Toad on the Road

Creek and Cows - Webster County, Iowa

After four days of making my way west on lightly travelled county roads, I got back on US-20 today. From here to Sioux City, Iowa, US-20 is a four lane divided highway. I would not necessarily call it lightly travelled. 

Back when I was younger, my sister and I would play a number of road trip games when our parents had whisked us off to parts unknown. We’d play I Spy…., Slug Bug, Round-Up, and Count the License Plates. Today, since I was on my own, I decided to count cars that I passed, or more appropriately, passed me. On average, I was getting passed by five cars every minute, and it was a bit of an adjustment from the relative serenity of the last week.

As I was walking along counting cars, I glanced down and noticed that my right foot was coming down dangerously close to a toad. Now this guy was sitting near the white stripe separating the shoulder from the road gazing longingly across the two lanes of concrete to the grass in the middle of the median.

The first thing I did was slowly break out my phone to take a picture. This caused him to hop to the east. He was still dangerously close to the road, so I took my trek pole and gave him a little nudge toward the water filled ditch on our side of the road.

He looked back over his right shoulder in a bit of a huff, and hopped lightly into the grass and disappeared. I had thwarted his plans of greener pastures across the eastbound traffic lanes.

There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere. If the toad was in a huff that his dreams had been thwarted, I was relieved that he’d made the decision to return to safety with a bit of prompting. From an inch above the ground, his horizon wasn’t sufficiently expansive to truly grasp the danger he was facing. At five cars a minute, odds are that hed wind up as flattened toad. I’ve seen enough of that along the path to know he wouldn’t have enjoyed it much.

Sometimes the Universe works that way. We get turned around in our dreams or our plans based on outside circumstances. Instead of getting in a huff, it might be useful to consider that some force with a greater perspective than ours has intervened to save us a great deal of trouble. 

In the end, I didn’t get a picture of the toad, but I did get a picture of a creek with some cows in the background. It’s the best I could do while adjusting to the new normal of traffic. 

Hope you all had a great Tuesday!