Tadpoles

My grandparents’ five acres in Lake Forest Park were immediately adjacent to a new school.  A fence marked the boundary of my grandparents’ property.  On the other side of this fence was a wooded slope of several hundred feet which dropped down for a distance and then terminated in a cut bank that had been part of the excavation necessary to produce the level ground upon which the school had been built.   At the base of the cut bank there was a thicket of immature alders.  In the spring and through the early summer these alders were submerged for several inches up their slender trunks in water that ran off the slope and seeped up from beneath its base and gathered at the edge of the cut bank.  It was the home of a huge number of Pacific Tree Frogs. Somewhere I had learned what the eggs of this type of frog looked like.  A little spring-time wading in this frog haven had revealed that the place was thick with frog eggs. I had collected some, had taken them back to my mother’s parents at weekend’s end and had put them in a large jar full of water collected from the frog pond.  I was careful not to leave them out in the sun.

What I had in that jar were several strands of what appeared to be gelatin, within which were little dark spots.  Closer examination showed the imbedded spots to be tiny black spheres.  Even closer examination showed that spheres had two hemispheres.  They looked like tiny planets, one hemisphere was cream colored and the other was black.  I put the jar on the ancient marble-top table that sat against the wall opposite the fireplace in my grandparents’ front room.  At first the eggs just stayed eggs.  They remained dark on one side and cream colored on the other and they remained within their envelope of gelatin. The jar of eggs had begun to seem to be the biological equivalent of the watched pot when almost imperceptible changes began to appear.  The spherical nature of the eggs had begun to change.  They assumed a more distended oblong character.  At one end of the newly shaping oblong mass a point developed; at the other end there was something more blunt or rounded.  Soon two tiny black points could be seen in the blunt end.  The pointed end clearly had begun to assume the character of a tail.  And then they began to wiggle inside their enclosures.  And then one day they were all out of the gelatin and were swimming about as tiny, perfectly shaped miniatures of tadpoles. 

Immediately the question arose, “what do tadpoles eat?”  That turned out to be a question to which no one could supply an answer.  Since the appearance of my amphibious children had occurred on a Thursday, and since I was going to visit my Lake Forest Park grandparents on Friday, the only rational solution to the problem seemed to be to return the babies to the place where they had been spawned.

With mixed feelings I went down the hill to the schoolyard that Saturday morning after my Friday evening arrival when it had been too dark to go to the frog nursery. I gently poured the little creatures back where I had gotten them. They wriggled off into the few inch deepness of their tiny native inland sea.  On numerous subsequent summer evenings I always wondered if I knew any of the individuals that made up the nighttime music of that little swamp.  The sounds of frogs in the spring, especially the little high pitched voiced ones were always special after that.  That chorus always remained like that other, early spring dawn chorus of the birds that I had once heard when I was young. Whenever I heard the springtime sounds of the frogs it always took me elsewhere in place and time.  And, like the chorus of the birds, it was always something that I could conjure from memory into tangible reality.