Take The Last Shuttle To Sexville

We've been scooping up frogs and bucketing them across Highway 30 for several years now, since that is the direction they insist on going in order to make replacement frogs, and we want them to keep doing that. Frogs have a number of obstacles in life. The other name for tadpoles, for instance, is "lunch." But even if they manage to grow right the heck up to full size, they're no match for a Chevy.

We've also been keeping nice data on them. We know exactly what sorts of conditions they require to make the trek (damp, dark, warmer than 43 degrees). Although, to be fair, we started out knowing that. It's in The Literature. The Literature is where all the scientific knowledge is stashed so no one needs to remember it. We do keep track of the sex of the frogs and the weather and the temperature and stuff. It helps us know when to be on the lookout. This season we had something like six frogs venture out over the course of a few weeks and then, bam, 345 in one night. You want to be prepared for a detonation like that.

One of the patterns we've noticed over the years is that the great frog migration is led by males. They'll be down at the pond telling tall tales and scoping out the competition weeks before the females make the trek. You can tell the males because they have long, uh, thumbs, and they're very avid. Boing! Boing! Boing! Also they're a lot smaller than females. This leads them to compensate, and for all we know, they're compensating away day and night down there in the pond once we let them go.

Later the females lug themselves down the hill with nothing like the verve of the males (or spunk, if you will). Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. It's hard to say whether they're just not as enthusiastic about the enterprise or if it's all that water weight. They're packing upwards of a thousand eggs each and, honey, it shows. They're one strand of elastic away from a world-class muffin-top. Perhaps there is some kind of primal drive getting them to the Mixer but it's entirely possible they just want to dump the eggs. As soon as they hit the water at least one male is going to want to grab on and squeeze and he's not about to be ditched at the punchbowl. He's on there until he gets something to fertilize--that's the nice term for it--and then he's all done and the female has to find someplace to arrange the eggs in a neat ball and then she bops back uphill, stretch marks and all. The guys hang out a little longer in case another lucky lady happens by looking for a big thumb.

Plus, a bonus salamander.

I don't know. I've never wanted to be a male but there are some things about the female condition that are not ideal. Primarily the bloat. I'd have been fine with lower pay and condescension if I could have negotiated away the bloat. If I were a frog I'd want to ditch those eggs all at once and as soon as possible.

In fact, I wouldn't have minded that option myself. It's one thing to harbor a pizza for a night or two and another thing altogether to suffer involuntary tissue turgidity once a month for decades, for no good reason. And to make it worse--it exactly coincides with the time everyone around you gets super annoying.

Frogs, Food, And Fun

It's a damp and pleasant night, and I'm plucking a perfect pink frog off a curtain of landscape cloth and placing her in a bucket. Which naturally puts me in mind of the Great Gilchrist-Crescent Spaghetti Feed of 1989.

We are trying to keep the frogs from crossing Highway 30 on the way to their annual Spring Fling in a vernal pond. On our data sheets we refer to this as "assisting" them, which is not the verb the frogs use. In fact the case could be made that they lack appreciation.

Not a frog, but definitely landscape cloth

We've got a slick system in place now. Our team has rigged up a temporary fence with landscape cloth to intercept the frogs before they cross the road. It's a thing of beauty and was engineered chiefly by Anne the Magnificent, who has imagination and ingenuity and, ever since the election, plenty of time to think about things in the middle of the night. It's a working wonder of rebar and old fence insulators and washers and string and clamps and pebbles and probably tractor innards and old hoof shavings and whatever else she could scavenge for free from her daughter's farm, and it works like anything.  Add in Maggie's contribution--sewing eight hundred heroic feet of rope in a channel on the bottom of the landscape cloth for weight--and us frog wranglers, and we've got a well-oiled frog-plucking machine.

But it's not as much fun as it used to be.

Before, we were scampering after the lusty hoppers all over the road and chasing them on the shoulder and clambering up to the railroad bed to coax them off the ties and scoping out their eyeshine on the berm and pointing and squealing and having us a fine old time. Lordy, it was invigorating. The hours go by like minutes when you're frog-wrangling aerobically.

But of course we missed some of them. And it isn't really safe to dash around a road in the dark. And the railroad company's legal department was pretty particular about us not getting near their tracks. So great minds got together and produced this slick new system. And now we stroll the length of the cloth curtain like church ushers with a collection plate and scoop up frogs as we go.

Pootie in a younger day

No more Gilchrist-Crescent Spaghetti Feed for us.

Oh, that! It was 1989. It was only the second year of the Cycle Oregon bicycle tour, before they'd ironed out all the kinks. 2,000 bicyclists were provided with campsites and luggage transport and dinner and water, but for most of the day we got a banana and a spank on the Spandex for luck and sent off for our ride. Any minor diner we came across during the day was stacked all around with bicycles eight feet deep and packed with cyclists, a wide-eyed waitress and a panicked fry cook. Little kids who set up cookie stands on the side of the road got cleaned out in minutes no matter what they charged. When we arrived in the logging towns of Gilchrist and Crescent, we were prodded toward the Grange Hall, where long tables sagged with homemade pies for sale--hundreds of them. We dispatched them like locusts on a corn crop. Then came dinner. Gilchrist-Crescent was ready. The community center was well-staffed and every large pot in town was set to boiling. Someone ladled tomato sauce out of a vat and everyone in town knew how many people to expect and how much spaghetti constituted a logger's portion, but they were not familiar with 100-mile bikers. The garlic-bread distributor blanched at her dwindling supply and cut us down to a half-slice each. Progress in the line slowed and then ground to a halt as pickup trucks peeled off to nearby towns for more boiling pots and spaghetti. Those of us still waiting for dinner made a shoulder-rubbing conga line and sang 'Sixties hits and put our left foots out and put our left foots in, and a fine and raucous time was had by all, even as the G-C womenfolk were living out their worst nightmares. It was like that all week. All 2,000 of us continued to vulture our way through miles of rural Oregon leaving behind a cleaned carcass of exhausted and astounded residents and a fair amount of money. It was grand.



But it would not do.

Cycle Oregon felt a bout of organization coming on, and got out its pencils and spreadsheets and calculators and thereafter delivered a precise and reliable 7,000 calories per day per person. Roadside cookie-stand business slumped. Waitresses waved from diners. Not many cyclists dropped dead. Order was restored.

It's 2017, and smashed frogs and starved bicyclists have been reduced to an acceptable minimum. It's a good thing. It's efficient.

It's just not as much fun.

The Voices

What I intended to do was park my fanny in front of the TV with a beer and watch The Voice. Don't judge. I like The Voice. You don't approve of that, find yourself a classier blogger.

However, my plans were dashed when the temperature rose and the weather turned drizzly mid-afternoon. That's not TV weather. That's frog weather.

For three years now the members of the Harborton Frog Shuttle have been ferrying frogs and salamanders across Highway 30. The amphibians live uphill in Forest Park and the place they have their Spring Mixer and Cotillion is downhill, below the highway. This has resulted in a situation that brings tender-hearted drivers to a screeching halt to sob against the steering wheel. Unfortunately, there aren't very many of those drivers. It's a squishfest. Rob Lee, who lives at the junction of Frog Lust and Highway 30, decided to do something about it.

It's pretty low-tech. Assemble an army of frog wranglers and give them buckets. We pick up the frogs, put them in the buckets, drive them across the highway, and decant them into the swamp. Our chief concern is for the charming Red-Legged Frogs, which, like a lot of other critters, are in some trouble these days. But we'll scoop up the tiny Chorus Frogs too. They're not listed as endangered, except in the sense that they're going to turn into paste on Highway 30, and that's endangered enough for us.

Long-Toed Salamander getting a ride

They're surprisingly easy to catch. It's possible that recent generations of frogs have internalized a collective memory of Highway 30 and they're not all that anxious to cross it. So when they're on their way and someone stands in front of them with a bucket, it strikes them as being a fine time to take a breather.

There are a lot of things that look like frogs when you're wandering around in the dark in the rain. Rain splashing off the pavement looks like small hopping frogs. Stranded clumps of lichen look like frogs. Your more charismatic leaves look like frogs. Water droplets on the grass look like frog eyeshine. You know what really looks like a frog? A frog. You get good at it after a while.

Last year our efforts were less effective and more fun. Aerobic, even. On a good warm, wet night, we were dashing all over the place trying to bag them all. This year, our intrepid frog captains have rigged up fencing with landscape cloth. It's nothing these frogs can't surmount, really. Half of these guys have been mounting everything in sight for weeks now. But it is a puzzlement at first. They poink up to the fence and sit there and say "Huh." And we collect them like so many dimes in the sofa cushions.

In the first part of the season, all the frogs are coming downhill. It's easy to tell the sexes apart. The female red-leggeds are much larger to begin with but they've also let themselves go. They're plump with eggs. They're gravid; the males are avid. Boy howdy they're avid. They're motivated. They're fast. Of course they don't have to deal with bloat. On the way back up it's a little harder. Presumably you can tell the males because they have swollen, let's say, thumbs, but frankly you can tell the females also because, not to be indelicate about it, they kind of have stretch marks.

Yes, at a certain point many of the frogs start heading back uphill from the swamp. And that means we have to intercept them below the highway. There is a considerable number of weeks that we'll have frogs going both directions. Sometimes we're not sure which way they're going. We have to conduct an interview right there in the street.

The red-leggeds make almost no sound at all. If severely provoked, they sort of mutter "Hey, now." And there's a little thumping sound when they, ah, kick the bucket. But that's about it. Still, the swamp is crazy with frogsong. That would be our chorus frogs. The little buggers are total belters, every one. Right on pitch and no affectations. You're not going to find that on TV.

It Came From Out Of The North

I am deeply interested in international relations, and that is why I was so pleased to have my friend Sara Stratton visit. Her personal awesomeness did not factor in at all. Sara is from the great state of somewhere-in-Canada, a landmass celebrated for its northness, but she speaks real good English. I couldn't wait to show off our corner of the world, and we have a lot of good material to work with.

It started out great. We set off to explore the wonders of nature, starting with Dave's neck, which is spectacular, and then moving off to the waterfall region of the Columbia Gorge. On our very first stop, we trotted down the path to a lovely cascade in front of which stood a young woman with, as Dave pointed out, no mistakes on her, who immediately removed a trench coat to reveal a pink bikini and high-heeled shoes. Tip: natural wonders are best presented with nonchalance. "Oh, a young woman with no mistakes on her in a pink bikini and high-heeled shoes in front of a waterfall," we said. "They're getting to be as bad as fruit flies around here."

At the next lovely cascade, we scored a magnificent red-legged frog that was completely naked, so things were getting better and better. The remaining waterfalls came plain, and we rested up in Hood River for sandwiches and a hearty, nourishing beer so strong it could stand up without a glass and slap you if you nodded off. As we rounded the valley for a trip around Mt. Hood, Sara found herself so overcome by beauty and hops that she had to rest up her neurons, but by the time she woke up again, we had her 6,000 feet up the flanks of a snowy volcano with a raven in charge. The road downhill bounced with elk. Natural-wonder-wise, I'd have to say things were really going well.

Now, you may have heard that the ancient Persian weavers always introduced a flaw in their carpets as a reminder that only God's creations are perfect. The statement being made, as I understand it, is "I am exactly like God, except for this little boo-boo I am putting in on purpose," which, you have to admit, is mighty humble. In this spirit, I decided to introduce a flaw into Sara's perfect day by picking up a stray ("Willy") in Rhododendron who had missed the last bus and wanted a ride into Sandy, twenty miles away. Sometimes I like to do favors for strangers to remind myself why I do it so seldom. I did think he looked dull and a little pungent, but I was wrong. Willy was thunderous stupid and loud and stank at least four different ways. Individual fugs of alcohol, pot, cigarettes and B.O. set up an intricate weather system in the back seat, where Dave, who is an awfully nice man, kept up a lively conversation while Sara and I counted mileposts as fast as we could. He had a lot of interests, foremost among them medicalmarijuana (what we used to call marijuana). For a living he made little screening boxes for medicalmarijuana, and in his off hours he liked to skateboard, use medicalmarijuana and miss the bus.

What is the sound of two brain cells flapping?

He mentioned he actually lived in Portland, so I was prepared when we rolled towards Sandy and he asked if we were driving any further. "I'm dropping you off at the Arco station," I said without explanation, because the Arco station is six feet inside the Sandy city limits. The rest of the trip home was pleasant, windows rolled down all the way, and the next day was sunny and bright all over again. An excellent day to shop, see more of Nature's wonders, and have the car upholstery burned.

International relations remain good, and if you have any more nice Canadians, roll them on downhill. We're ready.