One of the joys of flaneury is an intimate relationship with worms.
Walkers will come to know the earthbound annelids of their region, and not just on rainy days. On some Appalachian summer mornings the roads are crawling with the two familiars of my childhood in New Jersey, your garden-variety brown and tan earthworms and the bulging burgundy night crawlers. Here in West Virginia, well below the line of continental glaciation, there are also blood red wrigglers, cachectic beige strugglers, and numerous other varieties in size, color, and vigor.
There are eighteen, count them, eighteen species of earthworm in West Virginia including Lumbicus cantaneus, Amynthas diffringens, and Dendodrilus rubidus. My favorite is Bimastos heimburgeri, and I'm hopeful the species name references a person or place and not the delicacy of this worm with multiple citelli, those bulging saddles sometimes mistaken for hearts (they have none).
A former girlfriend with a big one, heart that is, would stoop to save worms from sidewalks and roads on our dog strolls. Walk duration aside, you've got to love this urge to help the geotactic flaneurs, but did those wrigglers really want a return to dirt?
The conventional wisdom is that earthworms surface when the soil is too wet to hold enough oxygen, begging the question of why do it when it hasn't rained for days. That riddle, unlike the scraped-earth theory of limited northern species, will not be solved by the musings of an addled ambulator.
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