Frogs in the tomb

The house that we started off with on Okinawa was way too small for our family. It was Dad with the five kids and the best they had available at the time was a three bedroom. It did have a screened in porch that Donnie used as his bedroom. Dad had one, Teri and Tracy had one and David and I shared the last. A four bedroom opened up in Plaza housing and Dad took it. This meant moving away from the neighborhood that we had just got familiar with. But that was O-Kay. We now had new adventures to keep us busy. One such adventure involved a tomb, an underwater flashlight and very daring kids.

We moved into the new house over the summer. Dad had to go back to work and it was just the five of us kids left home alone with the housekeeper. We would get up early, have breakfast and be out the door not to be seen again until lunch time. Our fascination was always with the boonies. We were in the boonies and found a small pond that was at the entrance of an abandoned tomb. There were tadpoles swimming around and we were looking for the frogs. Now these were not your every day run of the mill tadpoles. These guys were huge! We walk around the edge of the water and we heard a big splash. We looked around and could not see anything.

We kept this up for several days, never seeing the frogs but always hearing the splash. The entrance to the tomb was just visible above the water line. Donnie and I had it in our heads that the frogs had to be in the tomb. How could we get them out was the question. We were avid Scuba divers and we had underwater flashlights that we could use to check it out. One afternoon we took the lights down to the pond with us. Rock/paper/scissor to decide who goes first, I lost. The water was not all that deep, maybe three to three and a half feet. The thing was to get into the tomb you had to have your head under the water and come up the other side not knowing what was there. What the hell were we thinking!

I reached my hand to the other side and felt that there was room to come up. Down I went with the flashlight on. I raised my head out of the water and was lighting the place up. It was safe so I called Donnie in. The tomb was not that large and we now had two lights to explore with. When the light went to a small out cropping we saw the eyes shinning back at us. Before we knew what it was it jumped right at us. Talk about scaring the crap out of you. We then heard several more plops into the water. Too late, the frogs had made their escape. We ducked back under the water and out of the tomb. We tried this several more time before we decided we needed a new plan.

The new plan consisted of entering the tomb with the lights out and getting into position to pounce on them. We were both in the tomb and slowly moved over to the edge where they always rested. I turned on the light as Donnie jumped at the frogs. He had two frogs pinned under his hands. I set the light down and grabbed one while he secured the other. Holy crap they were huge. The biggest frogs we had ever seen. Well, what now. Show them off of course! We headed home, Donnie holding a frog, I’m holding a frog and David is carrying the flashlights.

We made it out of the tomb with the frogs and flashlights and headed back to the house. There was a large wash sink in the laundry room so we put some water in the sink and dropped the frogs off. What a catch! We were so proud of ourselves. We couldn’t wait for Dad to get home so we could show him our bounty. Dad arrived and he was greeted by three anxious boys. David was the first to greet Dad. Donnie and I were going to play the guessing game. You know, guess what we found today? But no….David blurts “Guess what Dad, we found giant frogs today and they are in the sink!” The look on Dads face was like yeah right. We grabbed him by the arms and dragged him back to the sink. He looked down and saw two frogs that were almost the size of dinner plates. His eyes got big and his jaw dropped. “Were in the hell did you boys come up with that!”

So we told the story on how we found them and how we caught them. The whole time he was just shaking his head in disbelief. “So, what now?” he asked. All three of us chimed in “can we keep them? Please!” He sat us down and we had a talk. In the end we decided that it was enough to just have caught them. We packed up the frogs and headed back to the tomb to turn them loose. Plop, plop. Back in the water and to the security of the tomb they headed.

Looking back at what we had to go through to catch the frogs I am amazed that nothing bad happened to us. There could have been other critters in the water. To think that we put our heads under the water! We never seemed to think before leaped.