Book Tour/Events

For technical reasons too tiresome to go into, I still have not figured out how to blog from the road. I swear I’ll get this working before the next trip, but meanwhile, here are my belated blog entries from the last several days, all originally written the old-fashioned way with pen and paper, usually while I was sitting in a café or in my lonely old hotel room.

3/25/2004 12:14 p.m. LAX
The worms and I landed without a hitch. I have a magnificent nightcrawler with me—as long as my hand without even stretching out, and male sexual pores so large I don’t need a magnifying lens to see them (from an earthworm’s perspective, I guess you could say this is a well-hung worm), along with a lesser specimen as a back-up and several red wigglers. They seem perfectly content stashed in a Rubbermaid container in my carry-on, and we made it through security with no problems.

My publicist set up a radio interview for me this afternoon at 4:30, but yesterday she told me I should just call the woman (Nancy) as soon as I landed to see if we could do it earlier. Fine with me; I’m giving a talk across town at 7:00 tonight so that gives me a little more breathing room in my schedule.

I’m supposed to have my newly-purchased and much-hated cell phone with me, but I don’t. That, too, is a long story with many tiresome technical details, but the short version is that I won’t be reunited with the phone until later tonight. So I call Nancy from a payphone at the airport. She’s not there. I leave a message and explain that I don’t have my cell so she can’t call me back. I head to North Hollywood to check into my hotel.

2:10 Beverly Garland Holiday Inn
This place is named after a mostly forgotten film star from the old days. The hotel is crumbling badly, and there are signs everywhere boasting about an upcoming face lift. I don’t know if Beverly Garland herself has had a face lift, but the analogy is apt, and I wonder if a nip and a tuck could really restore some glamour to this place. I’m staying here because my brother’s getting married this weekend. This is the wedding hotel.

At the front desk, they tell me that they can only give me the wedding rate until Saturday night. On Sunday, I’ll have to check out and check back in so they can charge me more. But I get to stay in the same room, the front desk clerk tells me with a smile.

They also charge $9 a day to park my car here. I don’t tell them about the worms—who knows how much more they’d tack on to the bill if they knew I’d have a half-dozen annelids sharing the room with me.

I call Nancy from the room and leave another message. She calls back a few minutes later. It’s a shame I didn’t have my cell, she tells me. Now I’ll have to drive all the way back to meet her.

It’s OK, I say. I’m in LA. I’m prepared to do some driving.

3:14 Culver Palms United Methodist Church
I meet Nancy in the parking lot. We’re going to use one of the church’s meeting rooms to tape the interview. She’s got all her equipment with her: just a tape recorder and a single microphone, which she will pass back and forth between us during the interview. She still edits the old-fashioned way, she tells me. She transfers the cassette recording to reel-to-reel and sits in front of the TV, cutting the tape with a razor blade and splicing the interview together. She says she knows it would be faster to do it on the computer, but she hasn’t gotten around to setting that up.

Knowing that, I try to do the interview straight through with very little fumbling around or starting over. She asks why I wrote a book about worms, what surprised me most in my research, what’s going on with the earthworms in the Minnesota forests—questions I’d been asked before, questions I knew how to answer. I’ve done a lot of phone interviews lately, so it was nice to do one face-to-face. It’s a more lively exchange when I can look into someone’s eyes and see their reaction to what I’m saying.

Nancy wanted to meet the worms, so I pulled out a nightcrawler and set it on her palm. She said she’d like to put me and the worms on her TV show sometime, too. The problem is, she has to raise the money to distribute each episode once it’s taped. Do I have any ideas about how we could raise some funds for an episode on me and my worms? she asks. I tell her I’ll think about it. I put the worm back in the dirt, we wash our hands, and the worms and I head into late afternoon traffic for my next event in Pasadena.

(tune in tomorrow…)

Check out this crowd of earthworm enthusiasts at Miller Farms Nursery this morning. I am simply astonished that 60 people would show up on a chilly February morning to hear about worms.

In fact, there were so many people registered for the workshop that I realized I might not have enough books. Miller Farms had a few on hand, and the bookstores in town all had two or three copies, but I thought that wouldn’t be enough. This is one of those things that authors worry about—you put so much energy into making an event happen, and a big group shows up, ready to buy books, and there aren’t any books to buy. The moment is lost.

So I called my publisher and bought a couple more boxes of books from them, as long as they could ship them quickly and get them here by Friday. This proved to be a somewhat complicated transaction because I was on the road at the time and never could remember to call them before their East Coast office shut down for the day. We managed to make the arrangements by voice mail, but by yesterday evening, the books weren’t here, and I had just resigned myself to this unexpected book shortage.

Then, when I arrived at Miller Farms this morning, there was a message waiting for me from my husband. UPS had just delivered the books. I didn’t even know they delivered on Saturdays. “Get a cab,” I told Scott (we only have one car), “and bring them down here.”
The workshop itself was great fun. I love talking to a big audience because there’s so much laughter and excitement in the air. After a while, I just start taking questions, and the audience usually covers all the main points I had planned to—what do worms eat (fruits, veggies, paper, no meat, no dairy, no fat), where should the bin go (outside, sheltered from rain and sun), what about fruit flies (keep a layer of shredded paper on top to keep them out), etc. etc. The nursery sold about a dozen Can-O-Worm bins and coupons for mail-order worms from Happy D Ranch. (It is surprisingly difficult to find a good supplier of worms here in Humboldt County…makes me wonder if I should have gone into worm farming on a larger scale after all and supplied them myself. But Happy D does a great job of shipping worms through the mail.)

As it turned out, we didn’t need all the books I’d ordered, but we did sell quite a few and I was glad to have them anyway. I know I’ll want an extra box to take on the road with me when the book tour begins, just in case there’s another unexpectedly large, boisterous, worm-friendly crowd out there.

Drove down to Avenue of the Giants today to give a talk about worms to the 4-H club. I just love 4-H kids. They’re so…I don’t know…down-to-earth. Fun and unspoiled and kid-like. They all enter projects in the county fair and raise chickens and plant gardens. They’re easy to talk to. They don’t babble on incessantly about some video game I’ve never heard of.

And they are fascinated by earthworms.

We met at a farm owned by one of the parents. They’ve built a worm bin against the inside wall of their greenhouse—it is about 3 feet wide, 2 feet tall, and it runs the length of two sides of the greenhouse so it forms an L shape. The walls are cinderblock and the lid is nothing more than a series of metal panels that allow you to open just one section at a time. The worms start out at one end of the L and, as food is added, they work their way to the other end. In the spring, the family pulls out the castings that they’ve left behind and, with all the worms now concentrated in the other end of the L, they add food again and get the worms moving back to where they started. It’s a constant cycle, back and forth, with the worms following the food and the castings getting pulled out behind them.

The kids were eager to hold the worms, asked all the right questions (what happens when you cut them in half? How long do they live? What do they eat?) and when I told them what an earthworm cocoon looked like, they spent ten minutes digging through the castings, hunting for one.

In this picture, I’m leaning on a worm bin called a Wriggly Wranch. This one does not have any worms in it—it’s a demonstration model I use when I go talk to people about worms. We were all standing around eating oranges, and when we finished, we threw the peels to the worms and the kids stood looking in the bin, as if they expected the worms to leap up and take the peels in their mouths and dive down with them.

Well, I survived my talk to 80 sixth-graders today. I wasn’t really afraid of the kids. Mostly I was just freaked out about being back in the sixth grade, as if walking into a middle school would somehow get me sucked back in time and I’d have to relive the whole thing all over again. Schools have that effect on me, and that’s not to say I hated school—I was a good student. It’s just that I like being a grown-up so much more than I liked being a kid. After I’ve been in a school, I always take new and unexpected pleasure in such mundane adult privileges as being able to drive, or eating whatever I want for lunch.

(I could not resist taking a picture of the sign—it’s a little Spinal Tap, isn’t it? Remember the scene where they show up for a gig and it turns out to be a puppet show?)

Anyway, they were a surprisingly orderly group, I thought, and much more knowledgeable about worms than I’d expected. One kid knew that they had tiny bristles—setae—that help them anchor their bodies in the soil, one knew that worms are both male and female, and, because there was a little confusion about the difference between a worm and a snake, I asked them to explain the differences and it turns out they knew quite a bit about snakes, too.

It was mostly boys who spoke up at first. I guess some things never change. But once I asked why the girls didn’t know anything about worms, they all started to raise their hands and I ignored the boys and called on them. One little blonde girl said that worms were disgusting and she didn’t want anything to do with them. But when I got them out—I’d brought one nightcrawler and four red wigglers—and asked for volunteers to hold them, she actually came up to me and put her hand out. In fact, by the time the worms had made their way around the library and it was time to return them to me, they were all in the hands of girls.

One kid asked if he could have a worm. It’s so funny, the way kids think that adults will just give them stuff. I told him, “No way, get your own worm!” He offered to buy one from me and I said, “All right, how much money have you got?” He backed down from the negotiations at that point. He must have realized that I was serious about taking his lunch money in exchange for something I dug out of the dirt in my backyard.

If you ever want to take earthworms to a cocktail party, here’s my advice:

First, tell people in advance that you’ll be bringing the worms. Just talking about it is half the fun.

Second, let the worms get dressed up, too. They don’t want to show up at a party covered in dirt. No one will want to touch them and they’ll be treated like outcasts. Instead, buy clear water crystals like Soil Moist, which are available in the houseplant section of most nurseries. When you add water to them, they have the consistency of Jell-O and look kind of like chipped ice. (Usually water crystals are used to increase the water-absorbing capacity of potting soil.) The worms wouldn’t want to live in this stuff forever, but they’ll tolerate it for a couple of hours and they’ll look so elegant.

Third, get one of those little plastic containers about the size of a baby food jar to hold your water crystals and worms. It’s a little less space than the worms would normally prefer, but once again, they’ll put up with it for a while. Punch some air holes in the lid with a thumbtack.

You’ll need the smaller plastic container for the fourth step, which is to find something fabulous to carry the worms in. A little black bag, preferably in silk or velvet, is perfect. The more stylish it is, the more amazed people will be when you pull out your worms.

I have taken the worms to just one cocktail party so far, and it all went smoothly because I followed these simple steps. The party was a gathering of booksellers, publishers, and authors; many of them knew I had the worms with me and wanted to see them. A surprising number of people asked to hold the worms. I brought individually-packaged hand wipes with me, thinking that anyone who touched a worm would feel an immediate need to wash their hands, but as far as I can tell, no one thought twice about using the same hand they’d held a worm in to pour drinks, shake hands, or dip chips into salsa.

I left the party around midnight. Jim McManus, author of a book on poker called Positively Fifth Street, was going to give poker lessons into the wee hours of the morning. Even live worms can’t compare with poker, brandy, and cigars. That night, as the worms and I sat in traffic on an LA freeway, I realized that worms, like alcohol, smooth over any social awkwardness that one might feel at a cocktail party. The next morning, I didn’t have a hangover and the worms seemed no worse for wear. I slipped them out of their Soil Moist and into the damp earth behind my brother’s house, where I hope they are enjoying a balmy southern California winter right now.

Sam James is a guy I met while I was doing research for the book. He’s the leading earthworm taxonomist in the country, if not the world. I went to see him at his laboratory at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. Folks in town called the students and faculty of the college “meditators,” as in, “We weren’t too crazy about those meditators moving in at first, but we’re starting to get used to them.” The meditators moved in thirty years ago. I guess Midwesterners are slow to accept newcomers.

I did not see any meditating going on when I went to meet Sam, but I did see plenty of worms. He has the lab of a mad scientist—enormous pickled worms in jars of murky fluid, wooden cabinets filled with tiny worms in vials, and intricate, hand-drawn diagrams of worm anatomy taped to the wall. Sam is one of those rare scientists who still gets to make new discoveries in the wild. He’s like a nineteenth-century naturalist. There are over 4,500 species of earthworms that have been identified, but many more have yet to be discovered. Sam goes to the Philippines once a year and brings back jars of exotic, wildly-colored worms. It is his task to categorize and name them. To fund his research, he hopes to set up a program that will allow people to have a worm named after them—or someone else—for a fee. Same way you’d have a star named after your child, or a rose named after your wife. To a worm lover, this is a beautiful idea.

More on Sam in the weeks and months to come. Meanwhile, I was worried about putting the worms through the baggage X-ray machine at the airport so I wrote to Sam for advice. (Thanks to Philip who posted a comment about asking the screeners to hand-check the worms. Oh, my. I’m trying to attract as little attention to the worms as possible. But they already wear those latex gloves, so maybe they wouldn’t mind thrusting their fingers into a container of worms in their own poo.) Mostly I was worried that the worms would be harmed on the way through the machine. There is nothing more demoralizing than a Rubbermaid container full of dead worms, let me tell you.

But Sam was very reassuring on this point. “They should be fine with the X-rays,” he wrote. “The most likely problem is overheating at some point in the transit process. Red wigglers are more heat tolerant than nightcrawlers, but much smaller and therefore less impressive.”

My plan is to travel with at least 3 species of worms: the red wigglers, Eisenia fetida, that live in my compost bin; the nightcrawler Lumbricus terrestris, and perhaps Aporrectodea caliginosa, the grey worm, which is commonly found around plant roots in garden soil. And Philip, you’re right—these worms will be taking a one-way trip. Some of them will have to endure several cities with me before I set them free, so they’re likely to be a little road-weary and in need of some TLC, but at my last event before heading to the airport, I’ll be looking for someone who can give my worms a good home.

So I called United Airlines and asked them about taking earthworms with me on the plane. The conversation went something like this:

“Thank you for calling United.”

“Uh…hello…um, I have kind of an odd question about…uh, carry-ons, and…well, sort of…pets.”

(Pause) “OK, what’s your question?”

“Well, here’s the deal. I just finished writing a book about earthworms, and soon I’ll be going on a book tour and I’d like to bring some worms with me. They’d be inside a small Rubbermaid container about the size you’d use for a sandwich. I’ll have the container in my carry-on bag, and I’m just wondering if I’ll have any problems going through security.”

(Even longer pause) “Are these…like…man-eating worms?”

I laughed. OK, this guy was on my side. “No, no, they’re little red wigglers, the kind of worms you’d take fishing. I just didn’t know if the security people would get freaked out and think I was bring some kind of biological agent on board.”

“And these worms are going to stay in the container the whole time, or will you be taking them out on the plane?”

Now I think he was having a little fun with me. “No, I swear, they’ll just stay in my carry-on bag. Do you think it’ll be OK? I’d hate to have to surrender the worms at the checkpoint.”

“I think you’ll be fine. Why don’t you bring a copy of your book to show them—”

“Oh, that’s a great idea.”

“—and maybe even a letter from your publisher or an itinerary or something.”

“Perfect. I think that’ll work.”

“Good luck. Thanks for calling United. Is there any other travel we can help you with to day?”

I considered telling him that my next book would be about boa constrictors or Africanized bees, but I decided I shouldn’t push my luck. “You know, that’s probably enough for today,” I said, and hung up.

Tune in tomorrow, when I ask worm taxonomist Sam James if the worms will be harmed by the baggage X-ray machine…