Redneck French food

A short note about my surgery: everything went as expected, I'm home and recovering, and I owe a great deal of thanks to many family and friends for thoughts, prayers and other contributions that have made our lives easier during this time.  We may delve into this topic more later, once I'm past the recovery, but for now I'll just say that we're beyond it and moving on.

The morning before my surgery, I rode up to Kearney on my motorcycle just to kill some time.  I tooled around town a little, just soaking in all the places I'd hung around the first 18 years of my life.  As I left town on Highway 33, I passed a subdivision.  It was once a very large cow pasture, past the southern-most developed part of Kearney, and it contained a pond in the middle of it.  It belonged to the uncle (I think) of a friend of mine, and one night in high school, a group of us - probably five or six - decided to have a campout at the pond.  

Except for rare occasions, Kearney was too small a town to have parties without it getting back to your parents.  So back in those days, a campout was a good reason get away from the adults, have a few beers and shoot the shit.  It took a four-wheel drive or two to get us all out to this place in the middle of nowhere.  We must have had four cases of beer between us.  We always over-provisioned for events like this.  Where were you going to get more if you ran out?  

After several hours of drinking late into the night, we decided we were starving.  At that point we discovered we hadn't supplied this trip very well.  As one of the guys summed it up, "We brought four cases of beer, and not so much as a fucking cracker to eat?"  There wasn't a place then that was open late enough you could go grab something to eat in the middle of the night even if you wanted to, and for that matter it would have taken a while to get to a road.

Pretty soon, we found ourselves walking around the pond, flashlights and guns in hand, searching for frogs.  One guy would spotlight the frog, and the other would shoot him.  I can't be sure, but I don't dismiss the possibility we discussed shooting one of the cows instead.  We were pretty hungry.  

We must have shot a dozen or more.  We cut off the frogs legs, skinned them, and threw them in the ice water of one of the coolers to clean them off.  Then we open-roasted them over the fire, had a few more beers and went to bed.  It was the first time I'd ever had frog legs.  I don't remember much of what we talked about for hours, and I hadn't thought about it probably 25 years, but I still remember it as a fun night.  One thing I do distinctly remember, before I took my first bite, was wishing we'd had some salt.  

The Boy Scouts would probably not advise going on a campout, bringing nothing but beer, guns, knives and something start a fire with, but that wasn't very notable in Kearney in those days.