It's not just raining cats and dogs. In Iowa, it's raining frogs!

I’m afraid there is no escape for us: we shall have to give to civilization upon this earth—some new worlds. Places with frogs in them.
—Charles Fort (August 6, 1874 - May 3, 1932) Book of the Damned

Charles Fort was an American skeptic, anti-dogmatist and student of weird phenomena who wrote several books during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. He retains a cult following today, and the Charles Fort Institute continues his work.

One of his tomes- The Book of the Damned, quoted above- contains a section on occasions upon which it has rained frogs in various parts of the world. The phenomenon has been observed many times, not only with amphibians but also with fish, squid, and other creatures. The most common explanations are waterspouts and really, really strong winds.

I've had great respect for the strength of Iowa winds ever since I conspired with a couple of seminary classmates who also were from Chicago to vandalize the statue of Martin Luther in honor of the Bears' participation in Super Bowl XX (President Fjeld, upon learning of the plot, told us, "If I see you, I'll have to stop you. I go home at seven o'clock...."). Making it out of good, strong tape enabled us to secure Martin's Jim MacMahon-style "Rozelle" headband securely to the statue, but we had a terible time keeping those oversized sunglasses on Dr. Luther's face. The wind kept blowing them off, no matter how strongly we tied them to his head!

Mid-way through my second call, when I lived in Kellogg, Iowa, a 70 mile-per-hour straight-line wind blew the metal chimney cap from the parsonage through the front window of the elderly lady who lived next door. Even when they don't come from tornadoes, Iowa winds can be rather formidable.

This has been an amazingly rainy, stormy summer here in the Land Between the Rivers. A couple of months ago, I noticed a dead, squished, and decomposing creature on the sidewalk that I assumed had to be a baby bird. But it looked an awful lot like it had been a frog at some point. The problem was that it was too far from any body of water for that explanation to seem likely.

Now, there is a creek several blocks from my apartment, and the Des Moines River is about half a mile in another direction. But neither seem close enough to explain the number of similar little corpses that I kept spotting all over the neighborhood as the summer went on. Closer examination confirmed my initial impression: these were definitely small frogs, and not baby birds after all.

We've had so much rain that some low points and ditches have become semi-permanent little mini-swamps this summer. I considered the possibility that frogs from the creek and/or river might have laid eggs in some of them, produced tadpoles, and thus boosted the amphibian population of the neighborhood. Maybe. But I never saw anything swimming in them, and- though I did once hear some suspicious rustling in the plants which hid most of one of the larger of these front-yard swamps from easy view- I have never actually seen frogs in or near any of them. In fact, none of the frogs I've seen this summer have actually been alive. In fact, all have them have been reasonably far along in the process of returning to the dust from whence they came.

I see no other conclusion possible: we have had a Fortean summer here in the Highland Park section of Des Moines. We have been treated to a rain of frogs, and perhaps more than one of them. The winds from the angry thunderstorms we have experienced so often in the past several months must have picked up the little fellows from along the banks of the river (the creek seems awfully small to account for so many), and deposited them all over the neighborhood, causing them to either die from the impact on the concrete or dry out and shrivel up from having been deposited too far from water for them to survive. They have my sympathy, either way.

In any event, in reading about rains of frogs (both in the Book of Exodus and elsewhere), I never expected to actually experience one. Son of a gun, it seems that I have.

ADDENDUM: Or not.

I had an interesting conversation with one of my neighbors from the building last night. Seems that he has seen lots of living frogs in thw 'hood of late. One of them even got inside the building, and was hopping around in the hall outside my apartment!

Perhaps all the rain has simply made for an environment in which the little guys have felt safe in wandering unwonted distances from permanent bodies of water. Maybe those semi-permanent pools have played a role. Either that, or somebody in the neighborhood is keeping some Hebrews in captivity, and needs to let them go.