The Wisdom of Toads

Madeleine was officially initiated into the Great Toad Club Saturday morning.  The GTC was founded in 1959 in Ohio by my father-in-law, Mike, and some of his high school friends.  It was a club with "no special purpose" back in those days, but today it’s morphed into a do-good group.  Membership is free and available to anyone.  The only requirement these days is a dedication to help Mother Earth by doing Great Toad Deeds.  To that end, Madeleine and I donned our neon green GTC t-shirts, work gloves, and Day-Glo orange vests, and followed Mike and Judy out to the mile the GTC adopted about a dozen years ago, to pick up trash on the roadside.

It was a cool day, sunny with a light breeze.  We each gathered our tools:  a five-gallon bucket for trash, a plastic sack for recyclables, and one of those picker-upper tools to save our backs.  Mike and Judy headed east from their 1962 Corvair rampside truck while Madeleine and I headed west.  At first glance there wasn't a lot of trash, but it was enough to make the task necessary.  We walked along the road, picking up pieces of plastic, fast food trash, beer cans, and cigarette butts.  The sheer number of cigarette butts alarmed me – have we learned no lessons at all from last summer’s wildfires?  The roadside grasses are dry enough to catch from just a spark after a winter very short on precipitation, and fire would spread quickly with the slightest breeze. 

“Smokers are dumb times two,” Madeleine complained, dropping another butt into her bucket.  “Dumb to smoke and dumb to litter.”

The heavier our buckets became, the more frustrated and disappointed I felt.  Cleaning up after the human race does little to make me feel compassion for my fellow man, especially after I happened upon a pair of dessicated dead coyotes.  They were not road kill.  They lay side by side, in identical positions as if they’d been placed there a few weeks ago.  I began to develop a profile of the litter bugs of Yavapai County:  McDonald’s-eating, Marlboro-smoking, Coors-swigging coyote killers.  And I resented them.  A lot.

I thought back to my childhood days of TV watching:

Soon after finding the coyotes, I met up again with Mike, who shared that he’d discovered another pair of coyotes a couple hundred yards further down the road where he’d been.  A few years back, while cleaning up this roadside Judy had found several dead foxes.  The tails had been removed from each of the foxes, presumably as some sort of trophy.  I supposed we should feel grateful we haven’t yet stumbled upon anything worse than a few dead predators.

We continued down the road gathering the detritus of modern society.  In addition to the typical trash, cellphones, dollar bills, iPods, and clothing have been gathered on the GTC’s road cleaning adventures.  Plastic sacks waved like flags from bushes and barb wire.  We removed all of these items, carefully bagging them into heavy-duty bags when we were done.  We sorted the recyclables.  We removed and packed away our gloves and Day-Glo vests for the next time. 

Judy must have sensed my disappointment in the human race.  She told me that when she first began to clean up the road a dozen years ago, that she felt frustrated with her fellow planet dwellers.  But she learned to let it go.  She realized that holding onto that anger gave her a burden that really served no purpose at all except to make her even more resentful.  I thought about the starfish story I’ve heard so many times from motivational speakers in my occupation, and wondered if throwing a starfish back into the sea was anything akin to picking up cigarette butt after cigarette butt.

Later, though, I thought about what she said and I came to realize that there’s a great wisdom in it.  Despite the negative actions caused by the ignorance and apathy of others, she and Mike still make a positive difference.  Sure, they’ll need to come back in a few months to pick up litter again.  That story will not change.  But they’ll make a difference anyway. 

Home

Home

Home. Love the word. The long ‘o’ stretches itself out, and the ‘m’ lingers a while. It’s that very definable, and yet somehow indefinable, space that is mine, ours. Poets have waxed about home for millennia. Home is where Odysseus fought to arrive, obstacle after obstacle – and after all, there’s no place like home. Just ask Dorothy.

How we each define home is also somewhat dependent on how far from home we travel. And it depends on who asks where home is. If I’m out of the country and asked by a native, home might be defined as something as immense as the United States – an area over three and a half million square miles. A trip out of state, and my home is Arizona, or a city, depending, again, on how much the person asking knows. Familiarity of one another’s space allows us to draw our circle of home as a smaller, more intimate area.

Home is what I miss – and who I miss – while I’m gone. There’s nothing quite like coming back to my own deliciously comfortable bed and my own shower. My neighborhood’s nighttime silence punctuated by yipping coyotes. It’s the familiarity of the route, of knowing where I’m headed. Of hills and horizons recognized. The rhythms and patterns of the day. The routines and rituals of life. The drawing together of hearts whose cadences complement one another. My heart aches a little less with each step retraced toward home.

The colors of home dull with contact. Yet, after a while even the vibrant tropical greens and sapphire blues of Maui made me yearn for the pine greens and granite pinks of home. At the age of twenty, I spent the summer in Paris, living with a French family. I was too enchanted with the city to notice more than a mute ache of homesickness. The lackluster greys and slate blues of Paris are monotonous but unifying – and were so different from my usual world. But after traveling south to Marseille, the scrubby hills surrounding the ancient port astonished me more than the Mediterranean, reminding me of similar colors in the Sonoran Desert.

The times in our lives which are the most difficult are those when the concept of home is not distinct. We float, anchorless, scanning the horizon for a beacon to guide us. These transitions are unsettling because we are literally unsettled. When we are unsure of where home is, little else in our lives is well-defined either.

At some point in our lives, we get to choose our home. To be where we love and with those we love. And while we leave home periodically, by choice or by duty, returning comforts us like nothing else. We navigate our own obstacles on our return: screaming babies in place of Odysseus’s sirens, indifferent baggage handlers rather than the Cyclops, the parking shuttle and traffic instead of the Scylla and Charybdis. For me, the anticipation of returning home at the end of a trip is often more intense than the pre-trip eagerness. As Ludwig Bemelmans put it, the best part of a journey is when the trip is over, and you are home again.