… are trying very hard to make my summer outages as miserable as possible. It’s bad. All the diethyltoluamide and icaridin in the world isn’t even slowing them down! I can’t expose any skin. Within a second there’s a half dozen of them stuck in me. It’s almost impossible to have any fun. Clean up is this intense frustrating thing that normally I don’t really mind so much…
With that gripe out of the way… I went out the other day, almost got struck by lightning. Got wet. But I found a huge area that’s nothing but mud. I spent several hours out in the bug fest wandering around the muddy mud puddles and sure enough I found a nice thigh-deep hole to play in. Nice smooth organic mud. No horrible smell, not even any surface water. It’s just that mushy. I had a good time, aside from feeding a million little bloodsuckers.
Another good thing about this area is I get to pass by the creeky bog from late last year. It’s all still under a foot of water, and with all the rain we’ve had this year, it’s possible I won’t get to play there at all this year, but in it’s place less than a 10 minute walk is this ginormous expanse of mud. When I found the spot, all I needed to do was move a couple logs and scrape off last year’s leaves and debris. Of course, just as I started to mush around, I heard a couple of very close lightning strikes less than a mile away. It ended up just being a cutesy little unhappy cloud that sprinkled a bit and that was it. But it was kinda frightening for about 10 minutes.
So anyway, the creek I’ve been playing around for the first part of the year is out of service now. I may go back to check out the ponds which are upstream of the cattle field and are less likely to be contaminated with mountains of bovine poop… But I think I will stick with the creeky area. The soil there is mostly organic with some silt and clay deposited from a seasonal offshoot of the creek. I tried to get a photo but it’s exceedingly difficult to stop moving long enough to take the shot. Maybe next time I’ll get there under sunnier conditions and minimize the exposure time.
So far this year I’ve dipped into 4 different mud pits, for a total of 7 successful excursions. For sure a good start to this summer!! I see Walmart has some of those heat-activated bug repellents for $15, so I think I will get at least one of them and maybe some plain old coils. I see on my happy map that these new spots are farther away from any dwellings or trails, so I’m expecting to be able to use these stinky coils without attracting unwanted attention. Yeah! Fuck you, mosquitos!
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