THE MUD (from Ellen)

October 15, 2009 
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P.S. This picture is one of the non-mud times, notice the huge hammer breaking clods

It’s raining. Still. After two and a half weeks. When I stopped to get gas this morning before heading to school (yes, I am STILL in college), two old geezers drinking coffee in the dark outside the gas station asked me “so is it gittin muddy out on Sloans Creek?” My reply, was “yep, about hip deep now.” Later I pondered why two older men would be drinking coffee out in the fog/rain in the dark in front of a gas station, but then we live in Dodd City so I guess that answers it.

Anyway, as I was saying, it has been wet. Now, for those of you who do not have anything but concrete in front of your house, or for those of you who live on sandy land, you really can’t understand what wet really means on Sloans Creek. We live on blackland, or as it is more fondly known, “black gumbo.” This means that for most of the year the ground is so hard that it develops cracks up to two inches wide and I don’t even know how deep—I can’t see the bottom (we actually lost 2 piglets in cracks one year.) The clods of dirt are so hard that they can’t be broken apart with a hammer—no exaggeration. Then, for the other part of the year it rains and within 24 hours the ground becomes mud the likes of which have never been known before. Not like the fun mud I grew up with making mud pies in East Texas, this stuff has a life all its own. It sticks to everything and quickly becomes knee deep. Now, I was exaggerating a little when I said it was about hip deep, but knee deep is very accurate. The knee deep stuff wouldn’t be so awful without the stickiness. Add deep and sticky and you might disappear without a trace. A couple of weeks ago, when the rain had just started I went out to feed pigs by myself. Hours later when I returned caked in mud from head to toe, Lauren (my sister) commented that as the time went by, she had wondered if it was possible for someone to get so stuck in the mud that they really couldn’t get out. Of course, she admitted she didn’t think enough of me to come and check, but the thought did cross her mind.

A couple of winters ago I was out feeding the pigs in the mud (the story of my life) and sunk up over my knee high mud boots. This is bad, but it wouldn’t have been quite so bad if I hadn’t been holding a bucket of feed and there wasn’t a 500 lb very hungry boar in the pen with me. Now, I am only 5’3″ and when you take into account that I was sunk over my knees in mud, I was now about 3’3″ tall. Needless to say, I sacrificed the bucket of feed so as to not be flattened permanently into the mud. Then there was the problem of getting my legs back out of the mud. My legs came out but the boots did not. All of this time I was trying to not fall on my face, which until you have struggled to get unstuck in knee deep mud you can’t really understand what a precarious position this is. I was cold, wet, muddy, and now mad. So, I did the only logical thing and left the boots to finish feeding in my socks. I survived but the socks were never quite the same. I once had a very similar thing happen with my legs stuck in the mud and then a pig ran between my legs, but that’s a different story.

In this current round of rain and mud, I was feeding pigs (I told you that this is the story of my life!) and had to bend over to scrape caked feed out of their feeders where they could eat it. Even without mud this is not a good position to be in. I weigh considerably less than most of the pigs, and when they crowd in around me to start getting at the feed, and I am bent down, it can get a little scary. Then add THE MUD and it gets a lot worse. To combat this problem and the possible loss of life and limb that could ensue, I take Aidenne, my Lab with me. Her job (and she loves it) is to keep the pigs away from the feeders until I finish. Sometimes she gets a little too enthusiastic but she saves my life/limbs so I don’t get onto her too much. This particular time, the area right in front of the feeders had become muddy soup. Stinky, filthy, muddy soup. I walked over to the feeder and was bending down in this soup when a large pig came up. Aidenne, in her zealousness, barks and gives the pig a small nip on the butt. The pig was quite surprised, squealed, and took off at a dead run, in the soup, right in front of me. The result was that his back legs kicked muddy soup all over me from my legs to my hair. I was drenched in stinky, filthy, muddy, pig soup. It didn’t taste as bad as I expected it would. The up side is that I should now be immune to every bacteria known to man.

Now I do realize that the rain, and subsequent mud isn’t the weather man/woman’s fault, but I think if they come up with a “revised forecast” one more week, I’m going on vacation.