Last night, in sheets of rain that created thick pools of water on the roads, I went driving to see what I might photograph; I enjoy night photography and the strange visual effects that rain can produce, and I wanted specifically to travel to St. Gabriel to see a roadside cross I used to pass a few times weekly when I road my bike more.

I and my dogs, whose heads out of the back windows were soon soaking wet, drove along the levee of the Mississippi out of Baton Rouge, and shortly discovered in the beam of my headlights many hundreds of frogs, brought to the road surface by the rains and the warmth of the asphalt. They were tiny, and while some stayed motionless others started at the approach of my car and leapt unpredictably in the air or in rapid jumps across my path.

I slowed to avoid them as it tends to be hard for me to kill things, but traffic behind me would roar past as frustrated and less squeamish (or perhaps just inattentive) drivers accelerated to the speed limit. Finally the road took me far enough from the city that I could remain around twenty miles and hour, braking and swerving to avoid them.

I probably killed ten or fifteen nevertheless, and on two occasions felt something in my chest at the moment of probable death (unfelt, unseen): a cascade of adrenaline, remorse,?enervation. It is not hard when one is alone at night to think that one feels the frog’s inarticulate reproach or its life traveling upwards through one’s body, but such superstition lasts only seconds.

My mother told me once of a similar experience in Mexico, I believe; perhaps it was when she and my father lived there. Thousands of frogs covered the road and one had no choice but to drive through them, a massacre at once inevitable, inconsequential, and deeply upsetting. I am not sure if all this seems laughable; I am not sure that it isn’t, but I do know that I like small creatures a great deal.

After much death-dealing, I made it to the roadside memorial for Scotty Brown, whose hat I used to see at the halfway point of 50 mile bike rides with some regularity and about whose fate I often wondered (photo below):

I find these tributes both touching and slightly discomfiting, as I’ve written about before. After a few photos I began to feel very guilty and left.

Returning, I saw three other crosses and two churches: one lit by a solitary sodium lamp and one by dozens of mercury vapor lamps at a chemical plant directly behind it. At this latter church, there is an unfenced graveyard which, on a bike ride perhaps three years ago, a friend and I discovered contained some open tombs; one had a plastic cover where the slab had been smashed, and plainly visible inside was a skeleton in disarray. It seems now to be better-maintained?(photo below):

I meant to take a different road back but missed the turn while lost in thought, and thus by my own inattention and carelessness killed several more frogs: they looked trailed their skinny legs behind them as they flopped across the center divider, lit white by my high beams in the fog.