Every year in the Florida Panhandle, a tiny town called Sopchoppy puts a unique local talent on display.
I stumbled across it a few months ago on a road trip down Florida’s state and county roads, which I always choose over the highways and turnpikes that rush past everything worth seeing. Departing from my hometown, Fort Lauderdale, I drive for hours, sometimes days, and stop along the way at diners, cafes and shops to ask people the same question: “What do y’all do around here?” My purpose is to find out what sorts of activities still pull people away from their individual routines to gather together, and locals are usually eager to illuminate their particular corner of the country for a curious stranger.
In Sopchoppy, roughly an hour south of Tallahassee and just off the Gulf, I stopped at a yard sale to chat with a couple of the town’s 500 residents. I asked my usual question and the answer came back: “Worm grunting.”
“Worm what?”
They invited me to come see it for myself at Sopchoppy’s annual worm grunting festival, which draws thousands of visitors. There I watched kids drive wooden stakes into the ground and rub metal bars across the top as if they were playing an instrument. The worms underground mistake the vibrations for the sound of an approaching mole, and they wriggle up to the surface where the grunters catch them in buckets.
Previous generations of grunters would make a living by selling worms as bait to fishermen and women on the coast. Today, the tradition lives on primarily as entertainment for festivalgoers.
Turning hyperlocal traditions into public spectacle is an American pastime. The first county and state fairs were held in the early 19th century in New York and Massachusetts and quickly spread from coast to coast. Such fairs remain popular today, and when I started to document this country’s gathering places I visited many of them.
But the traces of regionality they once had are mostly lost; I would see the same pop-up circus tents and aging amusement park rides, funnel cakes and goldfish in plastic bags. So I began my long drives along back roads, looking for pockets of the country where smaller, stranger traditions have endured.
In a field west of Lake Okeechobee, I watched a 13-year-old Seminole boy learn to wrestle alligators in an inflatable kiddie pool — after his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before that. In another town I saw an armadillo race put on in honor of a stew made from what’s called swamp cabbage, or the heart of the sabal palm. I visited a town in the Appalachian foothills of Pennsylvania where residents pull rattlesnakes out of the woods to showcase them for an afternoon, and a shoreline in Virginia where every summer 200 or so wild ponies are herded into the water for a mass swim. In Twinsburg, Ohio, thousands of twins gather every August for a festival they treat as a family reunion. It’s the one place, some of the twins told me, where everybody understands them.
At these gatherings, even the most peculiar activities are turned into celebration. Beyond amusement, though, I was searching for proof that in an age of social isolation and online disconnection, people still hold on to the traditions that bring them together and make their hometowns unmistakably theirs.
While I was in Sopchoppy, I asked Gary Revell, 74, why he still grunts for worms. He told me that the times he goes out at dawn in the forest behind his house, the sunlight filtering through the pines, are when he feels closest to God.
At these festivals, something like that sentiment persists. People stand shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors, and allow themselves the gift of being amazed by the same strange and wonderful sight.
Nat Segebre is a photographer based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
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