Ribbit
I have had an episodic relationship over the years with frogs. As a kid who spent six of his first seven years of life in the tropics, frogs were a daily part of life. I’m sure they were all over the place in Venezuela, but where I remember first encountering them with high frequency was in that little tropical valley in Costa Rica, where we lived for two years. I’m not being entirely accurate when I say, I encountered frogs, because what I was really encountering were very large toads. In the tropics it is quite normal for it to rain almost every afternoon for about 20 minutes. My mother used to say that it rained just enough to wash off the streets. but while the streets may have gotten washed off, it also brought out the toads. Toads would come out of the undergrowth and hop onto the roadways presumably, for the warmth that most cold-blooded creatures seek to regulate their bodies. It was a normal every day sight to see toads on the roads and to see flattened toads in the middle of the road. I don’t know exactly how large these toads were, but they would be big enough so that it would take two hands to hold onto them. By the standards of anything you would normally see here in the United States, these were very big toads. For some reason, the thing about toads and frogs that always left me wondering was how they managed to stay in the water so much and not get water inside their bodies. I suppose the answer to that is in the old expression “tighter than frog’s ass.”
When we lived in Wisconsin, it wasn’t really in the country, but it was reasonably non-urban and I remember seeing frogs and tadpoles on a fairly regular basis in the local streams and ponds. By having lived through my Costa Rican toad experience, I don’t think Wisconsin frogs were a big deal to me. I’ve owned a number of houses over the years with swimming pools, and the water and pools always attracts nighttime critters of all sorts that end up usually in the skimmer basket. I’ve pulled out many a dead frog from those pool skimmers and I’m not really squeamish about it, though I can’t imagine anybody likes picking up a dead frog.
In my travels around the world, I have occasionally dined at a fine restaurant that offered frog legs on the menu. I know the old story that they just taste like chicken but nonetheless, my years of toad and frog interaction have always prevented me from finding any appeal whatsoever in the idea of eating frogs legs. I’m not sure that I know what frogs are for in the ecosystem but I’m pretty sure that they’re not for human consumption.
I have described our hilltop out here in San Diego as being high chaparral, which is to say that it’s a fairly dry climate, not desert-like but dry. I have an abundance of succulents in my garden, but succulents are for the most part drought tolerant plants that store water, specifically because they live in a climate where it does not rain every afternoon at 2 PM. Some who are not used to the San Diego climate may think San Diego is a tropical climate but technically, it’s a subtropical climate. Up here in the north county of San Diego it’s even drier than in the rest of the county, and without watering, the summer months will yield fairly barren, hillsides, or at best a hillside with that golden grass that is so common in California and gives the state it’s moniker as the Golden State. When I bought this house, it had neither a swimming pool nor a hot tub. I’ve been a regular user of both aquatic features in prior homes that I’ve owned, but I was pretty sure that I didn’t want a swimming pool to bother with in retirement. By the same token, I was certain that living in California meant that I must have a hot tub to soak my weary and aging bones and that I would use it quite regularly. I also knew from prior experience that what I didn’t want was to have one of those hot tubs that has an insulated cover on it to keep the heat in. I know myself well enough to know that the deterrent of having to wrangle with a cover, even one that was power driven, was such that it would decrease my use and enjoyment of a hot tub. So instead, I decided that I would put in an outdoor hot tub without a cover, but would also only be heating it up when I wanted to use it.
In the early days of living on this hilltop, I used to think that getting up in the morning and going into the hot tub at six or seven AM was a wonderful way to make use of this luxurious amenity, and that it was a great way to start my day. Once I started seeing my propane bills, I began to realize that heating up the hot tub after a cool mountain overnight was rather silly because the hot tub warmed itself during the day and was far easier to heat to the appropriate level later in the day than it was in the brisk early morning. Therefore I started putting the hot tub schedule for circulating the water such that it would operate between one and four PM and I knew that I would have to manually turn on the heater when I wanted to use it. It takes an hour to heat it up to the appropriate temperature which is still fairly low by hot tub standards since I tend to keep it between 95° and 100° and never take it up to the typical hot tub temperature of 104°. I’ve gotten very used to this program, and I probably use the hot tub two or three times a week with Kim joining me once every three months since hot tubbing is not her thing. Family and guests who come stay with us are more likely to use the hot tub than either Kim or I, and as long as I remind them that they need to give me notice before the hot tub will be ready, everyone enjoys it. I have never once regretted not having this built without a cover.
One of the stranger things about our hot tub is that it seems to have attracted frogs. I’m not sure why I find that strange since there are plenty of lizards in the neighborhood and enough snakes to keep me on alert when I walk around, but I always think of frogs as being near streams and ponds, not really hanging out in such an arid landscape. Of course the hot tub and it’s small rocky waterfall that feeds it, is more like a pond than I thought. The result has been an abundance of frogs that can be heard once the sun goes down. In fact, these little frogs of about one inch in length are noisier than the bigger toads I’ve encountered. On some summer nights when we drive into our driveway we can hear the frogs singing in chorus for whatever reason frogs sing. I suppose it’s some sort of mating ritual, but it also strikes me as somewhat dangerous for the frogs since they are letting any critter in the area know where they can be found. What that means is that when some noise or motion comes to the attention of the frogs, that singing will suddenly stop, and there will be the quietness of night, where there had been a very loud chirping noise a moment before.
I suppose it’s a good thing that frogs don’t bother me, because I love my hot tub and these little frogs out here seems to love my hot tub as well. That all works just fine for me and judging by the loud “Ribbit” that I hear each evening it must be working for them as well.