Mining Mud, Revealing Stories
By Peter Cleary
The man stood over a column of mud he had laid on the ground.
As he started talking, I listened, expecting what he said to be as boring as the mud. Then he started talking about hurricanes. The mud contained signs of the storms that passed over this region hundreds of years ago, he said.
He went on talking, pointing to a section of mud and saying that if you looked at it under a microscope you could tell when European settlers first arrived to the area. Then a bit further up you could see how one species of tree, the chestnut, died off in the 1920s.
The column of mud, which the man called a core, came from a salt marsh. What he saw in the mud beneath the marsh told him that the coastline used to be miles away from where it is now. He said he could see signs of the Industrial Revolution and nuclear weapons.
The mud told him stories, like an old friend.
This was all fascinating. But I needed to touch the mud. I reached down and wiped my finger across 1,000 years of history. Starting at the bottom of the core, I moved my finger past the time when Indians walked miles to the shore to catch fish, past the first European farmer, past the hurricane that tore up the coastline, past the death of the mighty chestnut tree, past the Cold War up to the green grass that had felt the warmth of the rising sun just that morning.
It was awesome.
I had never been so charmed by mud. That two-inch wide tube of mud changed my life.
I spent the next three summers in salt marshes, taking cores, digging holes and teaching kids. And each day I was as fascinated.
I even learned how to read the mud and interpret it myself. The surface of the marsh was no longer just grass. What lay beneath was no longer just mud.
I saw the storms. I saw the first European farmers. I saw the atomic weapons exploding in the sky. Right there in the mud.
But then I left the mud behind. It was time to move on with my life.
I saw little wonder for the next two years. The landscape did not intrigue me anymore. The smell of dead leaves in the fall did not warm my heart.
I carried on for a few years not seeing much. I was bored.
At the depths of my boredom, I recalled how I once saw the beauty of the salt marsh. I once experienced the wonder beneath the lush green grass. I once read the story held in the mud.
I could no longer read that story.
Then one fall afternoon, just as the leaves began to blanket the ground, a new friend told me she wanted to make love to a tree.
I laughed.
Then I began to understand what she said. She wanted to merge her beauty with the beauty of the tree. She wanted to know its wonder.
The idea of making love to a tree stayed with me, and I began to see beauty and wonder again. If a person could make love to a tree, were there any limits on where I could find moments of beauty? Were there any limits on the doorways to wonder?
I thought of my time in the salt marsh, which I had left behind a few years ago. Looking back, I was probably making love to that salt marsh. There were days, weeks, occasionally even months when I spent more time with that mud than with any person. I knew it in the marsh. Then I took it home with me and poked at it, asked it questions. I asked it where the ocean was when the marsh was young. I asked it when it was ravaged by a passing storm. I asked it when it first felt soot from the factories of our cities fall upon its moist surface.
I took the mud from its home to a dark basement room. I burned it with a hot flame. I ate away at it with acid to see what remained after everything weak had been stripped away.
I knew that mud.
But I had since forgotten my intimacy with the world, with the dirt I walked on, with the rise and fall of the ocean's tide. When my friend reminded me of it, something happened.
The marsh was another world, and I could no longer enter it with the same intimacy. But I knew everything I saw had the same potential as what lay below the surface of the marsh.
Beauty and wonder returned. At first it just resided in the obvious places: a pregnant mother holding the hand of her first-born, two sisters with graying hair talking in a coffee shop.
Then I started seeing it everywhere.
I could make my life wonderful. I could return to the exciting, mysterious and vital subterranean world. There was the possibility of making love to a tree, or anything I encountered.
I dabbled with this for another year as I discovered how I could go through life looking for points of beauty. I told people I was a reporter and they let me walk through their world watching them, listening to what they said.
I opened my eyes and the world came flooding in.
I watched as a toddler stood inside a voting booth with his mother and shouted out his choice for president: Wesley Clark. I heard the story of a man who dreamed of powering his bus on what most of us consider garbage. I learned that particles from an alien galaxy were passing through my body as I looked at images of that galaxy being consumed by the Milky Way.
I was only a reporter, though. I wrote about what I saw for the people who could not be there. Anybody could do that.
But I knew there was something beyond what I saw. The idea of standing in a forest and making love to one of the trees followed me everywhere.
A few weeks ago, I realized I had to get to the core of the people I met and things I saw while reporting. I was betraying their beauty if I did not. Accuracy is not just about presenting a transcript of what happened, but also about the engine for what happened.
I don't fully understand how to use them yet, but I recently acquired the tools–my coring equipment–that will let me core souls and cities in search of the wonder that fuels them.
I've learned to look in the muddy areas of a person's heart for the story that has yet to be told. I've learned to guide a person past his tough parts to where he holds the stories that bring tears to his eyes. I've learned that a piece of paper someone carries in her purse can be the key to that person's life. These are my tools.
With them, I'll navigate beneath the pastoral beauty of any green field I find. I'll see its storms and soot. I'll see what it feeds on and what it has given up. I'll know what makes that grass grow and what makes it die.
And someday, once I've played in the mud beneath that green field, I'll share with you the wonder it hides.
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