The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When we were kids, my brother and I noticed the little grocery across the bridge leading up the hogsback past the Pelican River in Northern Wisconsin sold bait. We asked the owner if he would buy worms from us and he said, yah sure, u betcha. Even provided us with the cardboard containers we’d put 50 red worms in with some mulch. So, being good little entrepreneurs, we went to work down in the ravine below our house digging up thousands of the wrigglers and selling them to the store where we noticed they also sold nightcrawlers which sold for a lot more than the regular worms.

Nightcrawlers, for you folks who never explored your backyard grass in the middle of the night with a flashlight, are giant worms that sneak out of their burrows after dark to mate. They especially like rainy nights. We’d wander around the yard with a flashlight and see their long shiny bodies stretched out of their holes, but as soon as the light hit them, zoom, they shot back underground. You had to be quick, no hesitation, and accurate. Get a grip and pull real slow so you didn’t rip them in half. Half nightcrawlers weren’t saleable. The big ones brought a nice profit.

True kid capitalists migtht’ve franchised the operation, recruited other kids to dig and hunt, monopolize the worm market from Wisconsin to Texas, expanded into grasshoppers and eels, sequenced worm DNA, built huge bio-tech labs with 3-D printers, added bio-luminescence as fish attractors, controlled the bait shops across America and organized ‘protection’ to keep rogue worm dealers from incursions into our empire.

But … we didn’t. Too busy, I guess, being kids, discovering girls, drinking and rock and roll. Story of my life. Opportunity, like the Bard said, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Well, we missed our chance. Worm Kings, could’ve been us.

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