The Frog Chorus of Cannery Row

When professor Greg Smestad of Monterey, Calif., (pop. 29,674) wants his students at the Monterey Institute of International Studies to better understand the relationship between man and environment, he takes them on field trips. At a wilderness park three miles from school, he enthusiastically identifies and describes various plants to his group.

Three miles in the other direction from the school is a younger, more fragile environment that has intrigued Smestad since he first came upon it. “Because most of my work takes place in a laboratory,” he says, “I really enjoy being able to observe firsthand the science of nature unfolding in the wild.”

The elements in Smestad’s impromptu study were a vacant lot and an abnormal weather pattern. The vacant lot was to be the site of a hotel development project, but an unusually strong El Niño season in 1995 transformed it into an urban wetland. Rainwater collected along a retaining wall, saturating the ground and forming a small pond, which provided a fertile downtown ecosystem. Before long, tall reed grass and abundant insects provided the ideal setting for the Pacific tree frogs that seemingly showed up from nowhere.

Everything about the infant wetland intrigued the curious Smestad, especially its tiny, melodious frogs. Their two-note chorus was a welcome evening serenade that began around dusk with one or two frogs, then grew louder and louder as more joined the chorus.

“They were so loud,” he says, “that I could hear them from our balcony two blocks away.”

All this occurred in a part of Monterey known as Cannery Row, where sardine canneries operated between 1902 and 1964. John Steinbeck immortalized the area and some local citizens in his 1945 novel, Cannery Row. The canneries have since been renovated or replaced for other uses in downtown Monterey, a busy tourist destination today.

One evening last February, Smestad noticed that construction equipment had been brought onto the lot, some of the vegetation had been removed, and the frogs were singing a different tune. “It sounded eerie,” he recalls.

An eighth-generation Californian and an avid family historian, Smestad was smitten by the frogs and decided they had become a part of his own history and that of Cannery Row. He felt compelled to take action.

Crouching on the sidewalk next to the vacant lot one evening with a hand-held microphone pushed through an iron fence, the internationally known professor taped a symphony for the ages—a 10-minute chorus of unrehearsed frog music. His recording, now on a CD titled The Sounds of Cannery Row, is intended to be an archival account of the freakish Cannery Row frog song, captured before a new hotel displaces the thumb-sized amphibians.

Indeed, the frogs might even be related through uncharted generations to those mentioned in Steinbeck’s novel. It seems that some characters in the book known as Mack and the boys returned from a frog-hunting expedition with about 700 captives, but before they could sell them to the local marine lab, a fine summer party got under way on Cannery Row, a drunk crashed into the frog box, and then, after everyone fell asleep…

“Through the broken end of the packing case a frog hopped and sat feeling the air for danger and then another joined him. They could smell the fine damp cool air…For quite a while a little river of frogs hopped down the steps, a swirling, moving, river. For quite a while Cannery Row crawled with frogs—was overrun with frogs.…But well before dawn they had all gone. Some found the sewer and some worked their way up the hill to the reservoir and some went into culverts and some only hid among the weeds in the vacant lot.”

The vacant lot referred to in the passage is the exact same one where Smestad made his recording. He hopes that when the hotel is finally done it might feature a garden area where the frogs could serenade visitors. In the meantime, it’s rumored the little croakers are considering an offer from Smestad to go on tour with the CD.

Laura Harris is a freelance writer from Salinas, Calif.

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