Life Raft

Behind my house there is a small road, and at the end of the road is reservoir #4. I like reservoir #4. I sit on its outer wall and dangle my feet over the water, staring at one grove of banana palms as the fronds of another rustle behind me in the breeze. Few other spots here are so green and so calm.

The reservoir is always being filled and always being emptied, so although I never see the same water twice, its height never changes. That's too bad, because its height is measly; it stands more than a meter below the top of the wall. Frogs can't jump that high from water, so when they manage to get themselves inside the reservoir, they usually tire of swimming and die before they get out.

Today it was all interrupted — the green, the calm, and the judgement of frogs — because there were two large pieces of styrofoam floating in the water. From a distance I thought to myself, Silly people, what made you think that styrofoam is biodegradable? I was being facetious, of course. Whoever put it there surely didn't think about it at all. Trash, after all, is something that just disappears.

The careless trash culture doesn't totally explain this one, though. If you drop a wrapper on the ground, maybe you believe that it'll just blow away to the sea and nobody will ever notice. Or maybe you drop it at a soccer field knowing that somebody is paid to pick up trash there. But large pieces of styrofoam in a water tank? What you know is that somebody else will have to deal with it. Maybe even your cousin. But you drop it anyway.

And lo and behold, the frogs thank you! To them, the styrofoam is a precious, life-saving lily pad. When I got there, one adult frog was perched atop the larger piece. After I sat down, another crawled up to beach himself. And across both pieces were dozens of baby frogs no larger than a fingernail, perhaps freshly graduated from tadpolehood and totally unaware that solid ground could be anything but white, slick, crumbly.

Appreciating the frogs' predicament but still bemoaning the litter, I searched for an alternative. Specifically, I searched for something plank-like that the frogs could use as a ramp to get up and out. But the best I found on the ground were gangly, unstable twigs, and I didn't want to start ripping fronds off of trees that weren't mine, so I made peace with the status quo. I read one chapter of my book atop the wall, then one chapter at its base with my back against the stone and the banana palms now looming above me. From there I could see neither the styrofoam nor the farmers passing by with the busyness of work, so my green and my calm returned. Sadly, though, the frogs were out of sight, and I missed them.