Animal Tale #8

A big jump or a big bump

I left Copenhagen only a few hours ago. A beautiful city I hope never to set foot in again. Not because of the city itself, but because of what happened while I was there.

I went to Denmark with a colleague to de-install a work from the HQ of a big architecture studio.

The job itself was relatively easy, and certainly not the reason for my reaction. Everything went smoothly, except for the moment we had to flatten a rose bush to drive a boom lift into the building.

I’ve since learned this is something you should never do if you wish to avoid deeply offending the landscape architect in charge. They seem to grow each branch with such care and intention that you’d think they whispered to it daily.

But that’s not the point.

Once inside, we spent most of the time going up. Going down. Going up and going down again. All at an incredibly slow speed. And so, the day went by.

We were almost done, with only two works left to remove.

I drove us up for the second-to-last time, and once at the top, my colleague and I both froze.

Resting on the side of a concrete pillar, halfway across the ceiling, 16 meters above the ground, was a small green frog.

I freaked out and immediately bent down, so quickly that I smacked my head and started bleeding. My colleague just said, “Let’s just finish the job. I’m sure the frog will somehow find its own way down.” Given my mild concussion and my aversion to frogs, this sounded perfectly reasonable to me.

So we worked as before, the only difference being that our audience now included not just all the architects, but a frog as well.

She kept staring straight at us.

When we were almost done and I was beginning to feel safe again, the frog jumped, straight into the basket of our lift.

If you’ve ever been on a fully extended boom lift, you’ll know: even the smallest shift in weight can make it wobble. And this frog? Its little jumps had us bouncing up and down, every movement feeling way bigger than it actually was because of the height.

The architects down below all turned to watch and I braced myself for their judgment. But something else happened instead.

They started jumping too.

At first, just one. Then another. Then three, then four, until they were all moving at the same time. It wasn’t playful. They weren’t laughing. Dead serious, they were just jumping.

I can’t tell whether this lasted one minute or an hour. The whole thing was just too surreal.

I didn’t dare look at my colleague, afraid he might be jumping too. So I stayed completely still, unable to move or speak.

Then the frog jumped again, this time out of the basket and over the rail. A single big leap into the air.

When we came down, the architects had gone back to work, as if nothing had happened. I searched the floor but found nothing. No frog. No traces. No explanation.

We packed quickly. We did not speak about it. We did not think about it. We did nothing at all about it.

For the rest of the night, our last night in Copenhagen, we didn’t mention anything even remotely related to jumping, frogs, or architects.

I can still feel a strange pulsing sensation in my body, though perhaps it’s just the bump on my head.

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