“Frogs.” My wife looked at the pond to our right, the pond hugging the narrow dirt road splitting the woods. “Do you hear them?”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to admit my lesser hearing. Not when it comes to nature.
“Do you hear the frogs? Don’t you hear them?” she asked again.
I rolled down the truck window. I could hear something. I shut the truck off, and immediately the drone of the engine was replaced with the chattering and clattering chorus of the pond. “Yeh,” I said, “I hear them.”
It was the first Sunday in April. Easter Sunday. With the temperature nudging 80˚, we went for a ride. Where the blacktop ended and the choice was three dirt roads that snaked away through the woods, we took the left option. I had taken it before, on spring fishing outings.
For the next mile, the road slightly dipped and climbed, and twisted a bit, with the lake only a narrow strip of woods away. Cabins were nestled among the trees. Well, not quite nestled in early April for there were no leaves to nestle them.
There were a handful of ponds on either side the dirt lane. After hearing the frogs, we sat for a long time, and the chorus grew louder. The frogs grew braver.
“Why can’t we see them?” my wife asked. And no more had she posed the question when the dimples of mouths and eyes started breaking the water surface.
There were bulging eyes everywhere. As I tried to photograph the frogs—what little of them there was to photograph—some frogs would shoot forward as if to chase a nearby frog. It seemed there was more going on here than just singing for joy in the choir on a summery April afternoon.
My wife shot a short video, the sweeping picture of the pond accompanied with the sound, its decibels climbing the longer we sat quiet on the road. It wasn’t a peeping sound. It was a constant clicking noise with no rhythm and yet a constant beat. So it was not the spring peepers’ shrill whistles, but rather the wood frogs’ sharp and raspy clack and perhaps the tree frogs’ fast-repeating calls of quank. Though not an expert in herpetology, I’d put my money on the wood frog.
It was one of those first days of real spring when you could have sat on a log next to the pond, closed your eyes, and let your ears soak up the rebirth of a season.
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