Red Mud

One day at work I found myself cleaning a pair of shoes. Not mine, but one of the students at school. He and a classmate had just run ape shit through a morass of mud and came into the office looking for replacement clothes. These kids looked as if they had crawled over the top at Ypres to take out the German machine gun nest.

And we did not have spare shoes nor socks but I offered to clean their shoes in the janitor's slop sink. If anything but to prevent them from getting any so permanently dirty. Or have their parents refuse to let them in the car. Because I would not let my kids in my car with muddy shoes if a dinosaur was chasing them! "Kids, we are almost there. Remember to grab a plastic bag from the trunk and slide your shoes in there BEFORE you get in. Don't worry I already popped the trunk."

Scrubbing and scraping the muck off I was reminded of the unique mud of my grade school. It was Mars red and on a rainy day it could slough off the hillsides in rouge crumbles right out of Tremors* 

Quick aside on my school. One I went there K-12. And it was built in what I understood the be an old country club. At least that was the rumor but it has a very liberal arts college campus vibe even for a K-12 school. Grades were clustered separated by big quads and cement paths cut through the grass. Not too many trees but the long walk to the cafeteria cut through the playground on your left and then just a giant field on the right that was a combo soccer/baseball/whatever. It was a big campus and in the 9th grade when you had maybe 5 minutes to BOOK it from art (all the way from the "Top of the World" by the pools and maintenance shed) to English back on the main quad it sucked to do so in the rain. And yeah then your shoes would glob onto the mud so you looked like you were wearing Elmo Monster feet.

We had no carpets in our classrooms so people would scrape it on the cement walkways and the edges of the open air hallways. This left red skid marks on the cement and eventual dried up husks littering the walkways. And before you ask how did we get so muddy when there were walkways then remember we had to BOOK IT across these quads. Here is a drawing I made of the lower campus. Excuse the awfulness.

I am awful at expressing myself visually. I will do better for the upper campus

And that was just the lower half!




*A fantastic dumb movie I saw probably 90 times as a child on USA Network. I just re-watched it unedited on Netflix and it holds up