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The Captain and the Frog

I should begin by saying that although this may not be the typical field herpetologist story, it has woven in and out of my time in the field for more than 10 years. But let’s start at the beginning, at my first field research experience in herpetology …

In the summer of 2006, I was a junior in college and had been given the opportunity to spend a few months as a field assistant in Panama with my lab group from Boston University. It was a relatively easy decision: a free trip to Panama and a paid position working with one of the most charismatic frogs in the Western Hemisphere. That’s how I got hooked in—by a young graduate student holding up a printed photo of a Red-Eyed Treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas) in front of the classroom and asking if anyone wanted to work with these colorful creatures. Apprehensions I had of joining a field team were quickly overcome by the excitement of exploring the Neotropics and finally seeing these frogs in their natural habitats. Our group was based in Gamboa, a small town on the banks of the Panama Canal that was built in the 1930s to accommodate canal workers. Gamboa had a long history of hosting field biologists, though I was young and only vaguely aware of its historical importance in the pantheon of tropical amphibian research. I was focused on my first true taste of life in the field—the long, quiet days of walking from my colonial-style wooden house to the old school building that now served as our lab space, the slow visual searches around the edges of the pond to look for arboreal treefrog eggs that seemed like jeweled grapes, and the curtains of thunderstorms that periodically blanketed the town and forced everyone into a reprieve. It was a peaceful way of living, and I was enamored.

An avid and somewhat old-fashioned writer, I wrote long letters to friends back home in Taiwan and in the United States. A couple times a week, I walked around the back of the old school building and up the road to the small post office in town to send my letters and to pick up mail that had come for me in return. On the other side of the old school building was the Gamboa Union Church, built in the 1950s, shortly after the town was established. Not being a religious person, I walked by the church without much thought on most days. That is, until one day a few weeks into my summer.

I had just finished my daily duties of taking care of the Red-Eyed Treefrog eggs in the lab and was leaving the old school building when a tall, skinny Caucasian man walked up to me.

Hi, I’m Pastor Bill from the Union Church next door, he said in an American accent. I heard there was a Taiwanese student working with the frog researchers this summer, so I wanted to introduce myself and ask for a favor.

Being the only Asian around, I supposed I was rather easy to spot. Paster Bill was friendly and earnest—something that perhaps came with his profession—and we stood by the school building and entered into one of the most unexpected conversations I’ve had, before or since.

This favor, he said, was to accompany him to a prison a couple miles down the road for his Thursday morning service. He said there was an old Taiwanese cargo ship captain who was imprisoned in Panama for manslaughter because of some technicality and had not had any visitors since he was sentenced three years ago. The Captain, as they called him, did not understand Spanish and only spoke limited English, so he had been isolated in more ways than one. I agreed but said that I had to make sure my work schedule allowed for it. Conveniently, one of the perks of working with Red-Eyed Treefrogs is that they are nocturnal and, consequently, so is one’s work schedule. This meant that leaving for a couple hours in the morning, other than making me sleep-deprived, was not hard to manage. I should point out that I had never been to a prison, let alone a prison in the middle of a tropical forest in a foreign county. In the couple days that followed, during fieldwork, I wondered what The Captain had done to end up here. Paddling the small lab canoe around the pond and wading waist deep into the water to examine the development of the arboreal frog eggs, I wondered what I had gotten myself into, what I had agreed to, all too readily.

I was a new addition to the small group of retired European and American expats and missionaries that went through the prison gates that Thursday. The open-air prison looked like an old school building, much like the one I had just left earlier that morning, but with metal bars and meshed fences for windows. To the side, we entered a chapel-like gathering hall, and I spotted The Captain amidst the crowd of Panamanian inmates immediately, as he must have spotted me amongst the Caucasian visitors. He looked to be in his sixties and reminded me of my grandfathers—upright in posture due to his military background, calm and soft spoken, reserved, and extremely polite to this 21-year-old he had just met—which was especially surprising considering how elders are respected in Chinese culture and how young I must have seemed.

Not knowing what to say, I told him about the frog research I was doing, about the Red-Eyed Treefrog eggs we were collecting in the ponds nearby, and the predator simulations we were doing to determine what was triggering the escape response of hatchlings from the egg capsules. He had never been outside the prison walls, let alone into the field in Panama, but I told him about the ponds that were just a few miles up the road, and he talked about the frogs he’d seen in the fields as a kid. He seemed genuinely interested in hearing about my frogs. Perhaps it was an escape or simply a conversation in one’s mother tongue with someone from home, but the frogs became our touchstone.

From then until the end of my summer internship, I visited The Captain every week. We only ever had three to five minutes to talk during each visit, which was the amount of time between when we walked into the chapel and when everyone was seated and ready for Pastor Bill’s service to begin. I gave him weekly updates on my fieldwork, while every now and then he would share a small anecdote from his childhood or youth in the navy.

Not long after, the summer ended, and I returned to the United States to complete my undergraduate studies. I started writing letters to The Captain that I would mail to the Gamboa Union Church, which Paster Bill would then pass along to The Captain. And, once or twice a year, Pastor Bill would mail me a letter back from The Captain. The letters would take weeks or months to go from my hands to his and from his to mine. To my surprise, the first correspondence I got from him contained a worn newspaper clip of an article about a frog. I’m sorry to say I don’t remember what the story was about. What I do remember was reading his neat, traditional calligraphy-like handwriting saying that Pastor Bill had brought him a Chinese newspaper from a local fruit stand and that he thought I might find it of interest. How long he had kept that newspaper clipping I am not sure. I could see that the edges were torn by hand through folding the paper. The simple fact that he thought of me while looking at a newspaper story about frogs somehow conveyed a deeper emotion that, even now, is hard to put into words.

The next summer, I graduated from college and moved to Southern California to work as a field herpetologist, doing baseline surveys of endangered amphibians and reptiles under the arid climates of the Inland Empire. I wrote to The Captain about my new job, the new habitats I was surveying, and the new frogs I was seeing in the riparian habitats and vernal pools. And in return, he sent me letters of encouragement and assured me of his good health. As I got into graduate school, my pursuits took me to the tropical forest and ponds of Thailand, and I looked forward to sharing with The Captain the new frogs I was studying. However, I found out that, after years of requests, The Captain had been granted clemency and had been extradited to a prison in Taiwan. This was wonderful news, yet it also meant the end to my roundabout way of maintaining some correspondence with him. That was it.

Years passed, and as I waded chest deep in a different type of tropical pond looking for a different type of arboreal frog eggs, I wondered how The Captain was doing. After I finished my doctorate in Southeast Asia, I moved on to my postdoc in Tennessee and started working with a new set of amphibians in yet another new ecosystem, until one day I learned that the research project I was working on would once again take me back to the field station in Gamboa.

With this came a sudden urge to share this news with The Captain, though it had been years since we lost touch. I searched through newspaper clips and did some amateur sleuthing online. As luck would have it, he had a rather unique two-part surname, and I wondered how many people would share this surname in Taiwan. Turns out, there was only one on Facebook. It wasn’t him—not that I expected it to be—but about a day after I sent a very tentative message saying, I’m sorry to bother you… . This might sound far-fetched, but do you happen to know … I got a response Yes, he is my father. Are you the researcher who visited him in Panama? He told us about your work with frogs.

A few months later, I was sitting at a Häagen-Dazs store at the Taipei train station talking to The Captain about my frogs again. He had been out of prison for a couple of years and was now living with his family and taking care of his grandchildren. It was surreal, to say the least, though I’m not even sure if surreal is the right word to use. We seemed worlds apart from when we last sat together, and yet here we were again, him asking about my research and taking pleasure in hearing my description of the field, the ponds, and the frogs. A few months after that, I arrived in front of the old school building in Gamboa. I caught up with Paster Bill, who had stopped going to the prison because of a recent bout of illness but was still holding his regular Sunday services. I showed him a photo of me and The Captain at the ice cream shop on my phone. It had been 11 years since that summer.

Walking around the old ponds, seeing the translucent egg clutches hanging over the water, and once again admiring the beauty of the Red-Eyed Treefrogs, I considered how a printed photo of this frog had turned into a career for me. There is something about the calmness of the field, the isolation, and the peace it brings that allows for reflection … like the evaporation of noise that allows one’s thoughts to distill into clear droplets of water. In some way, my first field experience with the Red-Eyed Treefrogs has influenced everything that has followed. But beyond the academics of it all, it is the connection with The Captain that I think back on most frequently and perhaps one of the experiences that I cherish the most—the connection through these small creatures that first broke the ice and, I would like to think, offered a mental escape for him and showed me how easily they connect us all.