Tuesday, July 13, 2004

World's Smallest Frog; World's Biggest Stink

At the moment, I can’t stand the smell of myself and I’m really grumpy…and it’s all because of a frog.

It all started last year at this time when I was taking my daily walk and happened to notice a tiny dot hopping across the road in front of me. When I approached it, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was the tiniest frog I’d ever seen. I’d seen little tree frogs before, but this frog made them look huge in comparison. Certain that I’d discovered some rare, mutant pygmy breed, I rushed home and called my mother.

“It probably was just some kind of a bug,” she said in a tone that suggested she thought I’d had too much sun. “I grew up in the country and never saw a frog that small.”

By the time I finished talking to her, she’d just about convinced me that the teeny frog I’d seen had been just a heat-induced hallucination. I decided to put the whole episode out of my mind and not think about the frog again. And I didn’t think about it…until two days ago.

I was walking my dog on a hiking trail that bordered a marsh when I suddenly caught a glimpse of what looked like two mini-frogs hopping along the edge of the trail. Quickly, I bent down and scooped up one of them into my hand.

I stood there a moment, afraid to unfold my fingers and see what I’d actually caught. I mean, I’d grabbed the tiny hopping whatever-it-was so fast, I didn’t really know what I was grabbing, so for all I knew, some hideous spider probably was preparing to sink its fangs into my palm.

Slowly, I opened my hand. There sat a tiny brown frog, no bigger than the fingernail on my pinky. “I’m going to take you home with me, little frog,” I said. “And after I show you to my husband so he can tell my mother that you really do exist, I’ll bring you back here and let you go. Deal?”

I gently closed my hand around the frog and continued to walk. I could feel it hopping around on my palm and trying to squeeze out between my fingers. I’m extremely ticklish, so I decided I’d better find something to carry the frog in before I dropped it.

Well, normally this particular trail is littered with at least a couple empty bottles or cans, but my luck, on this day it looked as if a squadron of maids had descended upon it just before I arrived.

I walked down to the marsh to see if perhaps a fisherman had left a container of some sort behind, but the area was spotless. That’s when I noticed a big lily pad floating near the shore. For some reason, I thought it might make a good cup.

With one hand holding my dog’s leash and the other still holding the frog, I picked up the slippery lily pad and tried to fold it into the shape of a cup or a cone. Finally, after a dozen failed attempts and a lot of praying that a staple gun suddenly would drop down from the sky, I managed to transform the lily pad into a crude pouch. Carefully, I emptied the frog into it, then clasped my hand over the top.

“Wait till you see what I have!” I said to my husband the minute I stepped into the house. “It’s the smallest frog in existence! Now my mother will believe me!”

I grabbed a clear plastic container and put the lily pad into it, then closed the lid. The lily pad, because I no longer was holding it in a death grip, slowly began to unfold. By then, my husband’s curiosity was piqued, so he came out to the kitchen, stood behind me and peered over my shoulder. Within a few seconds, the lily pad had fully opened.

“Wow!” my husband said. “That really IS a tiny frog! It’s so small, I can’t even see it!”

I stared at the naked lily pad. The frog wasn’t there. I figured it must have escaped way back at the marsh when I’d tried to transfer it from my hand into the makeshift pouch.

“Do you see him in there?” my husband, leaning closer to get a better look, asked.

“Of course not!” I snapped. “There’s nothing in there! Obviously the frog escaped!”

He gave me a condescending look. “Sure it did, sweetheart. Your little microscopic frog escaped. I understand.”

That did it. The next day, I headed back to the same area where I’d caught the frog. I was determined to find another one and prove to both my mother and my husband that I wasn’t seeing spots before my eyes. I realized that the odds of ever finding another frog were about a gazillion to one, but still, I had to try.

I was so busy looking down at the ground for frogs as I walked, I never saw the skunk…until it was too late. My dog and I had just crested a hill and there, sitting right in the middle of the trail on the other side, was a skunk. It took me a few seconds to realize what it actually was because I’d never expected to see a skunk out in broad daylight. This skunk, however, did not look very healthy.

I took a few steps backward and yanked on my dog’s leash. The skunk moved toward us. That’s when my dog decided to stop and bark at the uninvited guest. Everything happened so fast, I didn’t actually see it happen…but I sure smelled it.

My dog and I bolted back to the car, but when we arrived, I decided it might not be such a hot idea for us to get in and stink it up. So we stood outside and waited for a hiker or biker to come by. I figured that if one of them had a cell phone, I could call my husband and tell him to bring rubber gloves, paper towels and the bottle of “Skunk Off” I’d kept handy ever since the day my other dog became intimately acquainted with a skunk in our back yard.

Usually the area where I park my car is bustling with hikers and bikers, but on this day, there wasn’t a soul around. Finally, after what seemed like 10 hours (and 200 mosquito bites) later, a guy on a mountain bike came by.

“Do you have a cell phone?” I called out to him.

“Yeah,” he said, and kept on pedaling right past us. He probably wanted to get away from the stink.

I had no choice. I loaded the dog into the car and we headed home.

Now, an entire bottle of Skunk Off and endless hours of scrubbing later, my dog and I still bear the faint essence of “Eau de Skunk.” And the worst part is that after everything I went through, I still don’t have any proof whatsoever that my itty-bitty frogs exist.

“I think I have it all figured out,” my husband said to me this morning (after telling me that I still stink). “ We’ve been invaded by tiny aliens from another planet and they’ve disguised themselves as frogs. Their protector, a mean alien bodyguard, is disguised as a skunk, and the reason why he looks sick is because he can’t adjust to the earth’s atmosphere.”

Nobody likes a smart aleck.