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Ironhead Sits On A Frog

Posted Jul 10, 2008 by Geoff Fox

Updated Dec 31, 2008 at 01:38 PM

Her tone was disgusted and insistent.

We’ve been married 13 years, so that was nothing new.

But it was 4:15 a.m. Saturday night/Sunday morning and Ironhead’s sudden, exasperated appearance set my senses atwitter.

Yes, I call my wife Ironhead. Yes, she answers to it. No, it isn’t disrespectful: just my way of celebrating the hard-headed woman Cat Stevens was looking for.

Anyway, she’s not the squeamish type. If a snake bumbles its way onto our back porch, she shoos it away. She catches toads just to “beep” their noses. Whenever a roach appears on the linoleum, she flattens it with a primal shriek that women tennis players could appreciate. This was different. “I need your help,” she said. I was led through the dark to the bathroom door, mostly closed and outlined by an unholy light. She pushed it open and I was temporarily blinded. Iron was motionless as a cardboard cutout, her finger extended toward the toilet. There he was, equally motionless and possibly confused, sitting on the toilet seat. Later identified by Ironhead as a pig frog, he had just gotten a view of my wife that I could have charged him for. “Don’t kill him,” she said, as she wiped moisture from her leg that had come from his back. Happily, the little guy wasn’t fast. I got him in a paper towel and tossed him out the front door. Following a chorus of other amphibians, he hopped toward the conservation area. Iron reasoned that he had not gotten into the house when one door or another was left open by kids who couldn’t shut a door if you paid them, but had successfully navigated the sewer system until his little Peter Lorre eyes popped out of our toilet bowl water. Unfortunately for me, Iron’s theory doesn’t hold water, according to Gary Morse, spokesman with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “From time to time you have these reports of people claiming that frogs and whatnot come up through the toilet, but they don’t. They come through the house,” he said. “They come through the house and find the coolest spot they can find and it’s the toilet.” So, it couldn’t have somehow gotten into the toilet through the sewer system? No,” Morse said. “That whole system is closed. They’d have to get underground and travel through that system and come through the toilet, and that’s virtually impossible. Usually, it’s a tree frog and they come in unbeknownst to you and they seek out the coolest, wettest spots, and that’s usually your toilet bowl.” Meet Ironhead: “Oh, come on,” she began, when I told her what Morse said. Her tone was disgusted and insistent. “There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence online,” she said. “If you look online, you find people who have had rats [in the toilet], and they say they keep the [toilet] lids closed. How are [frogs and other amphibians and reptiles] going to get in there? They can’t flatten themselves that much. “The sewer people are going to come out and check the sewer line. That’s what we pay utilities for.” In Iron’s head, there is no way the frog could have snuck into the house, noiselessly hopped across the carpet, eased his way under our bedroom and bathroom doors, and gotten into the toilet. “I think I would have heard him splash.” The conversation was taking a familiar turn. I tried to backpedal, saying it wasn’t me she was disagreeing with, but Gary Morse, the fish and wildlife guy. You know, the guy who gets paid to know this stuff. She snorted. “He’s one guy; give me a plumbing and sewage expert. What does he know? He doesn’t know. I’d say a third of the people keep their lids closed. They can’t get under there. This happens in India all the time.” A third of the people … what? And, we don’t live in India. “Yeah, whatever,” she said. “We’ll see when the sewer people come out.”

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