You Look Happy

“You look happy,” my mom said after watching my newest YouTube video. Last week, I wrote about wanting to get back out there and film new wildlife videos for my old channel, Catching Creation. I woke up early last Saturday after around four hours of sleep, but I did the dang thing. It felt good. Things went wrong, technology failed, I almost lost a boot, twice, but it was amazing.

Sometimes it’s good to remember who you are. In my case, I know I was designed to go on adventures and bring folks along with me through various modes of storytelling. I absolutely love teaching about these often-maligned creatures that lurk in all our backyards.

My initial idea went out the window as soon as we arrived at our destination. I had this entire idea about filming a species I’d never had a chance to film. For whatever reason, I’ve always missed out on catching wood frogs in their habitat during their breeding migration. Part of the problem is that I don’t have access to land in the western part of our state where they exist. The other part is that the only spot I know of is in a state park. You can’t hunt nocturnal amphibians in a state park if it closes at dark; they frown on that.

Still, I’d seen these frogs at a few sites in the past and gambled on driving westward to the one site I remembered. The first problem arose when I discovered the pond was dry. Bummer. Luckily, there were other sites and amphibians making noise that were much easier to find. While driving to the first site, I had my windows down and heard spring peepers, chorus frogs, and American toads calling somewhere in the distance. I mentioned it to my best friend, who has been my go-to cameraman since our days in Iraq, and told him to make a note of this area and that we’d double back if the first site was a dud.

Just because we heard frogs calling didn’t mean they were necessarily easy to find. We parked my truck along the river and found a shallow spot to amble across. Then, we just followed our ears and monitored changes and dips in the topography. I began hearing various amphibians calling as we got closer to the site. Even a few wood frogs were clucking in the distance, just out of reach.

The site we discovered was created by beavers damming up a small creek. It’s always so cool to see how they can transform an ecosystem. Once I was at the water’s edge, I saw the surface boiling with writhing American toads. They seemed equally thankful for the beavers and paid me no mind.

I was able to film American toads, a small bullfrog, eastern spotted newts, and a few other odds and ends. I was stoked. On one hand, being in nature recharges my battery, but beyond that, it just truly felt amazing to be filming again. I stumbled over words, I forgot facts about animals, and my camera gear was glitching, but those are stressors I can fix. Those are things that can be improved upon for next time. That gives me hope.

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Stan Lake is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker based in Bethania, North Carolina. His work has appeared in Dead Reckoning Collective, The Havok Journal, Reptiles Magazine, Lethal Minds Journal, and other outlets, and he directed Hammer Down, a documentary about his 2005 deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom with Alpha Battery 5-113th of the North Carolina Army National Guard. For The Havok Journal, he often writes essays and reflections about war memory, veteran life, the outdoors, and everyday experience. You can find his books, collected works, and social media at www.stanlakecreates.com.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.