Page banner image

Re: When did you first get really muddy.


[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ Wet Clothing Forum - Mud Pit ] [ FAQ ]

Posted by MZ on March 14, 2021 at 03:23:50

In Reply to: When did you first get really muddy. posted by Luke on March 12, 2021 at 08:42:56:

I'll preface this by saying - this was a long time ago - it was a different time and I didn't have nearly as much life experience, so things that seem mundane now felt like big adventures back then.

I have been on the Internet since the early 1990s - before there was even a World Wide Web. When the Web started to become a thing in the mid 90s and search engines started to exist I, probably like many others, discovered that I was not wholly alone in some of these interests that I almost exclusively kept to myself. Sites like this one were amazing early places to congregate. I started to learn about muddy events around the country and the world that I didn't even know existed. In those days, mud volleyball tournaments (called Oozeball at many colleges) were some of the earliest popular mud events. Mud runs weren't really a thing, although there were a few hardcore/military proto mud runs like the Volkslauf that always seemed intimidating.

Through those early Internet searches, I found out about a mud volleyball tournament in Bakersfield, CA - only a ~3 hour drive from where I was living at the time in Orange County. I was still in college and staying with my parents over the summer. My parents were the ultra-observant ultra-inquisitive type, and so telling them I was driving to the center of the state to try to jump in a mud pit was not an option. I needed an elaborate and believable cover story, and it had to stick - if I came home a little red from the sun, I'd better have told them I was outside somewhere. I had to come home clean - if i had a spot of dirt in my ear, it would have been "what's that in your ear? Is that dirt? What were you doing that you got dirt in your ear? How did that happen? Didn't your friends tell you you had dirt in your ear?" I'd never hear the end of it. I ended up telling them I was getting together with some friends for an early breakfast and that we were going to Magic Mountain for the day, which was 2 hours in the same direction. That was pretty good cover - it was an outdoor activity, and if I got in an accident or had a flat tire or something, the odds would be that it would be between the house and Magic Mountain - I'd just have to be extra careful on the extra ~hour to the tournament.

At that time, I had no idea what to expect. There were no pictures online of the tournament - just a text description and an address. There were no Google Maps (there wasn't a Google yet). Sites like Mapquest and Mapblast had a range maximum, so it literally couldn't plot a route from my house to the tournament location. (In hindsight, I should have had one of those sites map out a route from somewhere closer). I didn't have a Kern County Thomas Guide, just a AAA map of all of California to go by. So I managed to sneak an old T-shirt, shorts, and shoes into the trunk of the car, got up super early, and hit the road. It was early enough that the only thing on the radio was the guy who gave gardening tips for 4 hours. I made it past Magic Mountain and started into the Grapevine, which I'd never traversed before. For those of you not from the area, the Grapevine is the informal name for the stretch of road through the mountains that divides Southern from Central California. There's a steep incline, followed by a winding freeway drive through some high-up mountain passes and towns, and this big decline into the Central Valley on the back side - the traversal takes about an hour. In fair weather it's not a dangerous drive at all, but there are stories of how treacherous it can get in rain or snow or fog, and you pass all these little portents of disaster like runaway truck ramps. I was a little nervous having never driven through before and driving kind of a beater car. I didn't want to overheat or get stuck on the side of the road. There weren't too many cars on the road, and as I was coming down the back side of the mountains I passed a truck on the side of the road fully engulfed in flames. I got a little spooked.

The rest of the trip into Bakersfield was pretty uneventful until I realized I didn't know where I was going. I drove in circles for a while and ended up stopping at a convenience store to buy a local area map just to find the place - a large park with some baseball fields.

I finally arrived about an hour or two before the tournament was supposed to start. People weren't showing up yet that I could tell. There were some patches of dirt with some puddles on the ground, but I didn't see any volleyball nets even set up. I figured this was going to be a pretty pathetic tournament if it even happened at all, and got depressed. I got out of the car to walk around a bit. I heard some activity behind a big berm, and walked around the other side of it.

That's when I saw it - a big huge football field sized mud area, with maybe 16 volleyball courts. At that point the worry and depression washed away and I got extremely excited. Some people had indeed arrived - there was another parking lot on the other side of the park which was a little closer, but I hadn't realized it.

The tournament ramped up quickly and I spent most of the morning watching games from the berm. A lot of the mud was watery, but there were areas and courts that had better, thicker mud. As happens at these tournaments, the mud got mixed up by all the volleyball playing over the course of the day. I mostly wandered around attempting to look inconspicuous as I wasn't with any team and didn't know anybody there.

Eventually I worked up some nerve and, in between games, walked across the mud field from one side to the other. I'd never gotten to play in mud before and even just sloshing through it ankle-deep was a new and exciting experience. Later, I walked back through another time or two.

As the day wound on, the bracketing meant that some of the courts (including some with the good mud) were empty for 15 or 20 minutes at a time as other games progressed. Sometimes a team would practice in them, or there'd be a parent with some kids splashing in the mud. I found a good opportunity and wandered into an open half-court and kind of plodded around for a few seconds. In one of the great missed opportunities of my life, a couple girls wandered by and noticed that I only had mud up to my ankles and said to me "Hey, you don't look muddy enough!" I was already nervous and I just said "uh, no, not yet!" and they wandered off. What I *should* have said is "you're absolutely right - think you can help me change that?" but I didn't! Oh well, live and learn.

Eventually I went for it and flopped down in the mud and rolled around a bit. It was new, exciting, warm, encompassing, and everything I wanted it to be. I didn't get my hear or hair covered because I was still terrified about cleanup - after all, I had to get home looking like I had spent the day riding roller coasters, not wallowing in the mud!

They had a place near the mud where the firehoses that watered the court could be turned on in a way that made a fairly decent spray, and I was able to rinse off most of the mud there. But of course you got a little bit dirty getting to and from the hose. Fortunately there was this drinking fountain near where I parked my car and I was able to get some paper towels wet enough to clean up the rest of me. In getting cleaned up, I had been leaning against my car a little bit, and there were now these streaks of mud on the car. My car wasn't especially clean, but these were definitely noticeable. I wiped them off, but now the part I wiped off looked too clean compared to the rest of the car. To avoid the inevitable interrogation when I got home ("why is that one part of your trunk all clean and the rest of the car is dirty? Did you hit something? Did someone try to get into your trunk? Were you leaning against the trunk? did you spill something on it?") I ended up having to stop by a car wash on the way home to clean the whole thing up.

So that was my first real mud experience, and yes, I managed to escape scrutiny. Since then I've had many more, although not nearly as many as I'd like! I have perfected muddying and cleanup procedures and no longer worry much about that.

Incidentally, after that first visit, I looked forward to the next tournament all year planning to go again. I managed to make it all the way up there again the following year and found the field muddy but no people, no nets, nothing. I realized after wandering around for a while that the tournament had been held the previous week - I went up on the date the website said, but I guess they had changed the date without updating their website. Back then, the Internet was a secondary source of information and communication at best, so that wasn't an unusual occurrence. Back then, the tournament was only one of a couple muddy events within the SoCal area and so missing it was a massive bummer. I couldn't have attended anyway - the weekend of the actual tournament I'd missed was my own college graduation, so it was kind of a double bummer in retrospect.

Astonishingly, despite all the other mud events that have come and gone, that tournament is still held all these years later. They cancelled it one year for a drought, and last year for COVID of course. It's also held around the weekend of June 23rd, which is one of the absolute busiest weekends of the year for anything. I think I missed the tournament for three years because of weddings I had to attend. Looks like the mud isn't very good anymore; seems like all the loose dirt has been packed down and nobody goes to the trouble of tilling the field first. But mud is mud. They haven't announced whether they're going to have it this year or not; if they do, maybe I will head back up to check it out, if only for the nostalgia and to break out of these COVID doldrums!


Follow Ups:



Post a Followup

Name:
E-Mail:

Subject:

Comments:

Optional Image URL:

Security Code *
random image
This security code tells us you are human and not a spam robot.


[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ Wet Clothing Forum - Mud Pit ] [ FAQ ]