A Tale of Two Toads

You may recall my sojourn into a Savannah antique mall in January, where I found these two charming antique ceramic toads.
I like ceramic animals that look like the animal in question. Not so crazy about the cartoony ones. Something like this, it's fine, whimsical, but it doesn't spin my globe.

 The Savannah toads, on the other hand, really had Essence of Toad about them. And so what if the big one had been broken in half and glued, and if both of them were missing toes here and there. I didn't care. They won my heart. You don't have to be in mint condition to win my heart.

I don't buy much stuff any more. There was a time when I haunted places like this and bought all kinds of funky things. Those times are gone. I don't need more stuff. But something in me needed these toads, as a souvenir of a magical trip to the South.

So I bought them and stuffed them, wrapped in paper, in my photobag for the flights home.
Transportation Safety Authority, which in the last couple of years has become my personal nemesis, saw fit to unzip my gate-checked photobag somewhere in between my relinquishing it at planeside and claiming it on landing. Of course, they failed to zip it back up. Just like they failed to zip up the secret compartment on the bottom of my backpack, letting a hand-made fabulous much beloved Michael Coleman pennywhistle slip out, forever gone.

When I got to it, the big toad was falling half out of the photobag, and the little toad was gone like the wind. I was deeply bummed. Not because it was valuable, but because I loved the pair of them and had visions of them squatting under my bonsai trees come April.
\
I mulled over that missing toad for a week or two.

Then went on a Google image search for "ceramic toad."  Daggone it, I wanted a second toad.

I found this on Etsy.com, offered by a shop called The Pantages, with the following description:

 Beautiful green glazed ceramic toad or frog. Has some great patina and few chips as pictured. This is a piece that I imagine finding at my grandmas house.

Oh, yes. You, with the clunky toes and the fresh chip on your upper lip. I want you. I don't know how big you are. You look very small.

You and your warty back and well-observed hind legs will do nicely to fill the toad-hole in my heart. It haunts me to think that these photos were taken before you were mine. Ah well.

Only problem: he was a whopping (for me) $28.00. Eeek. I'd paid something like $8 for the pair of my original Savannah toads. This one was in undeniably better condition, but still... So I came back and visited him on Etsy a few times over the space of a week, and finally decided I couldn't live without him. You like something well enough to stalk it, you oughta just buy the dang thing. I learned that about the oak and slag-glass Hoosier cabinet I visited for six months. Told myself the last time I went to see it that if it wasn't gone I'd buy it on the spot. Now it houses our optics and chargers and batteries in the foyer, and I'm so glad I bought it.

There came the day that Toad arrived in the mail, in a box big enough to house a guinea pig. What the heck?? A sticker on the box announced that it was "packed full of awesome." No kidding!

Opened it and laughed out loud as I lifted the massive toad from his deep cushy wrappings. He was enormous, every bit a thirty-dolla toad, big as any Bufo marinus (cane toad)  I've seen plopping about cement sidewalks in the Neotropics. A real lunker. I wasn't expecting THAT.

I sent an enthusiastic email to the seller, Chris from Pantages. We'd been corresponding. We were both delighted to come to know each other; he checked out my blog, and will be visiting Savannah with his wife soon. May the circle be unbroken.

First thing I did was take a little watercolor to the chip on his lip, making it less noticeable.

Big Toad dwarfs the bigger toad of the Savannah pair. He's huge, more than a handful.

Now Toad watches over my orchid collection in the bedroom, and I smile every time I see him.

Sometimes you just have to go hunt down the thing that you want, listen to that little voice. I don't know why I needed Toad. I just did.

Discovering Savannah

There's never enough time to explore. I had a day and a half to myself to discover Savannah. I parked my little chocolate chip Fiat and set out on foot to see what I could see, quickly realizing it was much bigger than I'd thought. 

On the advice of a friend I made my way toward the riverfront, where ancient warehouses and shops had been made into restaurants, bars, candy stores and more shops. I bought myself some odd garments from Nepal at half price. If you want to know what Zickstyle is, this is it. Talbots material I am not. I suspect that twenty years hence I will still be wearing odd gaudy hand-pieced things, and still not caring whether anyone thinks it's age-appropriate. 

Litmus test: Walked into an Apple store upon returning to Columbus. Twenty-something "Genius" helping me stops, stares, says, "If I may say so, that hoodie you're wearing is AWESOME."

Well, all right. Thank you. That vote counts.

I lost myself in an antique mall and bought two busted up old ceramic toads. Unfortunately I somehow lost one of them. My bag was unzipped when it came out of planeside gate check, and the smaller one had fallen or been taken out. Thanks again, TSA. You suck out loud. Now you've lost or stolen a hand-made pennywhistle and a little ceramic toad I treasured. But I still have the big one, busted toes and all.

The antiques mall.  Yes, I was having loads of fun.

A late lunch at Crystal Beer Parlor. Crab stew and a Greek salad. Mmmm.

While we're on food, one of the best meals I had: snow crab and shrimp with grits and Cajun cream sauce at AJ's Dockside on Tybee Is. GA. Ohhhh my gawwwd. I ate nothing but crustacean for ten days and lived to tell about it. I was like Tom Hanks in Castaway, except that I was loving it. And didn't have an abscessed tooth I had to knock out by moonlight with a rock. Or only a soccer ball to talk to. 

Hit an art gallery and took an illicit photo of a superb folk-art osprey. I wanted it, but didn't have $1500 extra to spare. Look at that glare. Love it. He had lots of other water birds, all superb, all made by listening to the woodgrain. So good.

I walked downtown to one of the zillion parks and found a human-dog party of epic proportions.

 The dogs were milling around, and an old arthritic black Lab (yes, Floridacracker, this is for you...) was galumphing painfully around the outside of the pack, smiling at everyone.

Tons of butt-sniffing going on amongst the dogs.

I marveled that nobody was gettin' up in anybody's grille. Reminded myself that these were city dogs, used to socializing, unlike my country Boston terrier. He'd have been lining them up, taking names and kicking butt. Chet. You are such a heathen.

A beautiful pale boy was reading.

He got up, yawned and stretched, not knowing that I was admiring his long ivory arms through my telephoto lens. Sorry. No asking your name, not offering a release for you to sign. Just stealing a little  of your beauty.

More dog action. This pitbull mix was so adorable. Love that expressive tail!

The statues don't mind my taking their picture.

This city, this city. Why can't Ohio have just a smidge of its beauty?

It probably has something to do with our foul climate. Nobody has time to create beautiful public spaces. We're too busy surviving our disgusting winters.

No such problems here. It was 65 this day. Everybody was hangin' out in the park.

His guitar was well worn around the soundhole.

There's that swaying Spanish moss again. Ohhh.

An untimely bloom from a star magnolia. The people I spoke with said the end of January was a wee bit early for this to be blooming. That's OK. I'll take it. Oh, I'll take it.

A sweet presage of spring. Mmmm. More more more said the Zick.

I want to go back. Preferably arm in arm with someone I love, to stroll slowly down Savannah's myriad avenues. It's a  dreamscape for dreams like that.

Bonaventure Cemetery: Daylight in the Garden

I like that Bonaventure's angels are palpably sad, not blankly insipid. I almost expected to hear this one snuffle. 

Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery really is a stunning place. The older parts of the cemetery held the kind of scenes that made me just stop and stare for awhile. There was something about it, though, that I wasn't prepared for. Most of that fell into the realm of the spiritual. It felt to me like an unsettled place, a place not so much of peace but of activity. It's hard to put my finger on it. It was so crowded, graves on top of graves, and I guess I'd expected it all to be very old. But there are new stones wedged in amongst the old kind of willy-nilly. Many of the new stones are, for lack of a better word, tacky, not in keeping with the graceful statuary and timeless themes of urn and dove, angel and olive branch. 

There was quite a bit of aesthetic tension.

Everywhere were tributes, big and small. Does everyone who passes Becky leave a pebble? 

An azalea peeks out from under a cast iron fence, trying out a couple of ill-timed blossoms..  I saw so many azaleas in Savannah. None in bloom yet. But I could imagine what the place must look like in April. Zow. Blasts of color everywhere. I'd like to see that. I don't know. Maybe they bloom in March that far south.

I loved gazing up into the faces of the angels. There weren't as many angels as I'd expected. Maybe I never found Angel Central. When I went into shops and galleries in town, though, I saw all the same angels I'd photographed on the cards and prints. 

They'd become old friends if I came here a lot.

Maybe I need an angel on my grave when the time comes.

 Or the world's largest bluebird. 

The Spanish moss in Bonaventure is so well-developed and huge and drapey (it must like being on a bluff by the river) that it became downright overwhelming for me. Maybe creepy. Something about the way it was blowing in the uncertain southwest wind, the constant motion and sighing of the breeze through the endless drapery, made me feel surrounded. There was so much motion all around me I felt as though I were constantly being crept up on. I kept catching waving gray drapery in the corner of my eye and whipping my head around to see what it was. I guess I'd have to get used to that if I lived in Savannah.

A cycad, coming into fruit. This ancient gymnosperm dates back to the Age of Dinosaurs. A bit palmy, a bit piney, a bit bromeliady. It reminded me of Audrey, the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Feed me!  (Thanks, Jennifer Hurst!)

Not an angel, but a mourning woman. Or perhaps Corinne herself. Whoever she is, she's very beautiful.

I mentioned activity. There was nobody around, yet here was a perfectly fresh, just-plucked camellia bud in her broken hands. Someone has snapped off her fingers, which makes me very sad, and yet she's so beautiful, broken, like Venus with her busted arms. 

Who put the camellia there? 

Time to head toward town and food, the company of the living. I was glad I'd come to Bonaventure, but it was one of the many times on the trip I wished I'd had a friend to share it with. Maybe I'd have handled the haints a little better with company.

Guyana's Savanna

One of the things I hadn't expected to see in Guyana was grassland. I guess I thought it would all be Amazonian rainforest. I was stunned by the visual similarities between Guyana and South Africa, which I visited in 1994, when I was still shooting film. I couldn't get my head around Guyana being in South America when I saw vistas like these.
Guyana's savannas are natural, formed where the soil is too thin to support trees. Lightning helps maintain them. We had but a taste of the unique life these savannas support, so very different from the tall forest flora and fauna. There were dragonflies, for one thing, beautiful ones, and one blue one that must be among the smallest true dragonflies on the planet--less than an inch in total length.As a naturalist, it was a thrill to me to realize that I was looking at a life form that might be undescribed; endemic; that would set every nerve to tingling in my friends who study the Odonata--and to have no idea what I was looking at. I felt like a musicologist who had stumbled on a remote tribe who'd made instruments out of monkey skulls and shells, listening to music none of his colleagues had been privileged to hear.Who are you, elfin one? Does it matter to you?

The mystery continued in the plant kingdom. No idea what this is, even what family it occupies.
This one, I think, is in the pea family. Had to get down on my knees to see if it had a scent. Not at the moment.
This lovely thing was reminiscent of a Gaura. It also reminded me of Salvia greggii, or Autumn Sage, one of my favorite hummingbird flowers. Even the bee looked exotic.
This one, I know, is a melastome, a large tropical family easily identified by the parallel veins in their leaves, and the quilted look made by the cross-veins. I've seen a similar flower grown as a tropical ornamental in San Francisco.
Pull back, and see the landscape--are we in Africa?
A fork-tailed flycatcher says not. East coast birders will recognize it as a strangely frequent fall vagrant, which inexplicably flies up from South America, showing up along the coast from NJ to MA, just when it might freeze to death.
It was good to see this lovely bird at home. It's reminiscent of our scissor-tailed flycatcher, with none of the paradise pink on underwing and flank. Like a kingbird in a tux.
Near the airstrip where we landed, a pair of double-striped thick-knees stalked warily. Enormous relatives of plovers, they have a huge yellow eye with a heavy, weary-looking lid.
Savanna being hard to find in the Amazon basin, sparrows are hard to find. This plain little creature is the grassland sparrow.
It sits in a pepper tree and voices a buzzy song that might have been a Savannah sparrow's. We found all these treasures while ostensibly hunting for an endemic, a skulky little thing of wet open marshes. It's a flycatcher ally called the bearded tachuri. Tell someone you're hunting for a bearded tachuri and see what they think it might be. I somehow snagged a photo before he dove back down into the grass. I love getting photos, any images at all, of weird endemic life birds. But the nice thing about being casual about one's life list is that it's fine with you if you don't see the bearded tachuri. For me, it's all about enjoying the ride. And having probably the only blog on the Internet with "bearded tachuri" in the tagline. Heh. Ooh, that sounds like hubris. I'm sure there are other bloggers writing about tachuris. Somewhere.
In the marsh, we scared up a trio of muscovy ducks--the slender, wild progenitors of the pot-bellied, red-faced, hissing ogres we've made of them. I will say this--even fat Muscovy ducks retain their ability to fly, which is more than I can say for Pekins. Domestic Muscovy duck--photo lifted from businessafrica.net.Wild Muscovies, in Guyana. It was so good to see them as they were meant to be.
At our feet, an elfin forest of sedges and grasses. I wondered how many decades--perhaps even centuries--old these tiny "trees" might be, their trunks built up with each season's growth.
And realized that beneath my feet, termites dwelt in a teeming Gotham, making covered tunnels from one pile of horse dung to the next.
In this metropolis of insects, there is one bad actor--one enormous, all-powerful villain, perhaps the strangest animal that walks the earth, one I had never dared dream I'd see in the wild. We will meet him tomorrow. (Picture Mr. Burns, rubbing his thin white hands together).

I do enjoy cobbling a cheesy serial out of my little travelogue. Cackle!

ZICK ALERT: Wren at The Nature Blog Network just posted an interview with moi at the Nature Blog Network Blog. If only for a couple of highly cute pictures of Chet Baker, and some thoughts on why we blog and what might come of it, please go check it out!