In the Hand of Dante

Mud cakes.

There was a time in my life (you can probably guess that I was quite short) when I spent an abnormal amount of time carefully crafting cakes of mud. Their purpose: to be cakes of mud; nothing more, nothing less. I’d head out into the field after a wet night or early morning, taking great care to use collapsed cornstalks as walkways lest I lose a shoe, which I did very often, for I knew where to find the best mud.

The best mud, it just so happens, is open to interpretation, and I found my mood shifting day-to-day. The really smelly shit didn’t bother me, since I knew that its smell was simply rotting plant matter, and I often found myself gravitating towards it. Other days I’d make a beeline for the really smooth mud – the stuff that had, only hours before, been very fine dust. This dirt+water was the real deal: smooth, zero gravel, no plants – the edge of a previous week’s in-field pond.

As any good mud-crafter knows, you can’t simply grab a handful of mud, slap it into a round shape, and pray to Christ that it magically sets into a proper mud cake there in your hand. You need to practice a bit of filth-alchemy.

Especially with the smooth mud. It would be fine if left alone to set, of course, but it needed…something more. A little extra kick. I’d throw in a handful of sand from my sandbox, maybe some ground-down dried mud from a previous collection of mud cakes, and mix it all together with hands or sticks or a small plastic shovel, like the kind that comes with a small plastic bucket in a set of beach toys. The only beaches near my farm were the edges of the in-field ponds after rain.

The mixing was a careful activity – too much dry matter and the cake would not hold. Too little and it would flatten out and be impossible to scoop up. I usually carried an assortment of mixing vessels: old plastic buckets (from the aforementioned beach-themed set), enamelware that had stopped being useful, and many garden appliances. Once combined, the mud had to be shaped, placed, and set.

Since I didn’t have a kiln and couldn’t be trusted with the power of fire (having once nearly burned down the garage), the sun was my only tool. In my humid Midwestern climate, this could take another day or two, during which I would hope and pray that the rains wouldn’t return and transform my shaped cakes into their constituent elements. This required me to sometimes take precautions.

I’d carry a long board with me into the field, usually a 1×10 about twice my length, and use it as a sort of mud cake stretcher (or palanquin, depending); I could fill the whole board at least twice, perhaps three times before quitting the field for the day and returning to “base”, or my barn. Here I could hide the newly-formed mud cakes under the awnings, away from the rain (provided it fell straight, which it never did).

I had a series of these long boards which I used to transport the soon-to-be mud cakes back to the farm. They tended to fill up quickly. I’d place them on the concrete where the sows used to have their stinking pen and leave them be. If I could manage, I’d come back to check on them every few hours, depending on the available sunlight. I didn’t have to worry about pests or scavengers – mud has no natural predators. If done right, I would eventually return to the boards to find my beautiful mud cakes, now a much, much lighter shade of grey/black, arrayed in neat rows on the boards.

After some years (months?) of this, I found myself supplementing the cakes with other accoutrements: sticks and long pieces of field grass and rocks were all valid additions. I learned how to “weave” pieces of hay through a still-wet mud cake in order to create something that might hang on the wall of some Primitive’s hut.

The rocks made designs, the sticks strengthened the cakes, and the grasses that I inserted into the mud made for a fantastically crafty result. I was well-pleased with my mud cake empire.

But of course, once one has created a vast series of mud cakes with different styles and, truly, differentiated techniques, the habit is to…well, I’m not sure.

I don’t know what actually became of any of the mud cakes that escaped the rain or over-baking (which happened quite often in a childhood world of distractions), nor am I absolutely certain of when or even why I ended my mudsman apprenticeship. I faintly recall throwing completed mud cakes at the side of our corn crib, and that towards the end, my creations more resembled missiles and bombs (complete with different species of interior “explosive” mud) and other weapons.

For whatever reasons, I outgrew the mud cakery that had defined part of my childhood in the fields. Now mud is dirty and often dangerous – piloting a motor vehicle or bike through slick, wet dirt is always a bit tense for me – and I don’t enjoy it at all. But then again, I haven’t truly played with it in years.