I find it unfortunate that we English speakers have so few words for "mud," a substance that varies so greatly by location and conditions that it would be handier to have a hundred terms for it, as the indigenous Nordic Sami people do for "snow." If a useless neologism like "ginormous" can make the Oxford English Dictionary, you'd think we could spare an extra line or two to distinguish one person's home mud from another's. Out here in Silver Hills, our mud is less a description of the ground than it is a full season, a marker of identity, and a way of life.
Lacking a hundred helpful synonyms for mud, I think instead of stories that suggest what's special about the thick, deep, slippery gunk that we Silver Hillsians call "gumbo." One stretch of our driveway is so muddy that when I dumped a trailer load of three-quarter-inch drain rock on it the rock simply vanished into the mire. When driving on even the slightest slope it makes little difference whether you put your foot on the gas or the brake, since even while braking you simply slide along without resistance, like a capsule gliding through space. Our gumbo also has the unique quality of sticking to itself, gathering so thickly on our truck tires that it is limited only by the wheel wells, which shear it off with each revolution, neat as a spindle turning on a lathe.
The road to our house is sometimes so thick with gumbo that it becomes impassible even to high-clearance four-wheel drive vehicles. When that happens we have two choices: park at the paved road and slog in two and half miles through the muck, or wait until the mud freezes up, making it viscous enough that it becomes possible to pilot perilously across it. In seven years out here I've never completed a full mud season without sliding off the road, and we now run a "gumbo pool": five bucks buys you a guess as to the first date on which one of us will end up in the ditch. But the very best thing about mud season in Silver Hills is the "gumbo luge," which our young daughters love. Here's how it works: When mud season begins, the first dozen truck trips down our road leave shallow wheel ruts. Those ruts deepen by the day, and by mid-season are so deep that it is risky to try to avoid them, since a slide into the ruts results in a jaw-rattling drop that is bad for spines as well as transmissions. Instead, the trick is to get squarely into these twin tire canyons from the start, after which the impressive depth of the channels unfailingly prevents the vehicle from sliding off the road. The ruts are so deep that you can drive our road without ever placing your hands on the steering wheel. Instead, you simply slide along, secure in the deep tracks that guide your rig even around hairpin turns. No true Silver Hillbilly would ever be caught with their hands on the wheel while running the gumbo luge, and it is common practice to lace your fingers behind your head while gunning your truck along through the muddy slots.
One morning during the height of mud season I was sitting at my writing desk looking out the window--which is all I ever do at my writing desk--when I saw a spectacle so astonishing and surreal that I grabbed my birding binoculars to scope it out. There, in the twin tubes of the binocs, was a pink Cadillac, coming more or less sideways up our driveway. Understand that in all my years on the ranting hill I had never seen a two-wheel drive vehicle out here during mud season, that our driveway is an unbroken half-mile long sheet of hazardous gumbo, and that the only pink things I have ever seen around here are rock penstemon, long-leafed phlox, and my kid's pacifier. I instantly sprinted for the door, booted up, and headed out to see what would become of whoever was crazy enough to brave gumbo in a Caddy. My boots were soon covered with mud, so I crouched into ski jumper position and slid all the way down the ranting hill. I then slogged toward the next rise, wondering what I might see when I topped it.
From the crest of that knoll I witnessed an utterly indelible image: the pink Cadillac had gone sideways off the driveway, slid down a small hill, and lodged firmly atop a juniper stump, where it rested with its rear end up in the air and its wheels spinning madly, shotgunning mud everywhere. Covering my face with my forearm to deflect the gumbo strafing I worked my way down to the car, which had music blaring from behind its tinted windows. I rapped on the driver's side window and waited politely for a reply. Eventually the power window rolled slowly down, and Loretta Lynn came blasting out: "Well sloe gin fizz works mighty fast, when you drink it by the pitcher and not by the glass!" In the driver's seat was a middle-aged woman who looked uncannily like Loretta, only frosted blonde. She held in her hand a highball glass, from which she had apparently managed to spill not one drop of her cocktail. Rather than turning the music down, she instead held up her pointer finger as if to say "hold on a second," took a sip of her drink, and then gunned the engine again.
It took a few weeks for the gumbo to freeze up enough for a tow truck to get in and winch out the abandoned car, during which time I had the great pleasure of sitting at my desk, looking out at that beautiful wreck stranded down there among the gooseberry and rabbitbrush. And to commemorate the visit from the Mary Kay lady, whose name I never learned, I did what I think any socially-retarded recluse writer would have done: I composed a haiku.
Image courtesy Flickr user Jennifer Lamb.