Mud Season

As certain as lambs being born or maple trees being tapped for sap, in New England the transition from winter to spring is marked by mud season. Depending on the amount of snowpack that has to melt and the amount of new precipitation that falls during this time period, the season can last for six weeks or more, from mid-February into April.

Mud season is generally an underappreciated time of year, for several reasons. It is often cold, or windy, so hat and gloves must remain handy. On even warm days, winds can gust or temperatures plummet, making you wish you had brought the extra layer that seemed superfluous when you started out.

The earth stinks—literally—a stench so foul and putrid in places that it borders on dead animal. The earth is a giant stewpot of rotting grasses, sweating off months of inactivity and ice to prepare the soil for the new life to emerge. Mud season is wet and dirty, as its name implies. You can’t go anywhere off road without having to slog through an unpredictable and unstable sheet of mud.

It helps to have a dog at this time of year, as they embody the truism that there is no such thing as a bad walk. To dogs, walking is as essential as oxygen, supplying sensory nourishment to their brains that they digest like kibble for hours afterward deep in sleep, reliving each step, occasionally twitching their eyelids or legs.

Most dogs are, at least, indifferent to mud. The vast majority relishes it. Their communion with the planet’s surface in all weathers is how they know they are alive.

With or without a dog, if you accept the traces of cold, register, if not actually enjoy, the smells (the odors, after all, help locate us in this particular time and place), and develop a short-term tolerance for the awkward and somewhat unpleasant sensation of your feet sliding through mud, mud season has a quiet beauty.

There is the exercise, of course, true of any walk, but a little more demanding and involving more muscle groups at this time of year due to the shifting ooze beneath your feet. You can’t take balance for granted.

A mud season walk brings a fresh experience of sun and air after a winter spent mostly indoors, a return of color to your cheeks. It brings a heightened awareness of the natural world, including not just the returning geese, ducks and other migrating fowl, but also the local bluebirds, skunk and possum. Since so many people avoid it, the muddy walk offers an extra measure of solitude, increasingly hard to find, and a silent camaraderie (if you walk with someone, and/or bring a dog).

Mostly, though, mud season provides a uniquely compelling experience of the earth. It is a wet world, filled with puddles and vernal ponds and rushing streams that will vanish by spring or early summer. Most last only a few days.

When you walk through the fields at dawn or dusk at this time of year, the quality of light is unparalleled, reflected off of a thousand bodies of water ranging in size from a tennis ball to several acres, mirroring sunlight in dazzling shades of peach, crimson, blue, yellow, orange and purple. At times it is as if you are not mired in mud, but floating on a speckled sea.

So unlace those mud-caked boots by the back door, and towel down that wet, dirty dog before letting her back inside. It’s part of the ritual. You never regret a walk, I like to say, and that is especially true during mud season. If the rare beauty doesn’t move you, there’s always the prospect of some fresh maple syrup waiting inside.