Came back from a hike, and there was an unexpected guest waiting at the car.
This has always been a really meaningful image for me just because it was such a surprising thing to find and because if I hadn’t found it, I suspect I would have been an accidental toad killer. The moment is fresh in my mind every time I see the photo.
And yet, it’s always felt to me like a joke I have to explain, an issue I’ve talked about before in this column. It seems obvious to me that the toad is under a car, next to a tire, seeking safety in a perilous place, but I’ve had people see the shot and say “cute frog, where is that?”
Maybe a tire is a hard shape to parse from this angle, or maybe it’s a technical problem (black shape, hard to see). Or maybe the toad is where the eye not only goes to but remains, the only thing worth seeing.
Visuality is a surprisingly tricky thing. I always thought it was obvious that the main subject in the Andrew Wyeth painting “Christina’s World” had some kind of mobility issue, hence the feeling of pathos and longing in the image, but I’ve met a number of people who think she’s just someone who has been lazing out in the field on a warm summer day and is now looking to home with love and affection before getting up and walking there.
You can say that’s wrong easily enough if you know the history of the painting’s production, but it’s not as if the woman’s muscular disorder or her rejection of a wheelchair is actually visible in the image. The best you can do with the painting itself is sense some kind of striving, some tension, in the body.
There’s only so much you can do with an image to clarify what you want seen and understood about it. After that, you have to walk away—or in this case, clear the toads before you drive.
Yes, all I noticed was the toad until you talked about where you found it, and then I realized the tire treads were visible.