The View from Inside an Inflatable Frog

I hadn't thought much of it, but there's a good reason the inflatable frogs were most often nocturnal, and found in northern climes: the iconic Portland Frog suit is hot. The zipper is in the back -- making it hard to pop out for a few seconds of fresh air -- and the only way to see is through a thick rectangle of transparent plastic that quickly fogs up with condensation. What you can make out through the moisture is colors and large shapes, as the sun beats down on you through the green-tan dome hovering above your head.

It is one thing to watch the now-iconic original video of Portland Frog that launched the inflatables movement and a thousand pieces of fan art (yes, I too am weaving a tapestry) and admire his fearlessness. It is another thing to try to navigate the world in some form of that body.

You can't carry anything, other than in your pockets. (Mine had my wallet, phone, and two plastic water bottles, carefully rationed.) Your hands and arms can only manage large-scale movements; the smaller your own body is, the harder it is to even reach the fingers of the frog-arms. This makes it harder for anyone to hold your hand and help you with ledges and drops and crowds. There's a white piece of fabric that is supposed to rest on your shoulders to roughly align your eyes with the plastic film-- but if you're small, it's easy to slip through it. I was jealous of the inflatables with exposed human faces, or even whole torsos grafted onto cartoonish lower limbs. It is so incredibly hot. After two hours, my minimal clothing was sopping with sweat, and as counterintuitive as it sounds, dancing felt better than standing still, maybe just because it shifted the dome of hot air around a little. So I found myself dancing near a playground with a similarly-enumbered shark, not even speaking to one another, just moving in the heat.

In the car on the way home, as I chugged another bottle of water -- nausea beginning to creep in around the edges -- my imagination ran forward some number of decades. A high school field trip to a local or regional history museum. Teenagers elbowing one another, teasing, daring each other to raise their hand since a volunteer has been called for. One awkward boy stands up, and the docent leading the tour helps him into the inflatable frog suit. Laughter as he ambles about the room, then he's sent outside to walk around the buildint four times and report back on the experience.

Ever since SUCHO, I've been thinking more about museums and memory and the stories we tell about who we are. Already the frog is a symbol, an icon I hope is amplified with the passage of time. I don't know how this all ends, but I'm here for telling and retelling this story: that in Portland, a protester in an inflatable frog suit made the henchmen of the federal government back up, by grinding and dancing and wiggling his fingers at them. It's why I spend hours at the local makerspace, in the loud laser cutter room, making hundreds of keychains and pendants with Miles Smith's representation of that image to hand out at protests and mail to friends and strangers. This is a story I want people to know now, feel inspired by, take action, and carry it with them into whatever future narratives comes out of it all.

Today was a reminder that it's not just a symbol. Being the frog today was a joy and an honor. People were excited to see the pixels from their screen come to life. They wanted pictures. They came over to say hi. But it was very much also an embodied experience, and unless you've endured being in one of the more mercilessly-constructed inflatables in the sun, you're missing part of the story. It was hot in those things today, we couldn't see much more than the sidewalk a few feet ahead of us, but thousands of us marched nonetheless, bathing in our own sweat. We marched, we waved, we danced, and I think it mattered.

But also I am 40 and feeling very enthusiastic about some ibuprofen and a quiet night at home tonight.