"you can hear the sound of worms rustling up through soil and slithering across the surface"

Gruntin' and gathering
By THOMAS C. TOBIN

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 14, 2002
The worm-catching process that sounds much like a rooting pig is serious business and a source of celebration in Sopchoppy.

SOPCHOPPY -- One foggy spring morning deep in the Apalachicola National Forest, William Johnson took a friend to watch while he "grunted" for worms.

He pierced the loose soil with his "stob," a well-worn stake about three-foot-long, carved from the wood of a black gum tree. His other tool was an "iron," a flat piece of metal, twice as wide as a ruler and 2 feet long.

Johnson, 41, used the iron to bang in the stob: "Tink, tink, tink." He rubbed the iron against the stob: "grunt, grunt, grunt."

Up came hundreds of fat, footlong earthworms, powerless against this man-made vibration. Johnson's friend bolted from the forest.