Things Are Jumping

You can never predict in what situations you might find yourself.

Two years ago, my neighbor put an inflatable, above-ground pool in her back yard for her daughter. I wasn't a big fan of it (the pool, that is), but there wasn't much I could do. They let the pool go when summer ended. It slowly turned into a brownish pool of sludge that was disgusting to look at and an embarrasment when friends came over, but, still, as life problems go, not the worst in the world. Until the frogs came.

With no warning, on a random April day last year a large family of small frogs, all at once, took up residence in the pool. One of life's great mysteries is how a level of volume roughly matching that of air plane passing twenty feet overhead can come out of a critter roughly the size of half your thumb. But, as I painfully learned, it's a fact. We had a whole family of them living 20 feet from our bedroom, tantalizing close to our property line but just outside it. I tried to sleep through the noise, but it was like tyring to sleep through a passing train while laying on the tracks. I just can't decribe how loud the croaking was. If you record yourself screaming at the top of your lungs and play it at full volume while you and your nine closest friends scream your loudest alongside it, you can get a vague idea of the sound of one of these frogs. But we had 20. Surely our neighbor heard it too, I thought, and would someone get rid of them. But either she had the world's best set of earplugs or somehow found endearing the idea of her own varmit-infested backyard wasteland, because she never did anything about it.

I wasn't sure what to do. It was impossible to sleep at night (my earplugs weren't helping). I thought about asking my neighbor to clean the pool, but we had gotten in argument once because she was sitting on her porch at midnight talking loudly and I had asked her to keep it down. She told me she could do whatever she wanted on her property, so I anticipated that in her mind that included the right to have her own private amphibian zoo. I called city code enforcement, who referred me to the health department, who referred me to some other city department that didn't return my calls. I called the police department to report a noise complaint, and the officer, laughing hysterically, promised to come out, just as soon as he composed himself. I'm still waiting.

Anyway, Google returns surprisingly few search results for the phrase "frog poison." I found about 5 Ask Jeeves-type sites were others asked similar questions, but the answers were always to the effect of "you should enjoy the frogs, they keep pests away." But I'm reasaonably sure that whatever pests the frogs might be keeping away wouldn't be keeping me up at night. I would much rather these unnamed pests keep the frogs away.

Of course, I didn't actually want to kill the frogs, I just wanted them to go away. I though pouring salt in the pool might force them to find some other freshwater source. This succeeded in causing the frogs to leave for a couple of days, but they would just return, slightly pissed off and even louder, when the salt evaporated. And it took a whole lot of salt to do the trick, but this is how I spent most of last summer. I was spending an exhorbitant amount of money on salt, and I lived in constant fear of having to explain myself if my neighbor opened her back door as I stood in her yard with a pitcher of salt, but, hey, at least I was sleeping.

The frogs slowly built up a resistence to the salt. I knew I was going to have to come up with another plan when I poured a container of salt in the frogs' pool, only to see a group of frogs pouring sugar on my porch. I was not going to win the battle of baking supplies. I needed another method of getting rid of the frogs.

I read that the chemicals in Round-Up would do the trick, but I can definitely say that's a myth. I poured bleach in the pool. Nothing. I tried soap. Nope. As I sat sleepless with the TV turned at full volume at 4 a.m. one morning, it occurred to me to go out with barbecue thongs and catch them manually. There were a whole lot of frogs out there, but I proved surprisingly adept at the art of swimming pool frog catching with tongs (if I'm ever to win an Olympic medal, this will be the event), so that the noise steadily declined. Very few people come to my cook-outs once I started sharing this story, but this was a trade-off I could live with. In fact, I had mostly managed to erradicate the problem by the time the frogs went wherever they go for the winter.

They came back last week, and took my sleep with them. After about 8 calls, and just as many sleepless nights, I finally reached someone with the city who agreed to come out and tell my neighbor to do something about the pool. This morning, I watched with glee as my neighbor deflated it and hauled it away. It was a moment, from a pure joy standpoing, stood second only to my wedding day. Until I remembered that the frogs certainly would have jumped out of the pool by the time it was hauled away, and will now blame me for the loss of their habitat and spend the rest of their lives plotting their revenge. Right outside my bedroom window.