Muddy Water
Some people like their swimming clear or blue or aqua. In the Deep South, north of the Gulf, the swimming is muddy.
Let a Frappuccino melt or stir up a glass of Nesquik and that is what swimming in the South means, churned and brown, swirling and oozing around logs and gators and snapping turtles. Loblollies and Spanish Moss lean over to look at their opaque reflections. If you want to swim in clear water, build a pool or fill your tub.
Wade into the ocean and you’ll be walking on sturdy sand. Wade into a Southern river and you’ll be walking on a bed of goop, toes squishing into the leftovers of every farm upstream. Since the TVA invented the dammed lake, Southern kids grew up neck-deep in mucky liquid and were happy to be there. I know I was.
During high school – not that I am proud of this – I swam and skied many days when I was supposed to be in Algebra and Biology. All it took was a willing person in class to mumble “here” while the teacher read through roll. We took turns pulling “here” duty. More than a few of us were involved in this large-scale hookyathon. The Gantt Lake Mafia consisted of people who are now respectable doctors and lawyers, politicians and preachers. Of course, there were plenty of disrespectable types (like me) to balance out the congregation of miscreants.
Our raggedy club of pre-slackers could always scrounge the keys to a boat or two and while our more studious classmates with a serious future worked on their GPA’s, we played bass-boat-chicken with slaloming idiots at fifty mph on top of the soupy gumbo.
Few experiences compare with falling out of a boat at high speed and getting run over by a linebacker hanging onto a ski rope behind a boat. Mr. McCain, I am no hero, but I too have the scars to prove it. I have nearly been thrown over a dam on a hairpin turn. I have been bitten by big, anonymous fish and skied into rusty fishhooks hanging from tree limbs near the shore. I have slammed into piers and pines and tangled with a cottonmouth in a small boat. I’ve applied pressure to my share of bleeding wounds and been on the business end of more than my share of tetanus shots. I know people who never lived to be nineteen years-old due lake-induced violence. Like I said, I am not proud of this. Through it all, the muddy water flowed. It still does.
We fished and cooked and ate over open fires as the sun slipped into the creases of clabbered clouds. We never thought about who was a Republican or a Democrat or a liberal or conservative like people my age do today. Perhaps many of them injured their liberal tendencies while trying to jump a dock, loaded on PBR and doing 40 mph.
There were no video games, cell phones, iPods or internet – and only three channels on TV. But there was a lake and friends and four hours until dark. I can still taste the mud. It doesn’t taste like chicken.