Tadpoles and Tractor Puddles

One thing I hate about mowing is killing toads. It happened the first time I mowed this year. Too late, I noticed from my perch atop the John Deere, a startled hop. Then, over my shoulder, I saw him split in half like a pitted avocado—tough outer skin, dull innards, no blood or bone to be seen. He didn’t feel a thing.

I’ve run over a nest of rabbits while mowing, too, and not felt half as bad—maybe because they eat my vegetable garden. But the toads just sit under the leaves of my strawberry patch and clean the area of bugs. Hopping mysteriously around beneath the dense canopy, they keep my dog occupied so that she doesn’t run down the road and chase the neighbor’s kids while I’m pulling weeds. Toads greet me silently on the sidewalk when I take the dog out to do her business late at night—little, anonymous, unpaid sentinels in the dark, keeping the house as free of ants as they can.

When I lived in Maryland, I used to walk through the yard, down the bank, across the road and through a large field to get to a wooded valley through which a river flowed. On the way, I would often pass a puddle of water in a ditch made by the wheels of a tractor.

I used to find toad tadpoles in that tractor ditch, and I came across toad tadpoles again today, where I live now in Wisconsin, in a ditch on the side of a cornfield at a right-angle turn in the road, where said dog has paused to drink nearly every day this past week—thanks to near-daily afternoon storms—during our early morning walk. The tadpoles scattered away from her curled tongue like specks of night in the glittering water, as benign as the migrating skates my husband and I found ourselves swimming amongst one summer day in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New Jersey: skates tipping under swells as if someone had given life to shadows, moving perpendicular to the two of us as we bodysurfed the waves; we found ourselves engulfed. Alarmed, we left the water and watched them journey by, like so many drowned kites. So, too, these tiny larvae, bursting like a firework from my dog’s point of entry in this three-inch deep puddle. She draws back, confused, not understanding what water can do except fill the backwards scoop of her tongue to quench her thirst.

Sure enough, my Audubon Nature Encyclopedia (copyright 1965, acquired in 1995 from a former boyfriend who traded a futon for the 12-volume set), maintains, “The eggs of most toads are laid in long gelatinous strings and deposited in shallow waters, often in temporary roadside ditches, and tadpoles emerge rapidly.” I read on, halfway through the entry on Spadefoot toads until I reach the reason that this set of encyclopedias is still my first choice for information, even post-internet: its nonfiction is studded with value judgments, unapologetic appreciation for the natural world. It says, at the end of a paragraph on the elliptical pupils of Spadefoot toads versus the vertical pupils of Bufo Americanus: “The eyes of all toads are notable for their beauty.”

Who wrote this? Who has looked into the eyes of a toad long enough to note their allure? “—G.P.” is listed at the end of the article, and I thank G.P for this flicker of pleasure in a world that can sometimes seem all business. G.P. is not alone in his habit of ogling the oglers of toads. In George Orwell's essay, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” Orwell says a toad’s eye “is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.”

If it keeps raining this summer like it has, I expect I’ll be killing more toads. Our lawn, usually by this time brown and matted as a scouring pad, too painful for bare feet, is, as I write this, in need of a mow. But also, with continued rain, the breeding pools carved by tractors at planting time, now undisturbed while the corn grows, will stay full the five to ten weeks it will take for the tadpoles to become adults. So, in that paradoxical way in which humans both aid and destroy nature, I can be as sure toads' trills will reach my ears every night from May to September as I can that their eyes will haunt my dreams like souls.