I grew up in a suburb of San Francisco in the 50’s. The part of town I lived in was a track housing development built right after WWII and was mainly for the GIs and their families returning to a regular life again. The houses on our block were all exactly the same except for the derivation of every other house being the mirror image of the one next to it. Each house was a ranch-style design with three bedrooms, one bath, a small but adequate kitchen with a breakfast bar and a living room-dining area.
In those days, everyone knew and socialized with everyone else on the block. Every stay-at-home mom had the legal authority of being the mom to every kid. If I got caught doing something I shouldn’t be doing I was scolded by whichever adult witnessed the infraction. And my parents knew about it before I even got home. That kept all of us kids in line most of the time. But there was, however, an adult-free zone on the other side of an eight-foot fence at the end of our street. It was known to all as “The Dirt Road”. This was an undeveloped place a couple miles deep along a hill. Nothing but Eucalyptus trees, gullies, ravines and dirt. Lots of dirt. Perfect for rope swings, playing “Army” or “Cowboys and Indians” and all-around hiking and climbing. Oh, and no adults.
The weather in our part of town was always very predictable. The summers were in the 60’s with fog rolling in every afternoon. It warmed up as soon as school started up after Labor Day. The warm days stayed through mid-October when it started to cool back down to the 60’s again. Mid-November was the start of our rainy season. It seemed the grassy, brown hills around us turned green overnight. The rain was just enough to keep those hills green until around May. Then, just as quickly as they turned green, they turned brown again. While other parts of the country had four seasons, we had but two. Some folks even referred to our two-season climate as the brown season and the green season.
All the rain was enough to turn our adult-free zone into muck and mire. There was one low-lying spot where a pond would form each year and stay about knee-deep until March. We dubbed this pond Tree Frog Pond. Within days of the pond filling up, thousands of tadpoles could be seen swimming around in the murky water. I don’t know where they came from. I never saw any frogs before seeing tadpoles.
My best friend and I had BB guns as did every ten year-old boy in the 50’s. We’d take our guns into the wild, making our Army or Cowboy games even more fun. Luckily, none of the boys ever decided it would be great fun to shoot at each other. In our minds, these BB guns were just as deadly as any other gun and deserved total respect. I can’t even remember anyone getting accidentally shot in the crossfire between shooters and targets. No one ever lost an eye.
One day on our trip to Tree Frog Pond, we took our BB guns along. By then, some, no, lots of the tadpoles had turned into frogs. The little green things were hopping and crawling all over the place. I don’t remember who shot first, but suddenly we were picking off those frogs one by one until we ran out of BBs.
I glanced around and suddenly I was sickened by the sight. There were countless frogs littering the edge of the pond. Visions of the evening news documentaries with photos of the bodies of soldiers at Normandy Beach flooded my brain. We silently turned around and headed home. We never talked about that day. That night I had awful nightmares of death and killing. Frogs and people. And I never pointed my BB gun at another living thing.