Crawl

On the way to Mom's house for dinner last night, the storm front chased me up Western Avenue--or, more appropriately, I raced it to Mom's house, and I won. My victory was only momentary, though--I knew the rain would be waiting for me whenever I left.

I was right. (In case you're wondering: Yes, I hate being right so often.) By the time I left Mom's house after an evening of beef tacos, cats battling for my attention and "Antiques Road Show," it had been raining steadily for some time. The ground was soaked, large puddles had formed on both the sidewalks and the streets, and the temperature was slowly falling. Still, it was a short, brisk walk to the bus stop, and a bus came straight away. So far, so good.

When I hopped off the bus, it was still raining steadily, and many of the puddles had expanded to swallow corners and curbs.

It was then that I noticed them.

They were everywhere, winding their way through the water, pushing toward the submerged curbs, cutting through the grass and out across the sidewalks in all directions.

Worms. Hundreds of worms.

I stepped carefully around the worms I could see (who knows how many I couldn't see) and made my way to the bus shelter. As I sat on the bench, I watched the worms in their travels around my feet. Some were small and struggled to make progress against the texture of the splintered concrete, but many were large and long--a couple, at least, exceeded a foot in length--and were able to pull themselves along with remarkable speed.

I wondered where they thought they were going--if any of them made it to the street, they'd either be flattened by cars or swept along by the current of the rainwater swirling down the nearby sewer. There were crosshatch patterns in the dirt on the sidewalk; I realized later that these had been etched by worms that had already passed through.

As I sat, I was joined briefly by a young man wearing an eminently practical leather jacket, but lacking a hat of any kind. He stood at the other end of the shelter, loudly popping his gum and occasional craning to see if the familiar flashing display of a CTA bus was cutting through the mist. No sign (literally). Like me, he noticed the worms. Unlike me, he kicked at one, punting one onto the grass behind the shelter; it curled up, straightened out and started crawling back toward its original intended destination, seemingly unharmed. He then saw how many there were all around him. After another minute or two of waiting, he walked off into the rain.

I waited a bit longer--half an hour altogether. Finally, though, even my patience wore out, and I started to walk as well, carefully toeing around the crawlers I encountered on the sidewalks between the bus stop behind me and my apartment ahead. Then, as I usually do, I turned to cut through the large park near La Casa del Terror.

Bad, bad idea.

It was like a scene from a particularly gross horror film: the ground before me was writhing and undulating in the dim Park District lighting. There was no way to walk the winding path without stomping hundreds of them, so I trotted along the soggy grassline instead--maybe I still stepped on a few, but most of them were either on the paths, inching toward who knows where, or still under the saturated soil.

By the time I got home, greeted as ever by Olivia yowling like she hadn't been fed in days, I was soaked to the skin. I went to bed soon after.

This morning, it was still raining, though not as hard. There were few worms on the sidewalk on my way to the train, but as the Brown Line wound its way past the baseball field just west of the Sedgwick stop, I saw that it was covered by dozens of gulls. I knew why they were there.