When I drink mud my head feels like its gonna spin right off of my damn head. That red clay burns the back of my throat for the rest of the day and I can’t hardly say two words after I take a big gulp. And the smell. The smell I love. You know how on a summer day when you go down to the river and you sit there under the bridge and everything is quiet and you smell that mustycool river water- it’s a warm damp heaven. I get all my mud from down underneath the bridge and I cool off just smelling it. As I close my eyes and bring the glass to my mouth, I always take a deep breath before I swallow. I love that muddy river bank.
Tomorrow I’m going down to the Chattahochee river and I’m gonna drink that muddy water until I puke. I’m gonna get my fill of snake water and red Georgia clay and then I’m gonna lay back on the banks of that river and sleep ’til it’s morning.
Clay is sometimes like butter when you first put it in your mouth. Then it gets a glassy crunch. But if it’s moist and cool from deep down in the ground it’s great. Eating dirt was just never all that strange to me. I remember being no more than four or five and playing in the backyard with my best friend. We were digging a hole to see what we could find. We imagined finding near perfect tomahawks and arrowheads hidden below our feet and we made this dig into our own little project that we diligently attended to everyday. As we kept digging we hit a spot of deep, cool black dirt that was different from the sharp orange/red clay that had been barely under the grass. That black dirt was so moist and cold in my hands, I just lifted it to my mouth and put in the whole handful. It wasn’t nearly as soft as I had thought that it would be. I’d imagined hominy grits and jam and slurpies all mixed into this one dark mass. Instead, the dirt was fine and crunchy, it was all made of separate grains and I could feel each one as it scrapped my teeth. But the flavor was like what I’d imagined as I dug for the arrowheads, cool and moist. I was sifting through the earth itself in order to find pieces from the past. I knew that the past was below me, that if I kept shovelling away this dirt, this time that was between me and the imagined relics below, I would eventually find something. I knew that dirt was time and that someday everything would be buried under it. And I knew that time would taste just as mustycool as it did.
My brother, now that boy could put away some mud. When we were kids he would cover his face with that dark black peat and his eyes would open wide as he just kept shoving handful after handful into his mouth. And he would eat mudpies too. He would sit there cross-legged in the yard on a rainy day and make these meticulous mud pies complete with a glazed sheen for icing and clay balls that he would carve into flowers. Sometimes he would eat them all in one shove, smearing it all over his face and shirtless chest. And often he would eat the pies slice by slice, eighth by eighth, with one small flower on top of each piece.
I thought at first what I would bring to my garden in huge plastic bags was sterile, chemical and almost inorganic. But as the days go on and I see how the rain helps to mix the red clay-dirt with the black speckled peat, I can see them gradually blending into one soil. And I realize that the peat was what brought the tiny green and tan dots that are beginning to sprout from the ground. The plastic bag of peat is not a clean chemical at all, it’s a seed in itself that helps to plant living moving things into the dry red earth that was here before.
The black peat in the bag, dotted with white pellets of nitrogen and tiny flecks of bark, feels almost doughy when I squeeze it. There’s a lot of things imbedded deep down, a lot of things that are too small to see, things that are weaving chaotic networks of bacteria and tiny sub-atomic meetings between isotopes in the nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and others. There are fungi and mosses growing in every square inch, some of them will be able to be seen in a few days while most will die off before then.
Muddy cart tracks in Czarist Russia. Serf mud, slave mud. Cotton pickers’ shoes mud. Dried on your back, bent and flat in the sun mud. Little patches of dried goldenpink clay on the leather plow straps mud. On your fingers pulling carrots and beets mud. Damn sticky mud clogged in the horseshoes of the mule in front of you mud. Your shoes getting heavier with mud- with every step mud.
-Jeff Houze
