Or, a son’s letter recalls an amphibian’s ignoble end.
My mother has been diagnosed with dementia, so I have been sending her letters to spark old family memories. This week I wrote to her about our family’s visit to the Calaveras County Fair & Jumping Frog Jubilee in the mid-1960s. More on that below.
Dementia takes many forms. The rehab facility wing where she’s staying features a rectangular hallway around a courtyard where shrubs and eucalyptus trees are planted. Some patients sit staring out the window wherever staffers park them. Others propel themselves in their wheelchairs with their stockinged feet, determined to keep circling, circling, hour after hour. Get out of their way or they’ll scowl at you and gibber a rebuke. During my recent visit, one poor fellow asked me whenever he circled by, “Where am I?”
The Workings in the late ’60s, several years after the Angels Camp trip.
Mom can appear mentally sound if forgetful—conversant and aware of where she is. But she often falls into confusion. At first she thought she’d been kidnapped, rather than transferred here from a hospital after a fall. She still keeps telling us that my mentally disabled brother Jeff is lost, out wandering the Mojave Desert where we lived fifty-seven years ago.
“No, Mom,” I say, “he’s safe at home.”
This week I wrote to her after running across a reference to Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” My friend Anuradha Kumar’s lushly imagined novel, The Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mystery, mentions the story in the acknowledgements. This reminded me of our family’s long ago visit to the frog-jumping contest in the Sierra Nevada foothills in the mid-1960s. I must have been five or six years old.
[Check out my novel, The Insurrectionist]
Angels go camping?
What fun parents we had, taking us camping and visiting the Calaveras County Fair & Jumping Frog Jubilee in the town of Angels Camp. The event has been held since 1928 in honor of Twain. (The world’s record frog jump was set in 1986 by Rosie the Ribbeter, who bounded more than twenty-one feet, competition planners note.)
Mom and Dad no doubt were thinking that we boys loved to catch frogs in Walnut Creek, which ran behind our San Francisco Bay Area home. So they brought us to Angels Camp. What a silly name for a town, I thought as a boy, as if angels went camping with pup tents and ice chests and chocolate and marshmallows to make s’mores.
Mom was an English major, and in my recent letter I reminded her that Twain’s yarn discusses a “feller … by the name of Jim Smiley,” who trained Dan’l Webster, his pet frog, to catch flies and leap on command. Smiley loved betting on dogfights, cat fights, cockfights, and even whether Parson Walker’s sick wife would recover. (“Well, I’ll risk two- and-a-half [dollars] that she don’t…”)
One day a stranger asks Smiley:
“What might it be that you’ve got in the box?”
And Smiley says, sorter indifferent like, “It might be a parrot, or it might be a canary, may be, but it ain’t. It’s only just a frog.”
And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round this way and that, and says, “H’m so ’tis. Well, what’s he good for?”
“Well,” Smiley says, easy and careless, “He’s good enough for one thing, I should judge he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.”
Smiley bets on Dan’l Webster, only to lose. After he hands over the money, he learns that the stranger surreptitiously fed poor Dan’l two handfuls of birdshot so the critter couldn’t jump.
The day of the big event, we joined a crowd circulating in a huge room (or frog barn?) filled with terrariums. One of the bullfrogs hopped alongside me as I walked, bugging his eyes.
“Mom, he likes me!” I said.
Let the frog do the jumping
But during the competition, disaster struck. Presumably, the frog owners (frog coaches?) aren’t allowed to poke, nudge, tase, or otherwise touch their contestants, but other motivational efforts are allowed. One latter-day Jim Smiley stood in the circle, yelling at his frog. The baffled creature sat there swelling and collapsing his white throat, perhaps wondering what he’d done to offend his owner. Smiley II stamped his feet. The green blob remained glued the floor.
The owner leaped in the air, no doubt intending to startle the frog. Sadly, he landed right on top of his contestant, leaving a bloody splat where his prize bullfrog had been.
“Ohhhh!” the crowd moaned.
You might think this would traumatize frog-loving little boys. But the situation was so absurd, it became a long-running family joke. And it’s one tale that I’m pretty sure Mom hasn’t forgotten.
P.S. Blog frog logic
I’m amused to see that WordPress lists a post on my novel, about FBI Frogman Jones’s tragic death, as “related.”
The Elephant Box 