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© Copyright 2008, Mountain Kids
Magazine, LLC

Summer 2008
Gunnison/Crested Butte Colorado Family
Activity Guide

Features

Ode To Mud
by Shelley Read



After a long mud-season, mud doesn’t make it on to many Crested Butte parents’ list of favorite things. But with the dawn of summer, set your family free to romp in the mud and feel the simple joy of taking a squish on the wild side.

My family has many favorite places along the winding shores of the East River. Tucked in the pines near the headwaters is our secret camping spot. A bit farther down is the sacred place where we once held hands and tearfully scattered our beloved dog’s ashes into the current. Farther down the curves we hunt the crags for crystals, observe a hidden marmot colony in the lower falls’ cliffs, and trudge through the kettle ponds to catch salamanders and let their slippery bodies slide from our wet hands.

But few spots along the East River compare for just flat-out fun with the mud bog at the base of Avery Peak that my kids have nicknamed the Great Ooshy-Gooshy. My daughter discovered the G.O.G. when she was two years old while leading me on an expedition through the crazy maze of willows along one of the river’s thousand curves. We were wandering aimlessly (is there any other way?), getting lost and found and lost again in the thick tangle of branches, when we emerged into an unexpected clearing on the river’s edge, and there it was — a Jacuzzi™-sized soup of kid heaven.

I wouldn’t say it was love at first squish for my daughter. She was timid at first, keeping a long stick’s length from the mucky center, poking curiously into its depths, scribbling circles and the letter “A” with the limb’s tip. But soon she was squatting on the bog’s edge, scooping slimy handfuls and squealing with delight as black mud ran through her fingers and dribbled across her river boots. As she gathered her courage to get closer, go deeper, she giggled nervously and kept looking over her shoulder at me with the expression of a giddy thief, knee-deep in the riches of some unexpected booty. “Go for it!” I cheered her on, and she did— boy oh boy, did she. With a leap and a squeal, she landed smack in the middle of the bog, splattering black droplets shoulder high. The mud immediately sucked the boots right off her feet, but by this time she could care less. She was sinking up to her knees in the mire, scooping and tossing big globs of it in the air. My little girl was transforming into a wallowing pig before my eyes. I did the only thing a good mother could do: I threw off my shoes and joined her.

And so the love affair with the Great Ooshy-Gooshy began, and in the eight summers since then it has consistently been one of our family’s most joyful playgrounds. Interestingly, every visit to the bog starts in a similar way, each of us initially a little disgusted, a tad timid about getting our clothes dirty, a teensy reluctant to step off the drier, firmer earth of the perimeter. In a word, we arrive far too civilized. But just as it happened for my daughter upon her first encounter, the draw to the cool, squishy center of the bog proves just too great for our etiquette-tainted conditioning, and within minutes our inner pigs take charge. After that, anything can happen, and does — the mock concocting of elaborate mud cuisine, artistic mud sculptures, mud baseball, and all-out mud brawls leaving everyone filthy and breathless from laughing. Last summer my daughter and son decided their daddy needed his legs slathered with mud “stockings,” a project that hilariously spiraled out of control and eventually led to the three of them going for a cleansing dip in the frigid river in their underwear. It was one of the best days ever.

So what is it about playing in the mud? I have my theories about some tiny morsel of our reptilian brain still longing for the primordial gumbo from which we originally slithered. But for a more practical answer to my question about the lure of mud, I decided to skip lofty inquiries with evolutionary biologists and ask the real experts — kids. The question invariably brought smiles to the faces of all the children I asked — dreamy, pining grins or mischievous smirks as they imagined being up to their elbows in muck. The overwhelming reply? “Because it’s so messy,” they said, often following reproachfully, “and grown-ups hardly ever just let kids be messy.” Touché. Thankfully, both anxiety-laden adults and mess-seeking children have nature as a necessary antidote for our cultural obsessions with neatness and order. Playing in the mud does for us — young and old alike — what any wilderness experience at its most profound can do: It allows us to shed the tight skin of orderliness and set our wild, messy selves free. And, let’s admit it, it feels good.

I acknowledge that playing in the mud may not be for everyone, but if the idea of it makes the proverbial “good mother” in us shudder, we might do well to “examine why. Children are our constant reminders that the boundary between a human being’s civilized and wild selves is thinner than we like to believe. There is an untamed place in every human heart capable of admiring a mud bog as the perfect place to party rather than a despicable threat to our carefully maintained tidiness. As with most tenets of fundamental wisdom, young people tap into that wild place more easily and joyfully than do adults. If we’re lucky, they’ll drag us through the mud — literally — and liberate us from our skepticism and fear. After all, what is there to be afraid of? A few garment stains? Wear old clothes. Germs? Overrated. What your prim grandmother would think? It’s your life. Acting like an animal? Like children, animals have much to teach us.

Life is messy, literally and figuratively. A summer afternoon of letting down our guard against that reality and playing in the mud with our kids can open up wells of contentment and spontaneity we may have forgotten we possess. Just think of the look on your childrens’ faces if you suddenly let out a hoot and jumped right into the center of your own Great Ooshy-Gooshy. It might turn out to be one of the best days ever.

Here’s mud in your eye.

Shelley Read is a writer, educator, and the proud mother of two mud puppies. She is a regular contributor to Mountain Kids Magazine.