Catching Frogs
In upstate New York, we rented a cabin around a lake every summer, even though my grandpa built a stone house down the road. The lake was about the length of two football fields, eighteen feet deep at one end and two at the other. We used to catch salamanders and tadpoles in the long-poled purple and blue nets from the cabin. I stopped catching frogs when I joined Annie Schulz’s Wildlife Protection Club that she’d made for the kids who stayed in the cabins around Winnisook Lake. My sister Annie and I had seen a notice pushpinned into the bulletin board at the lodge: Calling all animal lovers, will you do your part to protect wildlife? Join the club. Next to the notice were checklists for a scavenger hunt style game of I-spy, which you needed to complete in order to join. We took two and began the hunt. One red eft, one rock shaped like a heart, one elm leaf changing colors early. Annie Schulz, clearly a fan of the honor system, trusted the green colored pencil check mark of a nine-year-old as proof of spotting, and, to her credit, lying never crossed our minds. After a few days walking in circles on the winding path that surrounded the lake, and a few het-het-hemms and suggestive head nods from our mom, Annie and I had spied all the critters and natural knick-knacks, and victoriously hiked up, with our mom, to The Castle.
Annie Schulz’s cabin was a towering stone structure behind the lodge, almost tucked into the mountain itself. She let us in and went to gather the Wildlife Protection Club membership gift bags, which contained a mini water color pallet, mini notebook, plastic frog, and a yo-yo. She asked if we were ready to join the club and we said we were. She said we had to agree to a few rules first.
“You must agree to never pick living things from nature.”
Jesus Christ, I thought. She was not messing around with this club. I had made similar agreements before with fairies. But it’s a lot easier to lie to a fairy than a sixty-year-old lady standing right in front of you, holding a very fun looking gift bag that I wanted very much. My sister looked at me. This was our let me step away to speak with my client in private moment. This lady was really going around asking little ten and eight-year-old girls not to pick any more flowers. We shrugged. We could live without it, we supposed.
Annie and I nodded.
“You must never catch frogs or touch them. The oil on your skin is really bad for frogs.”
First she took away flowers, and now frogs, though this was less of a deal breaker. I had always liked the thought of catching frogs, but in reality they were very hard to catch. The big bullfrogs of the lake squatted in between tall reeds in the shallow end, reeds like the elm trees of the forest, creating a canopy over what’s below, protecting all life underneath from a swooping hawk or eagle or rusty net. In their secret layers, the frogs were protected, promise or not, so I agreed easily.
“You must respect all nature and treat all living things with kindness.”
We nodded again, this one a no-brainer and the first ask we had actually seen coming.
“Okay, you are now members of the Wildlife Protection Club!” She gave us the gift bags, all smiles.
The day I broke my promise was the first time I faced a moral dilemma, thought about it, and chose the immoral option. Of course I had done generally bad or consequently immoral things before, but in those instances I more so just followed a gut instinct. Hit Annie, lied to my parents, pulled someone’s hair. The day I caught a frog I felt the guilt hang heavy on my shoulders like a wet towel. To be fair, I was at the YMCA and we were at the frog catching station and it was the only activity I was expected to do for ninety minutes. When my counselor, a sixteen-year-old girl who I worshipped, explained that it was not only frog-catching day but that there were two teams and whichever team filled their bucket with the most frogs won, I knew this was a real test of will.
One of the first feelings I remember is the unbreakable desire to win. When I was five, my parents signed me up for youth soccer. At Grist Mill Park at noon on Saturdays, in my neon jersey, with a team named the Green Hornets or the Fireballs or the Dolphins, bright red cheeks and white blonde curls in a clump of a ponytail, I felt in my heart a determination to exert my lungs to their full capacity in order to win. When the counselor explained that it was not just frog catching day, but that there was a frog catching competition, I felt that even littler little girl, and I found it likely that the Fireball within me was stronger than the part of me who was a loyal and faithful member of the Wildlife Protection Club.
I also happened to believe that I was innately more capable than most at catching animals. If Annie Schulz had included salamanders and snails and crayfish in the list of wildlife that actually needed protecting and could not be pestered, I would have had to seriously reconsider joining. Winnisook Lake was brimming with salamanders and I was the most skilled with a net, in my opinion (but I still believe objectively), out of Annie, our cousins, and even the boys and all the other kids whose parents or grandparents rented or owned cabins around the lake. So it was also a matter of pride, and a chance to impress the other freckled, sticky-fingered ten-year-olds in my brigade.
I looked around for a sign. I might’ve asked God for one, remembering when Annie had told me about the time she’d asked God to show her a sign he was real, and a hoodie perched on a toppling pile of clothes on her dresser had suddenly found its inability to resist gravity’s nagging pull. Neither the rich green trees nor the leaves of grass in the big field nor the bright purple foxgloves swaying in the wind gave me any indication of which being sitting on my shoulders I should listen to.
Although we had caught some toads since making our vows, I wonder now if those had counted and that we’d already broken our promise. Google says human hand oil is just as bad for the little red or gray toads that hopped between the stones along the bend in the Neversink River which we called the Binnekill. My grandpas would drive us back there, each of their wives opting not to come. We bounced in the backseat of the car as it drove over the big roots of the tall hemlock trees. Once we made it through the forest, closer to the riverbank, we ran off into the woods and changed into bright bathing suits. Even in August the river was freezing, so we played with the stones, skipping them, or sorting through them to find heart-shaped ones, or scraping them onto bigger stones and adding water to make face paint, and then smearing the stoney paint onto each other’s faces in polka dots or stripes. Or we stepped along the stones, carefully looking for the little toads, some as small as our fingernails.
The toads would hop in between the rocks, into the crevices, and find the tiny pathways of soft sand, where Annie and I would bend down and place a cupped hand over them, feeling the tiny toad bounce up against our hand, trying to get out. At first we’d scream and pull away the hand-trap, but by the third or fourth toad we were serious trappers, ready for the bouncy bang on the cell door of our fingers. Then we’d run over to our mother, sitting on the rotting old bench talking to her father or father-in-law, and ask her if she wanted to see our captive. We’d uncup the hand-trap and the toad would bounce out at her, landing on the bench or mossy forest floor and hop away. She never told us not to catch them. Maybe she thought frogs and toads were different enough too, or maybe she thought that managing our standing in the Wildlife Protection Club wasn’t her responsibility.
As I stood in the field, I noticed that the horde of kids had already grabbed nets and positioned themselves on the brim of the curving moss that bordered the water. I watched my brown-haired friend whose name I’ve long forgotten motion to me to come over and help her. The boy with the buzzcut who got stung by a wasp the first day, just like I had, who had walked with me to the camp clinic and sat in the hallway with me, his face red and eyes watery, just like mine, was now with a net in hand laughing. I watched them all, their frog-catching techniques equally terrible.
To catch a small creature in a net, no hook, no rod, no line, was an art form. First, it helped to select a long-poled net, unlike the ones with which we’d been provided, and hold it one-third of the way up the pole. Second, choose a target animal (for me, usually a salamander). To choose, look into the lake or pond and watch the animal long enough to evaluate how fast it is. Make a shadow over the water with your hand, and if it doesn’t notice, the better your chances for success. Third, time to catch. Slowly submerge your net in the water about two feet from the creature, and come closer. Here, it is important to accurately gauge how aware the animal is of its surroundings: Does it see the net? Is its head moving? Where are its eyes looking? If it seems tense, how tense? Look very carefully, does its tail have a slight quiver, or has it curved awkwardly in the middle (salamander-specific)? If so, it may be aware of the net. Evaluating how concerned the animal is will inform you how quickly to proceed with the swoop of your net. The more alert, the faster you must swoop. Why not always just swoop as fast as you can? Well, because slowly swooping the net around an animal you’ve deemed an idiot looks pretty cool to the other dorks hunched over the water next to you. You’re the salamander whisperer. You knew all along that it wasn’t going anywhere. Finally, pull the net forward, as fast as you need to, following through with your arms to secure the animal.
Looking around at my fellow campers, I did not see this. I saw a lot of nets slapping the water, some scooping randomly, and some nets even being thrown, like a badminton racket jokingly tossed toward a too-far birdie in the backyard. I walked over to the water and saw the small green-brown frogs in the pond, swimming away from the swish and plunk of nets, their legs for an instant bent up by their chests, butterfly stretching, and then extended five-times that length in two long streaks. These smaller ones seemed a little easier to catch than the giant bullfrogs of the lake that croaked through the night. The pond was also overcrowded with them, forcing some to venture out from the shelter of the reeds. I wouldn’t touch them, I thought, trying to comfort myself, but I knew that as you flipped the net inside out and coaxed frog into bucket, it was almost unavoidable to graze its skin with your toxic fingers.
My counselor was standing next to me, the wonderful sixteen-ness emulating off of her, an aura only noticeable by little girls and old men. She was so pretty, the perfect number of years older than me to be so cool doing absolutely nothing. She had smooth olive skin and a round, warm face and that teenagery edge of mischief and I could see, in the creases of her smile, all the things she had done that I hadn’t yet, all the times she’d chosen to listen to the devious little Fireball within her. On the last day of camp, kids were allowed to bring their counselor a funny piece of clothing that they’d have to wear the whole day, and in a few days I would bring her my Grandpa Karl’s fishing waders and she would stomp around uncomfortably in the huge boot-overalls all day, asking me if she could take them off and me laughing maniacally, no-no-no-ing her.
But on this day, she wore her same camp tee shirt and short jean shorts, not waders. Her hair was glossy brown and perfectly straight, standing in that field, staring off at the pond, probably counting the always-moving heads of the children, trying to ensure no one was in the pond instead of around it. I wanted to be her with every bone in my body and have a phone and a purse and a car and a boyfriend and not be someone who was about to do the worst thing they’d ever done, someone who made promises just to break them, someone who sentenced frogs to death-by-skin-oil, someone about to become the newest ex-member of the Wildlife Protection Club.
“What’s wrong?” she asked me.
“Nothing,” I said, and asked for a net.