The deliberate creaking of a chorus frog greeted me on my walk through a local forest preserve last November. The frog was a bit cool and singing slowly, savoring each note. I expect to hear frogs singing on spring mornings, not on afternoons a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. I live in DuPage County, Illinois, where winter is relatively light and generally doesn’t arrive until middle or late December. Our days nonetheless shorten as we approach the winter solstice. Frogs sense day length and should know better than to start wooing in the fall. We were, however, at the end of the warmest year on record, 1.5°C higher than the settled-upon preindustrial global average temperature. Perhaps today’s frogs can’t be expected to know what they need to in order to get by.
I had forgotten about the frog by the next morning, when I stopped in my reading to look up a word. The reference at hand was my dad’s 1957 American College Dictionary. I use it not because it’s a great dictionary, but because it tucks in nicely between the chair and the wall, and because it used to be my dad’s. The American College Dictionary is, in the words of one reviewer, “more than satisfactory as a desk guide.” My dad was a student of electrical engineering at General Motors Institute at the time that he bought the dictionary. The book’s major recommendation for my dad’s course of study may have been that some definitions were lifted from the American Standard Definitions of Electrical Terms.
So I was surprised to stumble across a wavering underline in black ballpoint ink of the second definition of “nirvana”: the passionless peace of imperturbability, attained through the annihilation of disturbing desires. This is the only underlined passage I have ever seen in my dad’s more-than-satisfactory dictionary. By my dad’s own account, he did not have any particular interest in the humanities. I imagined him studying late at night—seeing him, unreasonably I know, as he looked when I was in college, not as he would have looked when he was in college—stopping in his work to flip through the dictionary, hunting some unfamiliar word, when the passionless peace of imperturbability caught his eye.
Then I recalled the frog of the previous afternoon, whose song was scrawled in the past but refined over more than ten million years of chorus frog evolution, the rules for courtship shifting as temperatures rose and fell. Frog lineages evolve, but individuals don’t. They simply respond to what their lives toss at them. Like a moss sprouting thickets of sporophytes in mid-December, a frog is plastic and susceptible. It is committed to interpreting twenty-first-century signs using an ancient grammar. There is perhaps nothing special about a November frog call. According to herpetologist Jim Andrews, frogs are “only minutes away from breeding” when they settle in for the winter. The intermediate temperatures and short days of fall mimic spring closely enough that frogs occasionally become disoriented. A November chorus frog is responding not to climate change anxiety, but to millions of years of natural selection, a tool wielded by seasons odder than the ones we are living through now.
There is perhaps nothing special about the underlined definition, either. I look back at it, and I begin to suspect it’s not in my dad’s hand after all. Every shopping list, birthday card, or note he wrote while I was away at camp was traced with a precise arch of the wrist that I tried to copy when I was younger, before I figured out that his way of printing letters was functional only for the left-handed. The mechanics of my dad’s handwriting made it utterly recognizable: he was plotting letters a decade before the Graphomat Z64 was released to the public. This unsteady underline could not be his.
In fact, I now remember underlining the definition myself one evening as a fifth-year senior at university. I was about to graduate and didn’t know what was coming next. The definition spoke to me that evening and was forgotten by the next morning. Then the thought of myself at twenty-three is replaced by the thought of my dad in his dorm room at GMI in his final year, a post-graduation job already tucked under his belt, but aware that a certain future is still uncertain. In this scene, he is underlining the passage. I somehow imagine these two moments with equal clarity and precision. Both images resolve more finely the more I think about them, despite the fact that the existence of either cancels out the possibility of the other. The underline, like the November frog call, is a message from a past, but from which one? My memory, if it is one, is no more accessible to me than my father’s memories.
Writing this down a few months later, I also don’t recall whether I made it all the way to the definition I set out to find in November. The word was “thirl.” I look it up now and find, “to pierce; penetrate. [ME; OE thyrlian, der. thyrel hole. See NOSTRIL].” If I looked the word up on the morning after the misplaced frog call, the sky falling imperturbably all around us, its meaning slipped away.
But I have it now, etched into the trail that winds backward through Anglo-Saxon and Old High German, forward through the morning to the coming spring, when the chorus frogs will start singing again in earnest. I will hear them as I am biking past the marsh at the east edge of the Arboretum, on my way into work. I’ll stand for a minute, wading in a pool of frog calls, breathing through my nostrils while the mercury ratchets upward. Then I’ll get back on my bike. When I reach work, I’ll make a cup of coffee and sit to work through sentences at the keyboard, nailing down one thought at a time.
Andrew Hipp is Director of the Herbarium and Plant Systematist at the Morton Arboretum, as well as a lecturer at the University of Chicago.