– A True Story (For Once) –

Time on social media can be funny. It continually passes, we evolve along the way, yet if we fail to post about it as it unfurls, it leaves mysterious gaps for the reader. When I posted my last featured piece, I had only just gone out on my first mud outing. It had terrified me, and I wasn’t sure I would ever have the nerve to video my experience, let alone publicize it.

That was 7 months ago.

One YouTube channel and 59 videos later, I have found myself at the intersection of reality and fantasy, which I relate to you now.

I was shooting footage for my next round of video posts yesterday. I had just sunken a pair of barely-worn cream suede Adidas Tubulars into some of the clingiest mud I had ever plunged my legs into, and even though I could already tell that my back and legs were going to be protesting the workout all night and well into the next day (or two), I couldn’t stop there. For those who have watched my mudding episodes unfold over the last months, you probably know that there’s a sweet little boggy spot I sometimes visit. Situated lakeside, it’s a pocket of soft black earth through which much of the runoff on the sloping valley beyond seems to funnel. Even in the spring, when the ground was at its softest and the cattails and jewel weed had yet to weave a tangled nest around it, the deepest place—where it comes up to my waist—could fit perhaps only three people if they huddled together (which isn’t all that bad of an idea, really).

And so it was that—even though I had already completely slathered my quite-recently-spotless high tops with pasty loam inside and out and my camo pants were saturated and clinging to my calves—I decided to pay the bog a visit. Only weeks before, I had completely submerged my olive Hunters there when it had become somewhat glutinous in the dry stretches of August. But since a string of wet days would have rejuvenated the site, I had opted to bring my yellow Boss overboots.

The canary yellow galoshes are fairly impractical, but they were arguably the boots that turned me to rubber in the first place. As I child, I had seen concrete masons pouring a neighbor’s garage floor. I remembered being spellbound by their bright yellow oversized boots, spattered with cement, as they trudged through the slurry. Some of the workers folded the boots over and secured them with the black side buckles, but the others left the oversized shafts to wobble around their legs as they toiled. It was for their gracious proportions—having been designed for construction workers to force their steel-toed work boots into them—that I had selected them for this particular visit to the mud hole.

It isn’t hyperbole to describe the process of sliding size 12 sneakers—slick with mud—into overboots meant for size 11 shoes as grueling. Have you ever tried putting on a latex glove with wet hands? It was like that, but on a larger scale. The straps of the Adidas kept bunching inside the forefoot of the galoshes, and the cotton lining in the boots squawked indignantly as I yanked on the rim and stamped repeatedly against a rock in an effort to get the soles of my sneakers to finally slide home.

It was during this process that I first heard the voices of two men drifting from the expanse of tall rushes that surround the lake (as well as the creek that feeds it). I didn’t think much about it. Though I had frequented the location for its solitude as much as for its ample pockets of mud in varying consistencies and depths, I had only ever actually seen other people on three occasions in my twenty-some visits. But I had heard others far more often as the area was a popular fishing spot.

I had a passing thought that their voices might carry onto my recording, but beyond that, I paid them no mind as I wrenched the second overboot in place and—heart racing and already slick with sweat from the exertions, I trudged off on the familiar path to the bog on feet heavy in boot/sneaker sandwiches with a layer of slimy filling. Now the mud hole was about a quarter mile hike north and sat just inside a treeline, about 50 feet off the edge of the lake. So I was a bit surprised when, as I was ducking under the low hanging branches and feeling the ground just beginning to yield beneath the soles of my elephant boots, the men’s voices drifted across the water and through the foliage, perhaps even clearer than before.

“The water is still a lot lower than I’ve seen it. Like, I’ve seen it all the way up to here. But still, it’s higher than it was last week.”

I froze, suddenly aware of the indelicate manner in which I had been blundering through the undergrowth. If I could hear them, they could most definitely hear me. Not that I didn’t have just as much of a right to be trespassing on the property—which was owned by a mammoth oil and gas conglomerate —as they did. But my king-sized banana boots, considerably soiled pants, and cell-phone tripod combination ensemble would be a little hard to explain, should I been faced with the need to. Besides, archery season had just begun. For all I knew, those voices were coming from behind two burly guys with bows that would tip toward anything thing in the woods that sounded like a lumbering beast. Dying like this would be almost as bad as blowing an aneurism on the toilet—it would not be how I wanted to be remembered by the people closest to me, who of course, have no knowledge of this entire mud-centric aspect of my life.

After a beat, I no longer heard the voices. I became satisfied that they were coming from safely across the water and that it was some trick of wind and geography that had carried them with such astonishing volume and clarity to my ears. Moreover, I became aware that I was taut with a thrilled impatience. I was standing in these enormous boots with their toes hanging over a mushy oblivion, and the thought of the men nearby was terrifying, which only sharpened the titillation. I had been massaging the crotch of my pants without even realizing it.

I set up my first shot, catching the moment my clunky boot first kissed the top of the bog, being careful keep the midday sun from casting any tripod shadows over the field. As thrilling as the adventure itself can be, the actual filming process can actually be quite tedious, requiring me to pause and hold various positions while switching camera angles. It can mean the time actually spent in the mud is twice or even three times as long as the episode seems. Though careful editing can blend it together into a satisfyingly seamless, cinematic presentation, it often comes at the cost of my own satisfaction. More than once have I turned off the camera and folded the tripod away, then returned to the scene for “me time.”

I had completed the second shot—a head-on of my taking the first plunging step into the paste—and had just begun a third, angled to capture the cascade over my right boot rim, when the voices resumed, this time louder and closer. Through the gaps in a screen of yellowing leaves, I could see two figures drift into view. My heart was splatting inside my grubby henley. It had never occurred to me that the men might actually be in the lake.

The men were strolling through the water at a leisurely but steady pace, heading upstream through the center of the shallow brown lake. I caught glimpses of the flick of a fishing line and the sparkle of the cast splitting the surface. They were mostly obscured from view, but they were about to pass by a clump of brush that stood between the bog and the lake and served as my only cover. In seconds, I would be in full view, at which point they had only to turn their heads eastward and my presence would be known.

Only then did I realize just how heavy the boots had become, weighed down not only by the leaden Adidas and sticky pants within them, but the pressure of an entire bog eager to take claim of my oversized footwear. I had a choice to make, and seconds to do it: I could plunge the boots deeper, submerging the loud yellow rubbery shafts beneath the surface and—conveniently—making myself shorter and, hence, less visible, but still risking being seen and also losing a pair of boots AND a pair of sneakers in the process, or I could use the fleeting time to pull like hell and back myself further into the cover of the trees.

For the sake of a story, I would have opted for door number one. Imagine the scene—me jamming my legs into the swamp, the liquid mud swirling into the roomy shafts (thus sealing their fate) while tracking two hot, oblivious men in their rubber fishing gear as they slid past me. But real life isn’t always the hotter choice, is it? Real life is the chiropractor’s dream as I wrenched every ligament and shredded every muscle in my core to make a hasty escape from my tenacious host and backed in among the wilting wild roses like an innocent doe.

Well, perhaps not so innocent.

They paused about 80 feet away, still squarely in the opening between the shrubs and the lazily waving stand of rushes—still highly visible—but past me to enough to the north that it would take nothing less than a deliberate craning of their necks to detect me. I felt my hand grasp my camo pants and drag the mesh lining over my own fishing pole as I watched them deftly snap theirs. Both of them were young—20s, and both sported baseball caps and shades, which left a lot to the imagination. One of them had his cap on backwards, which is an instant turn-on for me.

He tilted his head back and laughed at an unheard joke, and the morning sun caught the gleam of the wet ripple of his chest waders around the backs of his legs. God, it was erotic to be standing and watching him. His body leaned back slightly against his taut fishing line and the brown water of the lake came to his knees. I stood on the banks with my own feet turning pruny in the boot stew that my sneakers and socks were steeped in.

I knew the softness of the lakebed as well as anyone—I had sunken my own boots into it plenty of times. I knew that the soles of his magnificent waders had to be at least six inches deep in custard-like mud under that water. Probably more like twelve. Yet he didn’t seem to notice or care like I would. And that drove me wild.

The timestamps on my videos tell me I had stood and watched them for seven minutes before the two men resumed their leisurely slog upstream and their slippery drab olive waders disappeared around the bend. I had pulled myself back from the brink by then, deciding that I wasn’t going to waste a perfectly good video shoot of the bog on pants that had been obviously been creamed. I finished the scene in its originally-planned solitude, said a sticky farewell to the mud hole, then made my way back to my belongings with slimy, misshapen Adidas on my feet and a pair of ridiculously heavy overboots in hand.

That’s when the excitement of the encounter overtook me. A typical mud expedition will already see me at a slow simmer. But having played voyeur to two hot, young fishermen as they plodded through the muddy lake in their gear had me absolutely roiling. As I sat in my bog-saturated clothes, I began to think about backwards baseball cap guy, kicking off a pair of Hey Dudes and grasping his waders as he pulled them creakily over black socks and jeans. I thought about those socks inside the dark depths of those tall, undulating shafts as they pressed into the sodden earth beneath the lake. I replayed the head tilt and the laugh. And before I could say “I’m going to cum,” the semen was arcing above my hand and crackling on the golden leaves that were strewn by my feet.

After having mopped myself up and changed into reasonably clean clothes, I hiked back to my truck, which was parked in a stone lot just beneath the site of the old dam. A dusty SUV was parked beside me. I risked a peek and cupped my hands to the window. Behind the driver’s seat, a pair of rubber boots lay tipped over, glued with shards of grass. I heaved a shuddering sigh, climbed into the truck, and vowed to share the story with you.