Enter The Mud Season

by J.G. Fabiano

We made it through another one. Ayuh, we made it through the winter or 1995-1996, or at least most of it. The chances for that most feared nor'easter and sub-human temperatures have diminished. Coming soon are the foggy ocean days of spring and torrent of summer visitors, all wishing they were as fortunate as those of us who inhabit this beautiful tract of land called the Seacoast of New England.

Everyone who lives on the coast knows all to well that the season after winter never resembles what the rest of the country calls spring. It is , on the other hand, the beginning of the mud season.

The air does get a bit warmer after the middle of March. But it is always cloaked in dampness that no furnace in the world can hope to dry. Of course the season fools us by granting one or two nice days so we can get out and proclaim that old man winter finally left. The next day brings the beginning of at least two or three weeks of sub-freezing weather. Even after the temperature reaches the freezing mark, that sluggish low pressure over the Bay of Maine arrives to give us perpetually depressing gray days.

With the gray, comes the mud. Unlike the mud of other seasons, the mud of a New England spring has both a mind and consistency of its own. It can't be washed away and it has the corrosive strength of battery acid.

You can always tell when the mud season is about to begin. Our windows become covered with a brown haze. No rainfall can remove this dreary film which, over the past few centuries, has become immune to its arch enemy Windex.

Part of what makes New England mud so unique is the sand and salt thrown on the roads by the brave men of our highway departments all winter. Those tons of mixed sand and salt don't just disappear. They simply evolve into the mud of spring. The type of mud that can dissolved the doors and fenders off our cars. The mud that sucks the shoes right off your feet dissolving the stitching that once held them together.

This same mud dries in the middle of our roads to create a surface 10 times slicker than ice. In fact, it is worse than ice because it deceives you into thinking the roads are safe.

Like all good parents, The New England springtime mud gives birth to more mud. It actually seems to grow. You can spend hours brushing off you shoes and stamping your heels before you enter your house. But their is always a little left to track into the floors and carpet. This little bit of mud seems to grow into an evil pile of foul smelling debris that refuses to leave our rugs and floors.

Grape juice has nothing on the staining ability of our home grown mud. It leaves brownish marks on our hands that Lava soap can't touch. These are the stains that only wear off with time to be replaced by the grass stains of summer.

The paranoia caused by the spring mud season sets in by mid-March and doesn't go away until early June. In summer, the mud goes into hibernation so it can gain strength to once again drive us mad when another New England mud season arrives.

Their is little we can do to survive this season. We could stay home. But that would create another famous New England condition: cabin fever. Yet after being told that I was a little bit lower on the evolutionary ladder than a scum bug because of the mud I tracked into the house, buying a lot of groceries and playing Trivial Pursuit for two to three months wouldn't be so bad.

Jim Fabiano is a free lance writer living in York Beach, Maine

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Last Updated: Mar 15, 1996