Nightcrawlers at Pagonis Live Bait, Toronto © Chris So/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Worms love southwestern Ontario. The region’s dairy farms offer loamy soil, untilled and laden with manure: an annelid’s arcadia. On damp nights, when the wind dies down and the temperature is just so, the fields fairly writhe with the pale, glistening constituents of Lumbricus terrestris surfacing from the depths to feed and mate. This image alone—the ground seething with plump masses dancing their peristaltic dance—belongs in a David Cronenberg movie, but it gets worse, or better, because there are people out there, too, worm pickers, sometimes hundreds of them, stooping to collect their quarry. Beams from their headlamps skitter over the land, glazing everything in sinister reds and oranges. (White light spooks the worms.) They work until dawn. You can fit about three hundred worms in a jumbo-size tin can; on a good night, the best pickers harvest twenty thousand. The worms are soon packed and stacked in Styrofoam flats, stored in refrigerated warehouses, and shipped off to gas stations and Bass Pro Shops and Walmarts across North America. They end up impaled on fishhooks in one body of water or another.

This is the world of Joshua Steckley’s The Nightcrawlers: A Story of Worms, Cows, and Cash in the Underground Bait Industry (University of California Press, $29.95). Drawn though I am to the slight, the mere, the vanishingly specific, I wasn’t prepared for this degree of minutiae; I’m not sure if grains come any finer. Even Steckley’s interviewees doubted the necessity of such a project. “A book about worm picking!” one of them laughed. “Good luck with that.” But I’m glad he’s written about this extraordinary oddity in our consumer culture—someone had to. Steckley, who holds a Ph.D. in geography, grew up in worm country and never forgot how the pickers’ lamplight cut through the night. Eventually, he got to wondering:

Why is there only one worm capital of the world, and why is it based around Toronto? . . . Why are most worm pickers Vietnamese immigrants? . . . What needs to happen to turn the nightcrawler—the same banal creature found in gardens and on flooded sidewalks across the continent—into a valuable commodity? . . . And what might this tell us about the relationship between capitalism and nature?

Steckley gets to the bottom of it despite the fact that the worm trade is almost literally fly-by-night, and its prime movers would like to keep it that way. Access to premium sites can become competitive to the point of violence. A lot of cash trades hands; the taxman doesn’t always get his cut. The business coalesced in the prosperous postwar era, when the expanding middle classes found that they enjoyed fishing on the weekends. Nightcrawlers caught fish, so people caught nightcrawlers. Golf courses, at first, were reliable hunting grounds, and bait companies rewarded them handsomely for exclusive picking rights. From the Fifties through the Eighties, America’s fairways teemed at irregular hours with “retirees, college students, and enterprising children,” one journalist wrote, pinching worms from the shorn lawns and dropping them in cans strapped around their ankles.

But in time, Ontario emerged as the preeminent worm hub. It had quality dirt and, thanks to successive waves of immigration, cheap labor. Steckley spoke to one man whose family picked him up from the airport and drove him straight to a golf course for his first night of work. By the Seventies, the major players in the worm exchange were congregating at the Sinistri Café, a Greek restaurant in Toronto. In the morning, over demitasses and backgammon, buyers and sellers negotiated the day’s wholesale price as truckloads of worms waited outside. There was copious swearing. Things haven’t evolved much since then; the industry’s last great innovation was to rent pastures from farmers. Some refuse to let worm pickers on their property because they think removing the worms degrades their soil, while a number of the farmers who do allow pickers swear to Steckley that it improves theirs. Climate change has made ideal worm weather harder to come by, but attempts to cultivate worms en masse, or trap them, have failed—nightcrawlers refuse to be scaled or automated. The only way to get them is to bend over and pick them up.

Various species of earthworms, 1684, by Francesco Redi
© akg-images/De Agostini/Icas94.

Tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees settled in Toronto in the Eighties, and word spread among them that worm picking was a sure way to make money, albeit a punishing one. Pickers ruin their knees and backs over years of creeping through the squirming acres. (“If you are coming from a civil war,” one subject tells Steckley, “you can do a lot of things.”) Most of them are now in their fifties or sixties; the years have made them fleet-fingered, light on their feet, and constantly sore. They’re paid in piece rates—eighteen Canadian dollars, or thereabouts, per thousand worms. That’s a notable decrease from the roughly forty dollars per thousand worms (adjusted for inflation) that pickers received in the Fifties. Today’s pickers know they’re working a job that no one wants, and that the younger generation is unlikely to replace them. They are undeterred. Some of them picture the worms as coins scattered on the ground: “I just think I’m picking one cent, one cent, money, money, money.”

But you have to hoover up the worms to rake in the pennies. Steckley volunteered for a shift and captured about three hundred worms from their burrows and middens. His labor would have netted him less than seven bucks: “exactly $0.023 per worm.” It takes time to learn to use one’s hand as a tool. “When I could get a decent grip,” he writes, “the worm would come out with the sound (and satisfaction) of uprooting a weed. Other worms could hold to the soil so tightly that I would tear their bodies in half.” He took regular breaks—everyone does. Farmers, after a night of picking, find their fields strewn with detritus: adult diapers, cigarette butts, snack bags, sawdust (essential for drying one’s fingers between bouts with slimy worms), and, in at least one instance, a condom.

Steckley has stumbled into a world almost designed to be overlooked. At a Tim Hortons—where else, in Canada, is there?—he meets the Worm Queen, a Vietnamese woman in her late thirties known for her ability to clear thirty thousand worms in a night. “The worms started to infiltrate her dreams,” he writes, but she cherished the job for its freedom. Pickers, to Steckley’s astonishment, often use that word to describe their work. They go at their own pace, with no supervision, no need to explain themselves to anyone. “Nobody controls you,” another picker tells him. “Nobody tells you what to do.”

By this narrow definition, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey were as free as two worm pickers when they spent four months adrift on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean. Nobody controlled them, and nobody told them what to do. Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (Riverhead Books, $28) tells the story of the couple’s 1973 catastrophe, focusing on the sustaining connection between them. It’s billed as a love story; I don’t know if it is. Whatever held the Baileys together, whatever kept them alive, was stranger and plainer than love, harder to come by, and even harder to explain.

Maurice and Maralyn came from a suburb of Derby, England, a place so confining (“a particular kind of quiet stiffened the air,” Elmhirst writes) that they decided that life on a thirty-one-foot yacht would be less claustrophobic. They sold their house to buy the Auralyn, built, somewhat ominously, by a company known for its coffins. In June 1972, they set sail for New Zealand, intending to spend about fifteen months crossing two oceans. They brought five hundred cans of food, but no radio—to preserve their “freedom from outside interference.” Maralyn embarked on the journey having never learned to swim.

Nine months of starlight and sea air—chess, books, sewing, the sextant and the nautical almanac, bibulous pit stops in scenic ports—ended abruptly one March morning when a sperm whale smashed a hole in their boat. The water was soon at their knees. “Eggs and tins bobbed around them,” Elmhirst writes, with characteristic understatement. “They looked at each other.” Within minutes they retreated to the life raft—four and a half feet in diameter, too small for two people to lie in side by side—and lashed it to the yacht’s dinghy, rescuing what supplies they could. Their bodies felt “the insecurity of every wave.” Maurice, hamstrung by doubt in the best of times, perceived the accident as evidence of his highly “unseamanlike” failure, and wallowed in it. His captaincy had given him purpose, discipline, virtue. Now he was certain they would die. This certainty made him useless.

It was Maralyn who supplied the will to live—easily mistakable for, and perhaps identical to, a capacity for self-deception. She undertook practical tasks with a Panglossian zeal, intuiting that “doing limited the dangers of thinking,” as Elmhirst writes. Maralyn inventoried their remaining comestibles: steak and kidney pudding, marmalade, treacle, all to be washed down with rainwater. She forced Maurice into distraction, reading aloud to him—their biography of Richard III remained gloriously intact—and fashioning a deck of playing cards out of spare paper. As their flesh ulcerated and their stinking clothes rotted off their bodies, they enjoyed hours of delirious whist under the unrelenting sun. Accosted by a flotilla of turtles, she suggested killing one and eating it, thereby discovering a replenishable source of protein; later, they caught two and hitched them to the dinghy, hoping the turtles would swim them toward the Galápagos. When their charioteers proved uncooperative, they killed and ate them.

Maurice and Maralyn Bailey

Disaster stories have an easy grip on the lurid imagination, but it can be tough to find the drama in 118 shipwrecked days. There’s monotony even on the brink of death if you stay there long enough. The Baileys’ own memoir about the ordeal “was so matter-of-fact that it read like a dual account of an unremarkable holiday that took a slightly unconventional turn,” Elmhirst writes. But she herself has an admirably light touch; her short sentences contain something of the Baileys’ emotionlessness, their desolation, silence, and the slow putrefaction of their faculties. Her eye for detail also brings alive the surreal sensory fusillade of the couple’s improbable rescue by the Wolmi 306, a South Korean fishing ship, and the celebrity that followed in its wake: photo ops, game-show appearances, a filmed visit to SeaWorld. “The Avon Rubber Company, manufacturers of the dinghy and the life raft, invited them to open its new factory in Llanelli, South Wales”; the Baileys were there with bells on. They were a hot commodity—not because they’d lived, but because they hadn’t died.

Absurdly, they did it again: they got back out there on another yacht, the Auralyn II, and successfully navigated a fourteen-month journey to Patagonia, this time with some friends aboard. Elmhirst mostly skips this part, except to note that it was an insane thing to do, and that Maurice was especially tyrannical on his second go as captain. And yet I badly wanted to know how their marriage fared in those years and the ones beyond. I wanted to know what held them fast to each other, if not some entwined PTSD, and I wanted to know what Maurice, with his fixation on “emotional self-sufficiency,” made of England in the Thatcher years, when he may finally have felt at home there. Throughout A Marriage at Sea, Elmhirst occasionally lands on a knowing question—“After all, what is more self-interested than running away?”; “For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?”—where I would have gone for an expression of genuine ignorance. Because I am ignorant. I don’t understand.

The Baileys stuck to the surface, at least, on their quest for autonomy. The loners and pariahs in Submersed: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines (Pantheon, $28) insist on sinking. This is Matthew Gavin Frank’s look at personal-submersible enthusiasts, men (and one woman) who find freedom by diving in homemade submarines. Building an artificial womb and enclosing oneself in it at organ-smushing pressures can offer an innocuous escape: “Often I’ll just sit on the bottom of the lake and watch the fish go by,” one hobbyist says, “and eat my lunch.” Or it can provide an outlet for one’s most megalomaniacal impulses. Peter Madsen, the Danish designer of the UC3 Nautilus, boasted that his submarine could make him “virtually government uncontrollable.” He’s currently serving a life sentence for killing and dismembering a Swedish journalist, Kim Wall, aboard his sub in 2017.

Submarine in the bag, by Viktors Svikis © The artist. Courtesy Galerie Michaela Stock, Vienna

If you read the portion of Submersed that appeared in the pages of this magazine two years ago, you may expect a book charged with awe and bioluminescent wonder. In fact it’s a much darker affair, dominated by Madsen and his Bond-villain pathologies. Frank can’t help but see a link between deep-sea confinement and violence. The men he speaks with are always talking about how “sexy” parts of their submarines are, their impressive size, etc. Submariners on the USS Florida—only the second sub to have female officers aboard in U.S. naval history—made a “rape list” in 2018, he notes. One guy tells him outright that “the biggest genius is Hitler.”

Frank is an unrepentant maximalist, a lover of wide scope and picayune detail. He gives us Alexander the Great in his bathysphere, Jules Verne squabbling with the editor of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He informs us that Wall shared a birthday with both Chaka Khan and the inventor of Liquid Paper; the journalist’s final wave goodbye to her loved ones occasions a three-page history of waving. (“The wave has been called by the American Psychological Association one of the more essential components of human language . . . ”) It’s a lot, but Frank has to compensate for his subjects’ acute dispassion. Many of them see nothing unusual or profound in their yen to hide under the sea. “It is a fascinating hobby,” one writes on an online forum for enthusiasts, “as long as everything works out.”

And if it doesn’t? Submersed addresses, as it must, the tragedy of OceanGate’s submersible Titan, which imploded in 2023 while surveying the wreck of the Titanic, killing all five aboard: a British billionaire, one of Pakistan’s wealthiest businessmen and his teenage son, a veteran explorer nicknamed “Mr. Titanic,” and OceanGate’s heedless CEO. That CEO, one of Frank’s sources suggests, had a suicidal streak—he referred to his diving addiction as “the deep disease,” and he may have known that his craft would fail. I was surprised that Frank, for all his digressive energies, didn’t engage with the outpouring of memes that followed the Titan’s demise. Beneath the pasquinade was the desire to implode. Aboveground, someone slapped the Titan’s image on baggies of weed. Seeing a photo of one of these, empty and discarded on the street, I wished I had found it in real life. I wanted to bend over and pick it up.