Bullfrog bellows

Note: this piece was simultaneously published on July 12th, 2023, in Weighted Tangents, my Substack newsletter.

I stare out this window every day. At any point I can look below and watch life blossom: a turtle plopping into the pond, the Great Blue Heron picking his way through the shallows, a mother duck taking her ducklings out for a paddle, or the geese prodding their goslings along the shore. The rare sightings include a Cedar Waxwing perched on the iron grating, a yellow butterfly that spent hours flitting amongst the trees one day and never returned, and the pair of insects that crashed into the window to mate while I tried to run a meeting.

The bullfrogs, however, continue to elude me. I can tell you that they’re as big as a salad plate, and that when they bellow—puffing their gullets up with casual indifference—the water radiates across the pond, fleeing the epicenter of sound. And that’s fine, that’s all perfectly accurate. It’s the bellow itself that I can’t describe, a noise so absurd and intrusive and yet weirdly familiar that it feels like it should be easy to say “a bullfrog sounds like _____”, but every time I try to do it I come up short.

This has ultimately led me to realize that while I am fairly good at conjuring up the words to describe the way that something looks, I’m far less adept at describing the way that something sounds (please don’t ask me about the way something feels or smells). All I have to say is that it sounds like a bullfrog, although I only first heard their throaty chorus outside my window a few years ago, after which I spent days trying to figure out what kind of animal makes that kind of noise.

The closest approximation I’ve come up with is that it sounds like inhaling a burp. This description covers the gravelly bits clinging to the underbelly of the sound, but the doesn’t begin to touch on the rubber band-ish twang forming the melody.

It’s become a mild obsession of mine, whenever I’m stuck on a piece of writing, to stare out this window watching life unfold before me, and try to describe a bullfrog bellow.

Until next week!

xo