The Mud Man

My desire to have fun and live a meaningful life has always been there. From my very earliest memories, I can recall gathering kids together for night games, board games, video games, sports, and every other type of activity I could think up. I wanted everyone to feel included and have a fun time.

I remember one day when I was ten, a friend and I found a creek up in the foothills. We realized that through the manipulation of several levers and the construction of a rock dam that water could be diverted from its present course and redirected into a neighbor's undeveloped back yard. This neighbor just happened to have a giant trench in their backyard. Upon reflection, I think that the trench was originally intended to be the foundation of a new home, but in my developing brain, it looked like a big dirt pool waiting to be filled with water.

We didn't understand the technicalities of why a pool needed concrete foundations or tile siding; we simply thought we had hit the jackpot. After diverting the stream, we waited impatiently for our makeshift pool to fill. We had grown up doing connect-the-dots, and we connected them all right. Surely the owner's original intent in digging the hole next to this stream must have been for the purpose of making this pool. There was no other logical explanation. As we sat, we soon began to realize that we would need to wait overnight for this massive 30- by 30-foot hole to even begin to fill up. We were so entrenched in our assignment that we didn't make it home until quite late that day. My friend got grounded for being late, and I got a nice warm "How was your day, honey?" from my mom.

My elated enthusiasm could hardly be contained the next day. Since my compatriot had been grounded, I went to the other houses in the neighborhood, telling all of the children about the emergent pool and its ramifications for us as kids in the neighborhood. Only one child was able to join me that day, but his enthusiasm for the project could not be paralleled. We made our way up into the foothills to check the progress of our waterworks. The makeshift dam we had made the day before had been meddled with, but there was still enough water in the pit to make it worth a go.

My little friend, who stood at nearly three feet tall, got so excited when he saw the pool that he ran towards it with arms flailing behind him. When his feet hit the soft, slippery slope of mud, they flew out from under him, and he went tumbling headfirst into the pit. I waited hesitantly for him to respond, and when he finally poked his head up out of the mud laughing, I smiled and jumped in after him. When we hit the bottom of the pool, the thick slime reached up to grab hold of us. I landed on my butt and my friend on his knees. Both of us got a mouth full of sludge.

Spitting and laughing, we both scrambled to our feet. Rather than emerging from the miry clay, however, we found ourselves being sucked into it. With thick slime plastered to our legs, butts, and now arms, we couldn't help but burst with laughter. I picked up a ball of mud and threw it at him like a snowball. These balls soon began flying back and forth with a hoot and a howl with each passing fling of slime. At the end of this affair, we were both covered from head to toe with thick layers of the stuff.

Climbing out of the pit was beyond difficult as our slippery bodies kept sliding back in. When we eventually worked our way out from it, we both looked something like the sandman. You couldn't begin to imagine what it was like trying to put our shoes on with that much mud thickening on our feet. After a while, we eventually gave up and decided to walk home barefoot. The thick layer of mud stuck like cement to our feet, and for a while, functioned much like a shoe. With each step, we lost a little bit of our padding, but we were having too much fun to really mind. As we walked, the mud hardened and began cracking, and it became stiff on our bodies and in our hair.

When we finally arrived at our homes, my friend's mom was outside waiting for him. She looked terrifyingly distressed when she realized that one of the two mud figures happened to be her baby boy. I cheerily spoke up to tell her about what a grand time we'd been having, but before more than a few words had escaped my mouth, her harsh tone immediately silenced me. "What have you been doing?!" she demanded. "You look awful. What sort of trouble have you gotten into now?" She then proceeded to grab my friend and do something unlawful. She sat him down on the sidewalk, grabbed the hose, and began washing him like a dog. He looked up at me with his big puppy dog eyes. I was outraged, the sun was setting, and it was beginning to feel glacial outside. And this woman… with a hose... really?

I went home feeling slightly dismayed and clumsily proceeded into my favorite shower. After an onslaught of ripping and scrubbing, and washing, and pulling, and cleaning, and tidying, and neatening, my suddenly silk-like skin finally began shining through its mud mask. I was utterly oblivious to the layer of scum I had left on the bathtub floor, walls, and shower handle, let alone the chunks that had broken off in the hallway as I made my merry way into the bathroom. If I'd been capable of acknowledging the mess I was making, I probably would have been more understanding with the harsh course of action that my poor neighbor's mother had taken with him. Yet in my mind, all I could see were his huge eyes looking up at me as his mother marauded him with the cold hard spray that soaked him to the bone.

I'm not sure if it was a lack of punishment that contributed to my complete obliviousness to my surroundings and to the consequences of my actions or if every child is, in fact, as dense as I was. But I do know I got away from this incident scot-free, although it was quite a long time before I was allowed to play with that neighbor again.

The next time I went back to the mud pool, I had in-tow two other kids from the neighborhood. I may have slightly exaggerated how awesome our new pool was, for between the three of us, we could hardly contain our excitement. When we got there, however, there was a near lawsuit waiting to happen. The neighbor, whose backyard we had been trespassing on, came out of his house screaming at us. Before we could finish getting our shirts off to jump in, we decided to turn and book it before he saw our faces and tried to call our parents. We never went back.

The fun always started innocently; we never intended harm, we just wanted to laugh and play and enjoy life. As we aged, the things that we played with changed: from dams and rivers to hikes and swordfights, to drugs, fights, and addiction. It always started with innocence—little acts of rebellion and minor challenges to the rules that seemed fun and harmless. Even though I would try something out with an innocent heart, it was hard not to come out muddied and affected by it. Even when I had good intentions, it seemed I would come out of my adventures covered in a clay that constricted me, hardening around my body making it difficult for me to move. Drugs, relationships, and all the other things I whimsically turned to because I thought they'd make my life more fun ended up suffocating me.

I guess my whole life was a story about a small kid with a good heart doing stupid things and getting crap all over everything. My whole story was one of a graceful father and a loving mother accepting a little turd of a child who could only think about having fun and whatever else made him happy. I didn't know that if I made pleasure and fun the ultimate objective of my life that it would lead to so much confusion and misunderstanding.

We don't try to become addicts; if we had any concept whatsoever of the pain and cost that drugs would incur, we probably wouldn't go there. Instead, innocent kids innocently bite, and the goodness in them gets ripped around like a fish on a line. They bite the bait and end up having to deal with the hook and sinker. Life is a process of mistakes. We make them every day, some are easy to learn from, and others are not. Some let us escape unscathed (although they may leave behind a slight mess). Others eat us up and spit us out, swallowing our playfulness in the severity and intensity of their wake.

I could let my experiences sculpt me or I could just keep running along haplessly getting mud all over everything.