ENHS Nature Trails May 99 Article 3

Herp Heaven
by Tom Titus

February, 1979, Monmouth, Oregon

It's about 7 in the evening and I hear the gravel flying as a car slides to a stop in my driveway. I don't have to look outside to know it's an orange Renault. Bryan comes to the door. He has unruly sandy hair, and one eye doesn't track very well because of some muscle damage when he was kid. He looks wild. He is wild. He works a full time job, carries a full load as a biology student, sleeps about five hours a night, and fuels the whole thing on a balanced diet of Cocoa Puffs, candy bars, and Cokes.

"Ready?" he asks.
I think to myself, "Ready for what?"

It has been a long and extraordinarily cold January, at least by western Oregon standards. We've been locked in a lab all winter quarter "learning" about amphibians and reptiles. Studying herpetology in Oregon in the winter is a caricature. You have to identify animals that are a shadow of their former selves-preserved specimens-and study range maps and habitat descriptions in books, for heaven's sake. But tonight it is 50 degrees, and it has been raining steadily all day. It smells like, well... I don't know... like a swamp. A really fertile swamp. And earlier this afternoon, "Doc" Walker, our pipe-smoking teacher and one of the last of the old time naturalists, has told us that tonight is the night to be out herpin'! Oh yeah, and it's my birthday. And before you write me off as totally insane let me ask you: what would you be doing for your birthday, in February, on a rainy week night, in a town of 3,000, the only dry town in Oregon? Events in the Universe were conspiring. This was formative stuff...

We head south out of town on Old Highway 99, and I thank god Bryan can't afford anything faster and more powerful than a Renault. We don't get far before sliding to a stop (60 to zero in 2.1 seconds!) for the first object in the road. It's a cigarette butt; we log our first "hands on" lesson as budding herpetologists and refine our search image. The next several stops are the real deal; Pacific treefrogs, mostly males, heading for the roadside ditches to chorus. The earliest arrivals are already noisily engaged. Continuing south and moving off the flood plain around Cemetery Hill, we find our first roughskin newts. They're everywhere! They are walking across the road, they are smashed on the road. I'm wondering in my twisted way how many I have driven by (and over) in my previous six years behind the wheel.

By the time we arrive at Helmick Park on the banks of the Luckiamute River, the tree frogs and newts are exciting only because of their sheer numbers. But our mission has changed. "Doc" has told us that we might find Northwestern salamanders migrating to the quiet waters of the river for a night of fun, frolic, and,voh yeah, almost forgot, I'm a biologist... ensuring that their genes are perpetuated into the next generation. You know, increasing their fitness. For some reason those words don't quite capture the excitement of finding that first big, chocolate-brown beast with the bulging paratoid glands in the headlights. Later my wife told me they look like space monsters. I say they are glorious, and six years down the road they took center stage in my Master's thesis. Formative stuff, this birthday...

We drove forever that night. There was a long-toed salamander, a rare find in the spring because they are primarily fall breeders in western Oregon. I was green with envy when the next day Bryan walked into school with a large red-legged frog that he'd caught after dropping me off at home. Now the frogs are in trouble in the Willamette Valley, and everyone wonders why. I say, take a chance and eat more bullfrogs and bass; they're the prime suspects and don't belong here anyway.

Years went by. Bryan and I left Oregon within a year of one another and slogged through graduate school, he in botany at Maryland, I in herpetology at Kansas. I sweated it out when Bryan's trip to China was cut short by the events at Tiananmen Square. He got his eye fixed and his hair fell out. He was eventually hired back at our alma mater, Western Oregon.

In 1994, two advanced degrees and 15 years after that wild and slimy birthday, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. I walked out of the house holding hands with Laurel, my 3-year-old daughter. It had been a long year and my next career move was up for grabs by the Universe. It was late winter, it was warm, it was raining, and it smelled like a swamp. A really fertile swamp. I felt a jolt of energy in my spine and I knew, absolutely knew, that I would be moving back to Oregon within the year.

"What, Dad?" Laurel asked.
"I think everything's going to be okay," I answered.

Formative stuff.

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