Under Siege

Misadventures concerning mulch and toads.

“Come back and wake me up at about half past May” is a line Toad says in Frog and Toad Are Friends, written by Arnold Lobel. As I sit listening to foghorns on the sound and a tsunami warning blaring from speakers a mile down the coast, I would like to slide back into bed and sleep until half past May myself. But my coffee is working too well for that, and I’d prefer to write to you instead.

I remember reading Frog and Toad Are Friends and The Wind in the Willows (“Was there ever such a master of motorcars as Toad of Toad Hall?”) when I was a kid, and these books marked the extent of my education about toads until a few years ago when my wife and I found ourselves under siege at our home. It all began, as so many things do, with 16 cubic yards of mulch.

The mulch had been delivered early that spring and it sat in the driveway as an enormous pile partially covered with a blue tarp. This mulch became a problem for me. I had ordered it up by phone in a rare moment of exuberance, and now I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake. Sixteen yards didn’t sound like much over the phone, but it arrived in a commercial dump truck driven by a woman who hollered down from the cab, saying, “Your very own great big steaming pile of mulch. How’s that for a Monday?” Then she raised the box and drove off, leaving a towering mountain standing where her truck had been.

I would spend entire afternoons looking at this mulch through the window, when I should have been writing, wishing for the rain to stop so I could spread it around our flower beds and be rid of it. Then the rain would stop, and I’d be at the window again, staring at my own personal Mount Everest and wishing for the rain to return, which in springtime here, if one procrastinates long enough, it always does. This little dance lasted for the better part of a month until one optimistic morning, fueled up on oatmeal and coffee and protestations from my wife, I collected my cart and my shovel and approached the pile determined to be done with it once and for all.

The first shovel full of mulch that I dropped into my cart exploded with tiny toads. The next shovel yielded another batch. And the next. It became clear that the entire pile was compromised, probably infested from the seasonal pond on our property during my rainy deliberations, and I worried any further work might lead to my cutting one of these little creatures down at the dawn of their short lives. My wife, who had been navigating this mulch in our drive for weeks, was not impressed when I came in and announced my intention to halt all further work. A short field trip followed to provide her with evidence for this necessity.

The presence of these toads proved even better at conjuring ambition than rain, and my desire to spread the mulch was stronger now than before. But the mountain had been captured and I must watch and wait and think. Much time was invested at my computer researching the lives and habits of Western Toads. More time was spent strategizing: perhaps a plastic snow shovel and some kind of sifting screen would do the trick. My plans were still on the drafting table, however, when the toads seized the advantage by emerging from their stronghold unannounced. But they did not return to their pond as I’d hoped. Instead they branched out in a surprisingly coordinated assault toward the house and turned everything into a trap.

They penetrated into the garage and the garden shed. The lawnmower could not be wheeled from its stall without first having its undercarriage inspected and cleared. My wife and I began playing a game at guessing how many of these stowaways would be revealed beneath any object that was lifted. A Home Depot bucket usually yielded three or four, a planter even more. Toads do not bite or pose any real threat. What they do is squish quite readily underfoot, and their primary weapon is guilt. There were knots of them hiding by day here and there and everywhere, and they would appear en masse on the walkways come evening, moving unpredictably, and our leaving the house at all became troublesome at best. We were absolutely under siege.

Through whatever process nature provides for such things, our patience was rewarded by the ranks of toads being naturally culled, and we could eventually venture out with less trepidation. But even as their numbers dwindled, the remaining toads grew larger and the stakes increased. Initially the size of small buttons and in quantities too numerous to catalog, a failure to follow protocol might result in the somber disposal of a lifeless but anonymous toad and a sense of sadness some order of magnitude greater than that of killing, say, a large insect, but not nearly so great as murdering something larger, say, like a bird. And it wasn’t just their size. As the toads matured their personalities developed, and we could now tell them apart by their emerging dorsal stripes. My wife made the serious mistake of assigning several of them names.

“Look, honey, this one chases down beetles,” I might say, “but that one ambushes moths at the path light there. And it wipes its mouth with its foreleg after. Kind of cute, don’t you think?” My wife might reply: “That’s, Lucille. She mistook a leaf for a moth last week and looked embarrassed when she spit it out and saw us watching.”

Around this time, the toads began to claim territory, too. Some carved out homes in this or that flower bed, one claimed a clump of moss beside our fountain; yet others organized to move the siege line farther up into the forest and create strategic road blocks on our drive. Toads it turns out are nocturnal, and it also so happens that pale gravel is a perfect place for them to hunt. If my wife or I were to return by car at night and neglect for even a moment the proper caution, we were greeted the following day with an unkindness of ravens picking at the entrails of a perfectly flattened toad. This would not do.

We began turning down dinner invitations from city friends, knowing that the late ferry home would be followed by this quarter mile, hour-long gauntlet from our gate to our front door. At first, I thought they froze in the headlights as some kind of instinctive defense against predators. Now I believe they are just indignant and refuse to yield the right of way at all. You can read it in their faces. They are so distasteful to predators (the one exception being Olivia, the river otter you’ll hear about another day) that they feel no need to attempt an escape; instead they wait for you to exit the car and scoop them up, and then stare at you from your palm with a look of absolute disdain, as if to say, “How dare you disturb my evening stroll, sir. Don’t you know who I am?” Their grandiosity is captured in Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows:

The Army all saluted 

As they marched along the road. 

Was it the King? Or Kitchener? 

No. It was Mr. Toad!

On it went until spring yielded to summer and peace temporarily returned as the toads retreated into the forest, I suspected to regroup. With their fortress abandoned and no rain left to blame, my mountain of mulch was eventually spread. By midsummer, however, the files of toads had returned to their mulch, now nicely raked in our flower beds. Weeding became out of the question unless it was done by hand, and whenever a toad was uncovered, it simply stared out from its burrow with one offended yellow eye, not even bothering to open both, until it was satisfactorily covered again, which I dutifully did, of course.

There were skirmishes here and there, but the siege had mostly ended. In victory for whom I’m not sure. When my wife learned that toads do not drink water but absorb it instead through their skin, she began crafting and installing toad pools worthy of any Mazatlán resort (a new one appears every now and then as if by magic). These pools are kept filled by an elaborate rerouting of our drip system, and the toads return each summer now to claim them. It has become my routine in these months to meander to all the windows of our home with my morning coffee and look out and wish a good day to my fellow veterans of our erstwhile war. They gaze back, glassy-eyed and grumpy as ever. Whether they recognize me I cannot tell, but they are clearly unhappy being disturbed at their morning soak.

We have not had another bounty of new toads like we did during that early spring, and the returning survivors get fewer every year. But it has been a wet winter, the pond is very full, and I am preparing for the worst. I’ve learned a lot about toads here on this island, but if I’ve learned anything of importance at all, any wisdom worth sharing, it is simply this: never order 16 cubic yards of mulch by phone. 

Lucille caught during her morning soak in a particularly good mood.

An audio recording of this essay can be found here:

Audio: Under Siege