm path like a family of elephants — Vietnamese freelancers looking for a worm-filled field to mine. Seeing us, they stop, back up, turn around, and lumber off for greener pastures in a shadowy ballet that is repeated across the province every rainy spring and summer night.

Some Ontario farmers lease their land by the season for picking. Other territories are simply invaded. In St. Catharines in 1986, a provincial court judge dismissed a charge of careless discharge of a firearm against a fruit grower who aimed two shotgun blasts over the heads of his uninvited guests. A few years later, another farmer complained that police would charge worm pickers with trespassing — a minor infraction punishable by a fine of $55 these days — rather than theft. But the demand in the U.S. is so insatiable, and the supply in Ontario so inexhaustible, that the field work goes on.

"One time, this big Ukrainian guy comes to me," Nick says. "He says, 'I am strong worker. I want to pick worms.' I take him out. I go away and check some other fields. When I come back, he's sitting in Coffee Time, eating a donut, with his cans still on his legs. He picked 20 worms and quit."

Not everyone who masters the craft is interested in bragging about it, says John. "A lot of people have gone through this job. They become doctors, lawyers. Some well-off people are ashamed to admit it."

I ask Nick if the business has made his father wealthy. "If my dad was rich,"Nick Alafogiannis asks, "would he do this?"

"Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first suppose," wrote Charles Darwin (in 1881) in his final published work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms with Observations of their Habits. "When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly levelled by worms."

Darwin went on to discuss the worms' strength ("great muscular power for their size"), hearing ("they are completely deaf"), vision ("they cannot be said to see") and skill at plugging their burrows with bits of leaves when threatened ("they act in nearly the same manner as would a man").

More than a century later, Dr. Alan Tomlin of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada treads in Darwin's deep, deep footsteps. Tomlin, one of two research scientists actively studying Lumbricus terrestris and the industry it unwittingly sustains, estimates that the collective biomass of earthworms in southern Ontario is double or triple that of the human population, and guesses that the total value of worms exported annually is in the $50-million range. The pickers themselves, Tomlin says, may take home a third of that amount, in cash.

Tomlin says that a mid—sized company might send 50 million worms across the border in a single year. If the pickers receive $20 per thousand, and the worms retail for $2 (U.S.) per dozen in Ohio or the Carolinas, that leaves a lot of room for profit in between. But prices fluctuate so drastically with the weather, the worms are so perishable when crated, and the flow of paper is so incomplete, actual figures are as elusive as a worm on a dry, cold night.

"This is a business run for decades off immigrants' backs," Tomlin tells me in his office in London, Ont. "Because it's done at night, it's very difficult for Revenue Canada to get a handle on it."

Tomlin encourages Ontario farmers to lease at least a portion of their lands to worm pickers each summer as a source of added income and a vaccine against trespassing disputes. There is no danger of denuding the soil of its denizens. Even if the pickers took a billion worms each season, he says, that would leave 99.9 percent of the creatures undisturbed and underfoot.

"Do you think the worms feel any pain when they are hooked?" I ask the scientist.

"Humans are very arrogant about what feels pain and what doesn't," he replies. "But the worms don't seem very happy."

"They owe it all to me," Robert Drouin says. "I'm the guy who started it."

The gentleman making this declaration is an 82—year—old Québécois who came out of the asbestos mines with tuberculosis in 1939. Released six years later from a sanatorium in Hamilton, Ont., after treatment for his blackened lungs, Drouin continually flunked the chest X—rays that were requisite for a factory job. One night, noticing his lawn overrun with delectable wrigglers, he gathered them and brought them to the owner of a bait shop who asked for more, more, more.

By 1953, Drouin and two Toronto brothers joined forces to systematize picking and transportation. The ex—miner introduced battery—powered headlamps to replace the bulky coal—oil lanterns that had left pluckers with blackened faces and only one hand free. He has little time for complaints about the punishing lot of the poor field hands.

"When I was in the asbestos mines with my dad," he remembers, "we had to drill and blast the rock by hand with an air drill, then muck it out and shovel it by hand into a little trolley on a track. Picking worms, you only have these little worms to pick up. What would you rather do — that, or shovel 52,000 pounds of rock in an eight—hour shift?"

In the cluttered office of his home in Etobicoke, Drouin shows me clippings from the old Toronto Telegram — "Worm—Picking Industry Gives $500,000 Twist To Night Life On Links" — and a small notebook that records how many worms he, his wife, and their line of pickers gathered, night by night, in 1952. It is Drouin who attributes the world record of 22,500 in one session to a man he knew as "Ken J." around 1972.

The pioneer no longer works the fields, but he keeps his hand in the business by operating a trans—Atlantic export trade, shipping worms by the boxful to Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Holland.

Out in his garage, he is experimenting with soil mixtures, trying to find a way to render the worms even healthier and juicier as they await transport, sale and inevitable death in the maw of some perch or pickerel. But the thought of impaling his beauties on a fishing hook gives him the chills.

"I guess it's old age that causes that," Drouin says. "I know it hurts them. I really do.

"I go in the garage and I pick them up and they are so fat and beautiful. I tell them, 'No way you're going to the fish.' And I throw them back in the garden."

Allen Abel is an author and broadcaster based in Toronto.
Peter Sibbald is a photographer based near Toronto.

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