A Frog's Fire

Tonight I hear frogs. I turn up my radio- I still hear frogs. I turn it off to listen.

Outside my canvas wall tent a small piece of juniper-sagebrush desert stretches out rather abruptly to the canyon's edge. There, this short, but steep embankment is rugged and riddled with various patchy desert grasses and scrub brush. It meets the edge of the river across a blanket of basalt that flowed a few millennia ago; it now bares its porcelain black, buckled skin to the elements. Shaped by the age old seasonal snow melt in conjunction with the newly human interfaced irrigation district, the consistent channel is only about 10 feet wide, fed a cold fresh flow by the amazing groundwater system. Inside this tight channel it runs deep and green, with the solidified basalt shoulders extending out flat towards the canyon walls.

The sun has just dropped in its usual glorious manner, a painter tired of the brush and akin to splashing bucket loads of color across the naked canvas. Yellow becomes red; pink turns to purple… then slowly it all washes into gray.

So far, the chorus has barely begun its awkward, humble start. At first, the chirps are singular, erratic, and questioning. As if the instruments are out of tune and the audience is early, I find myself essentially listening to the show long before the curtain has even been drawn closed to invite in the guests. The show isn’t a show, yet, but instead the chatty commencement of the players finding their places.

As darkness takes over, the lights dimming to signal the show drawing near, the late arrivals are still busy squawking their tune up, but the rest are silent. Eerily, the silence grows until the background disappears, and there is nothing… for a breath. A few notes awkwardly erupt, trying to begin the sync, and a few hit their mark early.

This beginning is like adolescence all over again. I swear I can hear their poor voices cracking and their little air sac letting the BASS start to drop, if you now what I mean. Spurts of squawking chirps trying to find accurate pitch, tone, rhythm potentially attracting mates they may match up with.

So, the first round of this performance tonight is working out to be an amazingly syncopated hum of chirps. The sound is quite deafening, a roar even, yet the subtle contrast of the two sides of the river, the upstream rock outcrop and downstream raft-sized island clustered with willow thickets have both begun to carve out their own places. Everything's coming alive and joining into the circular rhythm. The constant building unstoppable; a great crescendo never quits.

Then it came. The silence. It happened all of a sudden. There wasn’t even the slightest little peep.

I strained to figure out why, maybe hear something. Did they hear an intruder? How could they, they were rocking like AC/DC? What made them stop together? Had I missed a certain intonation? Are they so rhythmically advanced that when the tune and beat match a certain DNA trigger they cut off?

Seconds felt like minutes before a few chirps happened again. And slowly, it all repeated itself, with a greater speed and dexterity to reach the final- shockingly silent moment a half hour later. Their trances, though, grew stronger, naturally blending the distinct areas of where the frogs sang from along the stream side. Each unique location was contributing to the larger flavor of this masterpiece.

It seems as if they were working to the flow of the water, the constant drum of the liquid march downhill. I stare into fires; I can’t let go of the flicker and flash of flames. Whitewater is much the same way, dancing and popping it frothy body around, or swirling it’s clear fingers around rocks into eddy lines or racing over clean glassy waves. There is such a deep draw to this kinetic energy acting out right before my very eyes that I am forever drawn in.

People, too. Full of a certain draw, magnetic forces create a natural combustion of energy. It’s amazing when you find it, but too hard to keep around. Dreams become clouds wandering overhead at night.

Tonight, listening to these frogs, I drift off to sleep and imagine the strength it would take for such small bodies to fill the canyon with so much sound that it spilled over onto me. I find a blanket of hope that they do this every night for awhile, as I should eternally be content to spend entire evenings just as I had tonight. Staring into the frog’s fire, reflecting as the moon slowly slides across a river, the sky reflects the charming, charging sound of frogs.