You might be the only guy, but I used to be terrified of worms. Terrified. Up until I was probably six I used to have my father carry me into the house if it had rained excessively and there were worms everywhere. The only time I’ve ever touched one was when we had to dissect them in biology.
(Spiders, on the other hand, don’t bother me at all. I like spiders. I’m actually like Eve and the others are with worms with spiders…whenever they’re indoors and in eminent danger of being squashed I pick them up and take them outside. But worms…shudder).
I was very afraid of worms as a small child, so my mom sat me down and explained how the worms helped make the dirt nice so that the grass would grow and the flowers would grow … and all that good stuff. So I became a worm enthusiast.
Of course, I noticed that the worms came up out of the ground when it rained. Why, I wondered, did they do that. I puzzled over this for many days. The little scientist in me needed to understand this fascinating ascpect of worm behavior. Finally the answer came to me in a flash! The worms came up out of the ground when it rained because they like the water!!
Now, here was a way that I could do my part for the worms. I could help them to get to the water. For the summer of my sixth (I think) year, every time it rained I dutifully went all around the block picking up the worms (with a stick - I wasn’t going overboard here) and carefully helping them into the puddles so they could go swimming.
My mom finally caught on and explained the worm genocide, and I switched tactics. Soon I enlisted my sister, who would touch them with her fingers (!), and we carefully put the worms into the garden. All the worms we could catch, into our garden.
Now I live in Seattle, and I don’t see as many worms on the sidewalk. Once, though, I had a giant bananna slug on my driveway. And I didn’t put salt on it.
I don’t feel too bad for the worms only because as a child, my mother told me that if they stay in the ground when it rains, they’ll drown, but if they come up, they either get stepped on, eaten, or they dry out. So it seems that when it rains, the worms are pretty much screwed anyway.
Unlike Eve’s sort of New Testament, “let no sparrow fall” approach, my take on insects is more that of an unpredictable Greek Pantheon. The bugs can never be quite sure if they’re going to receive mercy or a terrible undeserved fate. In the past week, I’ve rescued dozens of moths from inside my screened gazebo (although nursing a private conviction that they were about to become bat chow) and also whacked a giant carpenter ant near my garage for no other reason than he was less a carpenter ant and more the entire New Yankee Workshop and was therefore skeeving me out.
This mercurial attitude extends towards rodents as well – I’ll use a live trap to catch them, if practical, and occasionally rescue them from the cat, but let the little bastards start scampering around the attic when I’m trying to sleep and the gloves come off.