It was raining cats and dogs and ‘crawlers ~ May 3, 2006

David Heiller

For the first few days my eye hurt, and the vision was cloudy. It was like looking through a dirty window.

But now, wow.

It’s hard to convey what is happening.

I woke up the other morning and looked out the window and saw a squirrel on a tree branch outside the window. Without putting my glasses on. That hasn’t happened since we bought this house in 1981.

This was probably a good nightcrawler day,
but not maybe the best nightcrawler spot.

So at 6:30 a.m., when the darkness left the sky enough for me to see the ground well, I slipped on a cap and jacket and headed out. A light rain was still falling, and I knew I would get soaked, but that was just fine on a Sunday morning. No rush to get to work, no deadlines. Just a walk down the road.

And it was a good one. The driveway and township road were covered with worms. You couldn’t lay down without touching one. Not that I tried that—I don’t like them that much. But they were everywhere.

Not all the worms were full-grown, mind you. That would he asking too much. But every couple minutes, sometimes more often, I would spy a huge, healthy crawler.

Walking down the road on a Sunday morning, no traffic, serenaded by a cardinal, that’s getting close to heaven for me.

If you aren’t a fisherman, you maybe puzzled by this. What’s the big deal? Well, last summer a dozen crawlers cost $2.25, so there’s the practical side of things.

There’s another thing too though. Getting your own bait, beating the system, is fun. It adds to the adventure, and the fish seem to taste better with home-grown nightcrawlers.

Gathering nightcrawlers was a big part of my youth. We didn’t seem to get nightcrawler rains back then, at least that I was aware of. We did it the old fashioned way, with a flashlight at night in the backyards of Brownsville.

It wasn’t easy. My brother, Danny, and I would take the one flashlight that Mom owned. The batteries always seemed about half dead too. We would go into the backyard, walking as quietly as possible, then we’d carefully shine the light on the grass. The trick was to not shine the light directly on the crawler, because that would send it collapsing back into its hole. If that happened, you had to make a quick reach to get it before it disappeared. Sometimes we would get a good hold, and carefully tug it out. That took some finesse, because you didn’t want to break it or squeeze too hard and damage it.

Our yard was always pretty good pickings, but it wasn’t enough, so Danny and I would venture through the town. First we’d go to Burfields next door. We had to be careful though, because they had a houseful of fishermen too, and Billy protected his turf like a Doberman. There was a sink hole below their house where they would throw the kitchen waste, and it was full of worms and crawlers, but Billy did everything short of erecting a guard tower and 50 caliber machine gun to keep us out of that prime spot.

Everett Nelson’s garden was also a ‘crawler haven, but we had to be desperate to venture there. He seemed to have a sixth sense of when the crawlers and the little boys would be out. He always seemed to be looking out his window on the south side of the house on the best nightcrawler nights. We’d hear a yell from him and scramble off to another spot.

But there were plenty of good spots and friendly yards. Mrs. Bulman’s. The Collerans. Hansens. Bill Miller’s. Brownsville seemed to have a lot more open territory then.

One night I gathered such a windfall that I counted out 100 crawlers and took them to Serres’ Marina the next morning. Uncle Joe gave me a penny a piece for them. He sold nightcrawlers at his bait store at the marina for 25 cents a dozen, I recall. I don’t know if Joe really needed them or if he was just doing his good deed.

Last Sunday wasn’t quite that good: I picked up 80 in just under an hour. Still it was a lot of fun. Putting them to use will be even better.