You meet a lot of mud here, which is crazy for a place so dry.
We finally had a couple of days with highs in the upper 40s, and there’s been an awful lot of melting. Oh, man. Do you have any idea what a roadbed of clay soil turns into when it’s really soaked? Most of the time, water just runs off the hard surface. But when the melting snow has had a chance to seep down in, it’s time for miracles, not rubber boots.
When my wife pulled up in the truck a little after noon today, I was standing outside by the door. “We’re MUDDED IN!” she shouted through the open driver’s side window. I didn’t understand what she meant until I took off later to go to Wal-Mart to buy sunflower seeds to feed the birds. Ye gods: the last eighth of a mile of our dirt road is a complete disaster.
Coming back, I almost got the truck stuck just 50 yards from where I took the photo below. I had it in first gear with the rear wheels spraying a curtain of mud. The Ford was sliding all over the road, and then I hit something like bottomless wet concrete mix. Damned if it didn’t almost suck us in. In the scene below, what looks almost benign is actually the consistency of chocolate cake batter and about 10 inches deep. I couldn’t say more exactly, because there isn’t really any bottom to the mud. It does become more dense and rocky at about that depth, however.
This mud is almost a foot deep
At the moment, my ’87 Ford F-150 is just about the perfect vehicle for slogging through this stuff. I shudder to think what would happen to a conventional car. On Friday I saw a woman creeping along on what I’d call a good part of the road in a nice white Camry. A school bus splashed by in the other direction, and the result was right out of a movie: the Camry was almost completely coated in brown goo! I wondered what the poor lady inside thought and if her windshield wipers worked, but I was right behind the bus and didn’t dare stop for fear of sinking in. Scary business.
Sometimes they find cars in the spring when the grader comes through, though I’ve never seen any bones.
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Ah, mud. And wind. And those ceaseless cicadas in the summer. I grew up in northern New Mexico and wouldn’t trade it for anyplace else on earth. Oregon is surely beautiful, but I miss those transcendent blue skies that accompany all that mud. Thank you, John, for sharing your words and photos. They feed my soul!
“Mud, mud, glorious mud, so delightful for cooling the blood.” That’s prime stuff, you’ve got there, partner. Imagine how a few milennia ago a smart Mesopotamian (if not a hippopotamium) might of got the idea of molding this stuff into little wet cylinders on which the King’s bean counters could make wedge-shaped indentations recording the Royal beans they had got out of a particular field on a particular year. In that moment of inspiration was born the idea of writing. History and poetry would come in the wake of these primordial hen-scratches, and there would be a steady evolution of materials. Reeds, parchment, paper and now the electronic hen-scratches we call the internet. You, John H. Farr, writer, are deeply indebted to mud, where it all began. You shouldn’t cuss it so much.