Where Have All The Toads Gone?


     As my father explained in my pre-kindergarten days, a man was drumming up in the clouds and that is what caused the thunder. One summer day I caught a small toad and put its wart bubbled flesh body into a metal tub. I proceeded to play with my Matchbox cars when the skies grew dark and the man began drumming. Heaven opened and began pouring buckets. In a quick flash I ran into my house as torrential rains poured down. Suddenly I remembered the toad! I yelled to my mother , “The toad, the toad!” She asked, “What toad?” “The toad in the bucket” I cried. We went to the den and opened the window above where the bucket was and the toad was trying desperately to jump out but the walls were too high. Fortunately, our neighbor, Ronnie Higgins, a teenager at the time, was running around in the rain in his shorts enjoying the storm. We yelled out to him and he came over and released the small toad from the bucket. My concern diminished as the drummer played on. The toad was free!

      In our backyard, spring was always the return of the toads. I didn’t pause long to think where they came from but there they were leaping along the stockade fence and bouncing among the bushes. One day when my cousin Scott Dailey was visiting we decided to see how many we could catch. I always loved it when Scott came to visit. He didn’t have a father due to divorce and he was the only boy in his family, the youngest, with three older sisters just like me, though I still had a father.  We found an empty cardboard box that had once housed a case of Narragansett Bay beer bottles that my father had certainly drained with his man friends and began catching toads, placing them in the box, filling the vacancy left by glass.

      Before I was born my father had put up a stockade fence along the back yard. There were left over pieces so he created a shed with the surplus materials that stood in the far left corner of our yard. Scott and I named it Fort Hoptoad and as Lieutenant Daily and Captain Meadows, we moved in to set up our barracks and attend to the serious business of catching toads. We set up a chart and pasted different colored stars to keep track of our catches for the day. As 6th graders we were not getting different colored stars glued to our papers in elementary school anymore, so we found a new use for them. Falling apart next to the shed was an old wooden step ladder. The cross slats of wood that served as support for the front legs struck us as the symbol for Fort Hoptoad. They made a long x with a cross slat at the bottom and top.  I broke it away from the rest of the ladder and proceeded to find an old can of aquamarine paint from our basement that was left over from the painting of our backyard patio some years before. We placed it against the fence to dry and went off in search of more toads. Always at days end, we would tip the cardboard box over and let the toads hop away. 


       My father expressed his love not in words but actions however infrequent. One day I came home from school and he was in the backyard. When I entered the yard he nodded his head and motioned a shift with his eyes toward Fort Hoptoad and to my great surprise the shed now had a window with a black screen! Somehow my father had cut out several slats of wood from the shed, used them to frame the window, after putting up a mesh of black screen. Suddenly Fort Hoptoad could breathe and look out on the world. With his help I was able to hang up the dried Fort Hoptoad symbol and I was ready for Scott’s next visit which I looked forward to with much anticipation.

***

  August 2022 I’m deep in the North Cascades wilderness of Washington State with my childhood friend John Webber and we’re backpacking down a trail and getting hungry and ready for lunch. We soon find a creek running along side the trail and decide it’s a good place to stop. I drop my backpack and get ready to pump water when I suddenly see a fairly large toad hopping along. I’m struck by this as I haven’t seen one in such a long time and have thought on occasion about toads and the Fort Hoptoad days and how they disappeared from my backyard beginning in my teenaged years. Down beyond the last row of houses out behind Cottage Street where I lived growing up was a place called The Riverside, which is odd because it was a pond. I remember going down there and seeing these old rusted overturned cars on its banks and painted turtles sunning themselves on logs that were sticking out of the water. Some years later I made the connection that the toads most likely used this as a water source, a breeding ground and sanctuary until the land was bought, the pond filled in, and new houses put up on new roads with names like Pheasant Lane and Saddle Club Road, thus driving the toads away. I became transfixed on this toad as my mind wandered back in time realizing that this prehistoric reptilian toad was at great odds to survive in the 21st century of America and how this deep wilderness of the North Cascades was one such surviving place that was congruent to toad habitat and I sat in this rare place of solace from strip malls, suburbs and stadium colosseums and felt tranquil with this toad. 

   Upon returning home I looked into this toad I encountered in North Cascades National Park and found out the being is known as a western toad which looks very similar to the American toad which I grew up with in the eastern part of America in Massachusetts. From Global Ecology and Conservation magazine I found out that “American toads require a semi-permanent freshwater pond or pool with shallow water in which to breed, to gather their water supplies in times of drought or as a routine, and for their early development,” which supported my thoughts about the Riverside. I also discovered through an article titled “Why are amphibian populations declining?” from USGS science for a changing world that, “Amphibians are good indicators of significant environmental changes. Amphibians, unlike people, breathe at least partly through their skin, which is constantly exposed to everything in their environment. Consequently, their bodies are much more sensitive to environmental factors such as disease, pollution, toxic chemicals, ultraviolet radiation, and habitat destruction. The worldwide occurrences of amphibian declines and deformities could be an early warning that some of our ecosystems, even seemingly pristine ones, are seriously out of balance.” Looking into this, I was left to ponder about Fort Hoptoad in the 1970s and the joy of abundant American toads in my own backyard and this singular western toad that stood before me. Global Ecology and Conservation also stated that, “The influence of climate change on amphibians has been largely debated in the last two decades, and their effects are still controversial.” I’m not a scientist. In fact, I got a D for my sophomore year in Biology in high school and quickly veered away from the Chemistry and Physics pathway to college. What I do know is that there were more toads in my backyard than I could catch in a day when I was 10 and 11 years old and by my late teens I rarely saw one when I was mowing the lawn. Although climate change was not front page news back then, certainly the early repercussions were showing themselves to me in the absence of toads. And what of this controversy I wondered. Perhaps it’s because we humans do not always want to look at ourselves warts and all, so looking at toads is like looking in the mirror and we do not often like what we see. Toads make for a difficult mirror in which to see ourselves. 

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Richard Meadows is a Nature loving poet and adventurer who loves music driven road trips . He is a hiker, backpacker, kayaker and bicycle rider who loves being outdoors. Some of Richard’s educational adventures have been receiving a BA in English and Philosophy, an M.Ed. in Special Education and most recently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing of Poetry at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado.