Field Notes from the Worm War #6 The Day the War Stopped Being Funny

Something happened that I wasn’t expecting.

Not another record-breaking worm count.

Not an escape attempt.

Not even Carol catching me in the front yard trying to eliminate what turned out to be a suspicious-looking stick.

It was one worm. 🪱

If you’ve followed these field notes, you know I’ve tried to make this whole experience funny. Worm Olympics. Underground worm meetings. Tiny motivational speeches from the worm ringleader. Humor has been my way of carrying something that, if I’m being honest, has never come naturally to me.

I don’t like hurting living things.

I was a proud, card-carrying PETA member who grew up on a bayou.

Most people assume that means I grew up fishing, hunting, and perfectly comfortable with life and death.

I wasn’t.

I was the kid hiding my cousins’ bullets before deer season.

To me, there’s a difference between taking an animal to feed your family and posing proudly with its head for a photograph, only to leave the rest of it behind to rot.

I’ve never been wired that way.

I relocate spiders instead of squishing them.

I apologize to plants when I prune them.

Years ago, I walked into a pet store in Los Angeles and saw feeder mice being sold for snakes. I bought every one of them.

Turns out mice reproduce at a pace that should probably be studied by NASA.

That’s who I am.

So when I decided to fight jumping worms, I convinced myself I could separate the mission from the emotion.

Protect the woodland.

Protect the native plants.

Protect the soil.

The objective seemed clear.

Then today I checked on the worm in Zone C.

Zone C almost never has worm activity.

Five days ago I had removed one there.

Five days later…

It moved.

Not just a twitch.

It reacted.

It tried to escape.

And suddenly everything I’d told myself became much harder to believe.

I don’t know exactly what a jumping worm experiences.

I don’t know what it feels.

Science doesn’t fully answer that question.

But I know what I felt.

I felt sick.

I realized I had spent the last year trying to save one part of nature while becoming someone I didn’t entirely recognize.

That’s a strange place to find yourself.

Because the truth hasn’t changed.

Jumping worms are destructive.

I’ve watched them strip the forest floor.

I’ve watched native plants disappear.

I’ve documented their population exploding in my own yard.

None of that changed.

What changed… was me.

For the first time since this project began, I don’t know what the right answer is.

If I stop, they continue spreading.

If I continue the way I have been, I no longer feel at peace with it.

That’s a difficult place to stand.

Maybe this isn’t the end of the Worm War.

Maybe it’s just the end of believing every battle has an obvious hero and an obvious villain.

Nature keeps teaching me the same lesson over and over.

The closer you look, the more complicated everything becomes.

So tonight I’m putting away my imaginary Olympic scoreboard.

The jokes can wait.

Maybe the greatest battle in this entire Worm War…

…was never against the worms at all.