Draining The Swamp

Daddy and I always went out salamandering in the springtime, so we knew where all the best spots were. When it was looking to be a fine warm wet night, he'd grab his camera and flashlights and we'd hit the vernal ponds looking for spotted salamanders. Because if a puddle party of spotted salamanders doesn't inflate your soul, you've got more problems than can be addressed in church.

So he was the first to notice when they started paving them over. Ditches were gratuitously filled in, damp spots were erased. As an educated man who married a nice Lutheran woman, he didn't have access to a lot of salt in his vocabulary, and had to make up for it with actual eloquence, delivered in a preacher's cadence and for the benefit of nobody's ears but mine. The powers that be had seen every pond as a seep of contagion and an eyesore, and done their damnedest to eliminate them. I was young, and certainly understood the value of spotted salamanders, and if they represented even half the worth of the ponds, that made them quite worthy enough. Daddy had even more knowledge in the bank. I remember swatting bugs one hot summer day and whining "What good are mosquitoes anyway?" and Daddy didn't miss a beat. "Frog food," he said. Well then. Okay!

People are, collectively, stupid. They'll take an axe to an oak if they need a toothpick in December, and then complain about the lack of shade in July. Individual people can be pretty smart, but they get together and stupid right up.

It takes time and attention to learn what there is to learn in this world, but people, collectively, know a lot about wetlands now. All those boggy spots might appear to those without imagination to be worthless, but those people are as blind as they can be. Wetlands mitigate flooding, restore shorelines, filter water, sustain life, cache groundwater. For free. The Army Corps of Engineers can get as fancy as they please with concrete but they can't come close to duplicating the value of the wetlands, and they don't come cheap, neither.

Someone recently lurched into power with a promise to drain the swamp. A lot of people think he has broken that promise, because they see he has packed the pus-pockets of power with even more privateers and pirates than we had before. But they didn't take him literally enough. The other day, just taking a break between drowning refugees and jacking off the Big Oil boys, he drained the swamp. He put the boot to the Clean Water Rule that protects wetlands. Apparently, it cuts into golf course profits.

Some people can look right at the magnificent, unmatched genius of nature and see nothing of worth--nothing as valuable as, say, a Walmart on a slab. Two main reasons: they're greedy, and they're stupid. Don't underestimate the stupid. And so the trees come down, and the swamp is filled, and the concrete flows, and the Walmart pimples up, and the true bill is left for someone else to pay, down the line.



That's who is in charge now. Someone who will mine your organs for their value on the black market and then rig you up with a respirator and dialysis and say, See? Good as new! Bummer about your liver. But some day someone'll come up with a replacement for that, too. The best replacement, a beautiful thing, like you wouldn't believe!

A Detonation Of Frogs

If you're a member of an exclusive group, and you are privy to information that people outside the group do not have, you may be able to see things other people don't see. Just before the World Trade Center towers came crashing down, while we were all going about our daily lives, the intelligence community, intercepting messages and trying to connect the dots, felt like their "hair was on fire." Likewise the various Chosen People note signs of the End Times everywhere, as enumerated in the Book of Revelation, and they scan the skies for that imminent visit. I know how all these people feel. It's a strange mixture of alarm and giddy anticipation and a thrumming undercurrent of excitement.

I know how they feel because we, the members of the Harborton Frog Shuttle, know something that people driving by on Highway 30 are oblivious to. We've been watching. We have data. We can predict.  And we look at the dark shoulder of Forest Park looming over the highway, and we know: some night very soon, that sucker is going to explode with frogs. It will be an amphibian detonation. And, like fundamentalists waiting for their personal comet, we'll be ready for them.

We've been paying attention for years. The frogs are going to come down to the vernal pond below the highway for their annual Mixer. Not all at once, generally. We thought they did it from January through March, but last year the biggest migration night was in early December, and this season we saw about seven of them a month earlier than that. But that's been it.

A salamander gets a ride, too.

Frogs are pretty specific about what gets them on the move. It has to be wet. It has to be dark. It has to be 45 degrees Fahrenheit or above. Cooler than that, they figure the big date can wait. Even the males, who are avid. Well, hell, they're all interested. The females are full of eggs, and the males are full of, let's say, verve.

Unfortunately, conditions have not been right one single day since that first sighting in November. It's been warm, but dry. Or wet, but cold. And so they're still biding their time up on that hill, hunkered down in the leaves under the snow, grumpy. This is late. First warm wet night, that place is going to erupt. And we in the Harborton Frog Shuttle will be there with our buckets to give them a lift across the highway.

Red-legged frog, eggs, and chillun sculpture: Steigerwald NWR

Not sure just when the females start piling up their eggs, but they don't look comfy. This is some serious bloat. Every hop slaps a bellyful of eggs on the pavement. They are probably plenty interested in going to the pond and getting those eggs squoze out. The males--by comparison, little bitty zippy guys with big thumbs--really, really want to latch on and squeeze them out. They love doing that. It makes them, let's say, cast their seed upon the waters. So by now, everyone's more than ready.

We've probably rescued most of them before, either as-is, or as eggs and sperm, with some assembly required. "Rescued" is how we put it: they probably see it as more "molested," "kidnapped," "thwarted." One doesn't sense gratitude. They'll take their first hop out of the forest and hit Harborton Drive and see our headlamps and they'll be all "Aw, man, really? Again with the bucket?" But they won't get by us.  The males will be too singleminded to veer out of the way and the females are hauling around a thousand eggs each and not set up to win a race with a damp, dedicated frog shuttler.

The hillside awaits us. Our hair is on fire. The rain'll put that out, though.

"Harborton Frog Shuttle: Where the ribbet meets the road!" Anyone need a t-shirt? Any profit from the sale of these will go to a fund to buy supplies (safety vests, headlamps, etc.) for the Harborton Frog Shuttle. We've got women's and men's. Click to have a look!