Mud
Deep, sucking mud turns into swirling dust. Warm breezes and gentle rains green the fields. Yellow daffodils and budding pink apple blossoms announce a new season. Birds serenade. Barefoot kids yell “Play ball.” Fishing poles are found again. A new hook attached to the often broken line. The school year is winding down as the land and life are at last awakened. — Author Unknown
Once upon a time in the days and years before yesterday, between winter and summer came a season dreaded by country people. It was a season about as popular as a skunk at a yard party.
The mud season was a rogue season without bona fide credentials or a carefully predictable time slot. Depending on many variables it could last a few weeks or months. Regardless of length, it made you as cheerful as a coroner’s inquest, but it had to be endured like a painful toothache—with the faintest hope that relief was somehow coming in a dentist’s chair.
A century or more ago country people didn’t fight the mud season but had developed many time-tested ways of coping. As one old wag once said, “what cannot be cured must be endured.”
In those days, country people didn’t have to travel very far for mud made it next to impossible to travel. Wagons would break, wheels and axles, horses would keel over in fatigue trying to navigate the roads of muddy gumbo. Kids walked to school in mud. Mom hung out the wash in mud, with boots on. The barnyard was a sea of smelly mud. Muddy footprints went to the wood piles, outhouse and hen house.
Most houses had a mud room, foot scrapers and a gunny sack to wipe muddy boots on. Henry Ford’s Model T was a good mudder in emergencies, being some 18” off the ground. Even for the T, mud would pile up to the point where the wheels couldn’t turn and the hardened mud had to be chipped out. Some early vehicles used “mud hooks” on the tires. They were about as handy as a cow with a musket or a hog with a fiddle. In short, the mud season was a pretty depressing time. As one person described it, “like walking around in mud to save funeral expenses.”
My Utica-born father and life long resident was five years old when, in 1904 the U. S. Office of Road Inquiries published a highway census, showing some 2,000,000 miles of roads. Of this number, only 150,000 miles were improved (barely) and only 250 miles apart from city streets were paved. Well into the first quarter of the 20th century, when still nearly 50% of Americans lived in rural America, spring thaws continued to transform rutted and frozen winter roads into deep mud sloughs that were virtually impassable. In short, the mud season was unanimously PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.
Eventually, of course, Old Dobbin retired as the still continuing automobile age burst like a rocket ship on America. All season super highways soon crisscrossed each other as the population changed drastically from living in rural to now urban areas. Today the mud season to today’s urban dwellers is as foreign an experience as a roller skating dinosaur would be at President Trump’s golf course. For the urbanite, mud season is a very minor inconvenience. But for those rural Americans mud season is still in some fashion a reality. Weather continues to be the number one topic of conversation. My beautiful wife Lois and I know from almost 40 years living here in Brookfield just how challenging off-the-grid winter living can be. But as one old timer told us, “I wasn’t brought up in the woods to be scared by owls.”
Regardless of the season Lois and I are always busy like a proverbial fish peddler in Lent.
Living at times three torturous miles of dirt road leading to our dead-end road and isolated off the grid home, we have had to battle some really horrendous virtually impassable, muddy road conditions. At times we question our sanity living as we do at such a time.
Until the snow melts and warmth returns, my incredibly hardy and lovely wife Lois has to deal with lots of mud—including at times a flooded out house. When our life really gets busy, I find myself waving to myself as I pass my mirage heading past me in another direction. On such days I feel like a proverbial one armed paper hanger with a seven-year itch.
This year I think I’ll take the British novelist Anthony Trollop’s advice written in 1858. “Let no man boast himself that he got through the perils of winter till at least the 7th of May.”
Central New Yorkers will write Mr. Trollop an update July 4.
Hobie Morris is a Brookfield resident and simple country man.