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On Finding Joy in Frogs and Spring

Delicate yet resolute, green-legged hope kicks through the darkness.

Dorothy Woodend 1 Apr 2022TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend is the culture editor for The Tyee.

Spring is here. The signs are everywhere. The other day, I walked by a tree so raucous with birds that it looked like it might just lift off the ground and take flight.

The crows are also beginning to get busy, making low crooning noises and chasing each other around. Soon enough it will be running, screaming, dive bombing season. Hooray! It’s springtime, when everyone lives in fear from the terror in the skies.

When I was a wee wiener, Kootenay winters seemed to last about 15 months of the year, and occasionally felt like they would find a way to squash the warmer seasons, like a Zamboni crushing flowers. The first place that bare earth emerged from the snowpack was directly beneath the trees. I remember patches of brown, crusty dirt growing in diameter, day by day, like a slowly developing photograph.

After a few weeks, a faint green fuzz would appear atop the brown. As a child, I was so desperate to see this new growth, I would physically will it forth, summoning the tiny new shoots with all the energy I had in my small body.

If winter was a prison, then spring was a get out of jail free card. In B.C.’s interior, there would sometimes occur one extremely dramatic day, when winter finally packed it in and decamped for more arctic climes and new warmth came bounding in.

The first day you could shed your stupid boots and bulky winter coat and emerge, like a butterfly freed from the suffocating cocoon of winter clothing, was a moment of supreme joy. Even now, decades later, some of this effervescent fever lingers still when the days get longer and warmer.

There is a touch of this fizz right now in Vancouver. Here, the demarcation between the seasons can often feel like a long slow elision. But right now, spring is in full flight, ooooweeeee!

Look out, people. We’re right in the thick of it as buds burst forth, crocuses be croaking, and daffodils be ‘dilling. Giant poofs of cherry blossoms crowd the streets and rain petals everywhere. I always imagine that the cherry trees exploding into bloom would make some kind of noise, akin to the opening of a Pillsbury dough can, a suppressed whoosh of sugary air and then billowing yum. Layers of clothes are shucked off and even the dudes who insist on wearing shorts all year long hike up their drawers a little bit more.

But key things are missing. And those things are frogs.

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'Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment,' wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay, 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.' Illustration by Dorothy Woodend.

In spite of the daffodil yellows, crocus mauves and cherry trees’ confectionary pink, Vancouver spring sorely lacks small, greenish brown amphibians. In more rural parts of B.C., the mating calls of our froggy friends are some of the earliest indicators of the change in season. Even before the snow fully abated in the Kootenays, the sound of frogs was a sign that spring was finally on its way and winter could get stuffed.

My favourite place in the entire world as a youngster was the pond on my grandparents’ farm. It wasn’t simply a brackish bit of a water, but an entire universe filled with epic drama. Water striders, garter snakes, giant water bugs (also known as toe biters) and of course frogs — the stars of the show — were all wrapped up in stories of violence and passion. There were dramas of eating, avoiding being eaten, looking for love, finding it. The turning wheel of life and death writ small enough to see tadpoles turning from mobile black dots into adults in full flesh with gold-flecked eyes and slippery skin. I loved frogs with fanatical passion. And I still do.

When the Earth begins to warm, frogs sing out in chorus, beginning the search for some sexy times in the form of prospective mates. You don’t hear frog song so much in the city, although other indicators of spring are in full bloom.

So, why do I miss frogs, most especially this spring? Maybe because, in the face of ongoing calamity, there is something particularly poignant about their return. It reminds me of George Orwell’s 1946 essay "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad."

As Orwell wrote, “The spring is commonly referred to as ‘a miracle,’ and during the past five or six years this worn-out figure of speech has taken on a new lease of life. After the sort of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment.”

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The return of spring is communal and liberating. It pays no mind to the vicissitudes of everyday life. Illustration by Dorothy Woodend.

Then, as now, when the wages of war were and are being made duly apparent, spring still came somehow. In the face of human atrocities and conflict, the Earth endured. As Orwell notes, there is something deeply democratic about the return of spring. It needs no permission. It pays no mind to the daily news cycle. It doesn’t worry about housing prices or spiralling inflation. It doesn’t have to pay rent. It just arrives and starts singing. It is free and available to everyone, embodied in small, horned-up amphibians.

In B.C., a couple of the most common frogs are the Pacific tree frog and the boreal chorus frog. There have been concentrated efforts to return frogs to ponds and forests in the city. The most likely places to hear frog song is deep in the woods at UBC’s Pacific Spirit Park or marshier sections of Trout Lake.

In search of more frogs, you might have to venture a bit further afield and pay a visit to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary in Delta. It’s a wild scene out there, full of ducks, geese, and all kinds of shore birds. But keep an ear cocked for the dulcet tones of the frog brethren, lifting their voices, and trying not to get eaten in the process.

Frogs have been around far longer than humans, hopping around the globe from the top of Earth to the bottom. Scientists have even discovered the fossilized remains of frogs in the arctic. Their gossamer skin, gummy toes and huge solemn eyes have always reminded me of skinny human babies. Their thin-skinned sensitivity to the environment has placed frogs on the frontline of climate change. Their plummeting numbers are sometimes used as a harbinger of bad things yet to come. But even in the face of environmental degradation and human intervention, they find a way to continue.

Of all of the news stories these past few weeks, the only one that brought a blush of happiness was the discovery of two new species of glass frogs. If you’ve never heard of glass frogs, don’t waste another single second, go and look at some photographs of these extraordinary little beings. Translucent bellies, internal organs on display, tiny hearts pumping wildly — there is something so delicate and yet so resolute about their very existence.

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There’s something miraculous about how frog species have endured across human civilization, even predating our time on this planet. Illustration by Dorothy Woodend.

That these two new species were discovered near a mining site in Ecuador adds some pathos, but at least they’re still with us. Closer to home, frogs are also on the frontlines of environmental clashes, taking the blame for the Trans Mountain cost overruns.

Given their longstanding presence on the planet, it’s little wonder that different human civilizations have adopted frogs to stand in for all manner of ideas. They have been invested with symbolic value as good luck charms, sex symbols, omens, plagues, messengers from beyond. Whatever we need them to do or be for us, we variously assign, and then wait impatiently for them to deliver the goods.

Frogs, and their rougher buddies toads, have popped up in literary form in The Wind and The Willows and Frog and Toad, and on television in The Muppet Show. In all of these cultural artefacts, our froggy friends stand in for human travails, contending with a complicated, confusing world. They do their best. But as Kermit once thoughtfully noted, well, sang actually, “It’s not easy being green.”

I hear you, celadon-coloured ones.

But is there something that we might learn from frogs, without asking them to carry the burden of human dreams and desires? Is it enough to simply witness and honour their return, without demanding they be anything other than what they are?

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A portrait of stoicism and resilience in uncertain times. Illustration by Dorothy Woodend.

In this moment of supreme uncertainty, when so much of the human world appears to be fast unravelling, it’s important and even necessary to look to other realities, like the return of spring to regain a sense of what is both immediate and eternal. To look around, listen and fully see the world turning flowered summersaults in front of our eyes.

As Orwell wrote in the spring of 1946: “I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.”

Humans will keep on doing terrible stuff to each other and to the planet, but in the face of the Manichean march of the current news cycle, with one terrible thing after another staggering forth, some slender green bits of hope are edging their way through the darkness.

When the sun lingers long in the afternoon, and suddenly a sliver of one’s younger, lighter self returns, waste no time, get on your bike or take the bus out to the nearest patch of forest, marsh or swampy area.

I will be there, waiting for you friends and listening hard for the song of the frogs.  [Tyee]

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