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The Fire-Belching Battle Toad of Playa Negra
At night, in the month of May, the patio is overrun with June bugs, which, for some unknown but tactically blundersome reason, congregate on the floor behind the kitchen counter. Each night, the stocky, muscular toad emerges from his waterfront condo and makes his way to the congregation of floor-flailing beetles, half of which are on their backs, victim to some cruel prank of evolution. In that theater, our toad proceeds like a battletank, launching a barrage of firepower from his howitzer tongue, unleashing total carnage upon the mindless, unsuspecting targets, one after the other, devouring what must be well over 100 of the crunchy-on-the-outside-soft-on-the-inside, six legged morsels. Thus our lime green/coffee brown uniformed fellow gorges himself nightly on the caramel colored bon-bon-beetles. Enter Rasta Mike and a handful of tiny chile peppers, which, on this Texan’s up-ratcheted scale of picante, rate soundly as “Damn Hot!” Placed squarely in the battle toad’s sighting mechanism at the proper distance, these peppers suffer the identical howitzer tongue blast of our bon-bon-beetle casualties. After the successful acquisition of said chile pepper target, the battle toad pauses in order to properly assimilate the unexpected kill. Perhaps a minute or less passes, and then, an amphibian belch of atomic proportions bellows forth, of such brilliance that all self-respecting males privileged to so witness this once in a lifetime spectacle of belching radiance will laugh until they cry. You will swear that you have witnessed a toad summon from its diaphragm a ball of fire, that its eyes bulged out of it’s gland-covered skull, and that it levitated briefly, shaken by the inner explosion. You will swear that you witnessed exactly this and you will laugh so hard that you will fear death by lack of oxygen. Also patrolling this wild, exotic patio and its perimeter is a post-neutered, narcoleptic cat named Doobie who ferociously hunts ko-boas (sp?), one of the most venomous serpents of the land. As our battle toad returns to his waterfront condo, slowly, belly dragging from the battle kills, the ferocious, snake hunting gato enters his path and stops. The soldiers stare each other down, a tumbleweed blows between them followed by wisps of dust, and the familiar wild-west, pre-gunfight whistle-tune sounds. Time stops. Tension builds. The cat blinks and walks away. Señor Toad smiles, swaggers to his aquatic paradise, climbs into the fountain to cleanse himself of the night’s carnage, slips into his dark dwelling, and calls it a night, satisfied with the evening’s engagements, victorious yet again, still undisputed master of his domain. |
On Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, in the tiny, secluded Pacific surf community of Playa Negra, there exists a house. That house is owned by a dread-locked American surfer named Mike, Rasta Mike, and the kitchen and living area of that house are but a covered patio, open to the wild and all its inhabitants. And the focal point of that patio is a gurgling fountain constructed of stones and seashells, grown with lilies, water plants, flowers and algae, and filled with tiny fish and shrimp, charged with eating the algae. And in one particular crevice of the fountain’s stone wall there exists a tiny cave, or perfect abode, depending on one’s perspective. And in that sweet spot resides a mammoth toad, mammoth.