Nick Postagulous
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Superfrog TNT
Tuesday was a pretty good day. Most of the monitors that I visited were functioning correctly and I figured out the best way to set up the laptop, etc, in my work van so that I can get everything out the side sliding door. But the event that put it over the top, from being a day spent mostly outside (due to my new responsibilities at work) in nice weather, to a just plain cool day, was me rescuing the tree frog that was in a manhole.
The name of the manhole is 5S1E02031, which translated to five townships south of the Tennessee border, one township east of the meridian of the state (easily found at Meridian Street downtown), in section 02, manhole number 31. My database doesn’t indicate it’s depth, since obviously the wusses who we contracted with to survey all this were scared to get in the thing. I don’t get in manholes either. And I’ll fight tooth and nail if they ever try to get me confined space entry certified.
So, I get out to this manhole and pop the top, while accidentally stepping on an ant hill. The ants start swarming and I’m about to just forget checking the status of the monitor since, hey, ants are mean little cusses, but then I notice the tree frog.
Inside this manhole that is approximately 21 feet deep, on the top of 14 steps, sits a little light greet tree frog. The type of manhole cover for this area is a bolt down. And while it wasn’t bolted down (what’s the point, it weighs 80 lbs and it’s in the middle of nowhere), a bolt down type cover has no vent holes. In other words, before I opened the manhole, it had been in pitch darkness since August 23rd, when it was last opened according to my database.
And when I say steps, these are D shaped rungs that stick out from the concrete walls of the manhole, there were no vertical elements for Superfrog to climb up. Though, if he is able to climb up the rough concrete sides, that makes the story quite a bit less impressive, because if he can’t climb up the concrete sides, then he, in total darkness, jumped up 16 inches onto the next step, 14 times.
I’m thinking he can climb the concrete.
Well, in any case, after I see him, I realize that I have to rescue him. I used to rescue turtles crossing the street, or really help them across, quite often. But I haven’t been able to rescue any animals all this year. Until Tuesday that is.
I don’t think the frog could see yet, as he had been in total darkness for who knows how long and now he had sunlight streaming down on him. I just scooped him up, and it was then that I saw the underside of his legs were bright yellow, and let him jump off into the weeds next to the soybean field.
Two Other Frogs
There was only one other time that I rescued frogs. It was a big frog and a little frog that were down a 4 inch PVC pipe leading to a water valve in someone’s front yard. I don’t even know why I looked down the PVC pipe, well, maybe because I didn’t know why there was an open PVC pipe sticking up in the middle of a person’s yard. They were harder to get out, but I rescued them. Yay. This was about 5 years ago.
Superfrog, Superfrog, Who Art Thou?
I looked on the internet and couldn’t find any frogs matching the description of the frog I saw. The two that I rescued out of that little pipe were actually toads. Boring old toads that I don’t feel like looking up the type. But, dang it, I want to find a picture of the kind I rescued.
