Beans and Lima

Recess was always chaotic, no matter which grade I was in. By sixth grade, I had little sympathy for the adults who served as recess monitors. They tried to keep order with their shrieking whistles, but it was a losing battle. In the face of their discipline, we developed a sort of camaraderie, like prisoners bristling at their guards.

The hill next to the playground had a poorly-maintained soccer field that only the football players could use. During the fall and spring, the grass was filled with worms and bugs. A group of boys scoured the hill and gathered as many of these small creatures as they could. I usually didn’t join them; I didn’t like to get my hands dirty. Whatever we caught usually peed all over the hands of whoever caught it.

One day, there was a special discovery: one of the boys had found a spotted salamander resting beneath a concrete slab. It had slimy, black skin and yellow spots that ran from its head to its tail. Dull eyes protruded from its flat, round head. Stubby legs curled out from its segmented midsection. It looked like an ugly glob of toothpaste that had been given life.

Our sixth grade teacher begrudgingly agreed to keep it as a class pet. The only condition was that she would never have to touch the thing. We, the students, would have to take care of it.

We rejoiced at the adoption of our new pet, and named him Beans. One of the students supplied a vivarium (probably from a previous pet), and we filled it with mud, sticks and leaves. As far as pets go, salamanders are pretty boring, we discovered. They’re nocturnal, like to burrow, and have the permanent expression of a struggling narcoleptic. The cage smelled earthy and damp, almost metallic. Whenever we lifted the black sheet that kept Beans in darkness, it was impossible to tell whether he had noticed us. This led to a lot of tapping on the glass to get his attention.

During recess, the mission to find bugs took on a new urgency. Whatever we found was brought inside as Beans’s food supply. We caught grasshoppers and crickets and worms. Beans liked the crickets and worms best. The grasshoppers were too big, so they were either stapled to pieces of notebook paper or had their guts pulled out from behind. When winter came, we started buying crickets and mealworms from a pet store.

Each weekend, a different student took Beans home. I only had one turn with Beans at my house. It wasn’t very exciting.

In the spring, when the snow melted and turned the ground to muck, we found another salamander on the school grounds. Our class adopted it too, and named it Lima. Lima was shorter and less fat than Beans. The novelty was already gone, and there was less excitement with our latest addition. The two salamanders were still a part of daily class life. They were handled and fed, and integrated into the occasional presentation. Lima and Beans didn’t interact with each other, unless they were lunging at the same worm or cricket.

At the end of the school year, we had to let them go. Nobody wanted to take them home for the summer, and our teacher was emphatically against taking permanent ownership of the amphibians.

On the last week of school, we held a goodbye ceremony. The boy who had originally captured Beans and Lima said a few words, and then set them onto the grass. They each crawled a foot or two, but then they just sat there, and we watched them until it was time to head back inside.

Sixth grade was the last year we had recess, and I never spotted another salamander near the school. I’ve heard of pets who are released into the wild, then die a few days later, because they’ve gotten used to being fed. Some days I wonder if that’s what happened to Beans and Lima. And that’s all I do.