HAMILTON SPECTATOR (Ontario) 15 June 06 When Death comes for me, it'll be dressed as a frog (Lorraine Sommerfeld)
Long before iPods and portable DVD players, endless road trips meant playing the License Plate Game, I Spy, and She Started It.
Much to my mother's disgust, we also had a few variations of our own. We played Spot The Roadkill, with higher points designated for the more rare animals.
My sons are particularly enamoured of this sport, and I figure a renewed lesson in highway mortality is never a wasted one.
The game gets more exotic as you head away from the city, where usually the overwhelming number of sightings is a squirrel plastered flat, its tail waving in the breeze like a white flag hoisted too late.
You soon realize that raccoons are a dime a dozen, that groundhogs are none too fleet of foot and cats should be kept inside. My parents once had a huge deer clear the hood of their car in Saskatchewan, giving my dad a story to dine out on for years. I once sat immobilized on the highway near Kenora, gazing up at a moose whose belly was higher than the hood of my cube truck.
Cars are pretty much a death sentence for everything out there. A deer can total a car, but the only dead snapping turtle I've ever seen was on the road. In Bermuda, they have T-shirts commemorating the multitudes of giant flattened frogs that litter the roads. They look like they've been rolled with a rolling pin, and are about a foot long. Roadkill as tourist attraction.
The grossest drive I ever had up north was about 20 years ago. Due to construction, I had to take a detour road I wasn't familiar with. I was travelling late on a Friday night to meet my parents, trundling along in my little minivan. The two- lane highway was twisty, and there was a steady rain falling.
Not uncommon up north, I came upon a low-lying section of the highway that divided a marshy area in two. Peering out through the windshield wipers, I could see what I thought at first were a lot of bugs flying before my headlights. I dropped the van into second gear, and killed my high beams as a cloud of fog rolled over the road.
I hit the breaks when I realized that they weren't bugs. They were frogs. Thousand of frogs, doing some weird mating ritual or seasonal spawning thing. I never did look up the science, because the whole moment has remained too surreal for anything to adequately explain it.
The road was covered with frogs like some moving green carpet. My van and I were sitting in the middle, as the frogs leaped about. I couldn't get out, I couldn't go forward, I couldn't go backward.
I silently begged them to get off the road. I already knew I'd squished tons of them behind me, but involuntary manslaughter is different than premeditated murder. This was before cellphones, though I'm not sure you call 911 to report frogs converging on a highway. I had to move. I had to make a decision. I had to quit screaming.
I eventually did the only thing I could. I waited for the next fog bank to roll in, and raced across the rest of the frog playground.
I turned up the radio so I wouldn't hear any amphibian death screams. I told myself they were mating and would be pleased to die happy. I told myself I didn't feel anything beneath my tires.
By the time I pulled into the cottage a half-hour later, I'd regained enough composure not to tell my mom what had happened. I told my father, who wanted to go back the next day and check out the crime scene. I told him he was a sick man.
I've never again experienced anything like The Green Massacre, though I know when Death comes for me, it'll be dressed as a frog. I have a back yard full of toads that I gently move out of the way of the lawnmower in case they have some genetic information pipeline to their cousins.
I've seen people cause car accidents breaking for squirrels. I always stop for a mother goose and her babies. I believe the signs that warn of leaping deer.
I've seen bumper stickers that say I Break for no Apparent Reason. Maybe I'll get one made that says I Break for Frogs.
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