Pollywogs

I went out for a walk this morning, and on my way to the greenbelt trail, I walked past this puddle like I do every time, and something caught my eye.

Tadpoles in the puddle! So cool. When I was a kid, I lived right next to a huge park, our back fence backed up against it. There was a huge swath of undeveloped land in the park that was left to nature. The area was part of a type of environment that I learned (when they put the sign up in the park that taught visitors about it) was called Vernal Pools.

This meant that, for part of the year, there were naturally forming ponds that would cover the landscape, and it provided a habitat for certain plants and animals. I think this was when they started trying to prohibit people from enjoying the park anymore. They put up signs that insisted you had to stay on the path, and not provide any sort of disturbance to the environment. 

This was okay, because by this time, I was older and all I did was take my dog for walks on the trails, but up until that point, I'd played in those ponds all the time. How could you not? I mean, look at this place:

Those ponds are only knee deep. Can you imagine a place more suited for a young boy to play? Of course it didn't look like that year round. It was only in the spring that it was this verdant and inviting. When summer came, it looked like this:

The ponds dried up, the grass turned brown (and very flammable...I know that from experience), and only the deep rooted oak trees were able to stay green.

But in the spring, the ponds were filled with tadpoles...although as a kid I called them pollywogs. I find that nobody calls them that anymore. Weird, is that one of those localized terms that is said only in Sacramento? Or have I just only gone places that call them tadpoles, but if I'd gone in the other direction everyone would be saying pollywog. Of course, also, pollywogs don't come up in conversation much.

Tangent aside, I spent so much time wading in those ponds trying to catch pollywogs and bring them home as pets that would sprout legs and turn to frogs. As is the case, of course, when you're a kid you never consider how to keep a pet like that alive, so any pollywog I caught was doomed to a slow death of starvation. It's good that they were always so very elusive.

Except the one time when I came out to the park as summer was getting on, and all the grass was crisping up and turning that yellow-brown you see above. The ponds were drying up, and there wasn't much water left. At one spot, I walked past the last remnant of a pond, it was only a puddle now.

As all the ponds dried up, the pollywogs had steadily migrated, sticking to the water that remained, and here was this final puddle with probably no more water than you could fit in a bathtub. The thing was teeming with pollywogs. The water looked solid back. There seemed to be more pollywogs than water left. The whole thing was churning with movement as the thousands of remaining pollywogs jostled and splashed in their tiny confines. So much so that it almost seemed like there were fish in the pond and not just tiny pollywogs.

I remember looking at that as we walked past to head to the playground, and commenting to my friends that this was the greatest opportunity for catching pollywogs ever. If we went back to the house and grabbed a bucket, we could have the biggest score ever. It was like winning the lottery in my childhood mind. So many riches to be had.

Of course, then all the tadpoles would just die in the bucket instead of here in this drying out pond. I was like that man who scoffs at the kid throwing the starfish back into the ocean from the story you hear on the internet frequently ("It matters to this one!"). There was no way to save them. As much as I wanted to. Nature is a harsh old monster that doesn't care that much about life, and has evolved all sorts of strategies that involve life getting wasted by the truckload. Even as a kid, I already instinctually understood that.

I had to walk away and let nature take its course. And that was that. Sad, and, truthfully, not what I was expecting to write about when I sat down to do a really quick blog post about the puddle full of pollywogs that I found on my walk.

All I really wanted to say was that I like pollywogs.