The swamp

When I was about 12 years old, my family moved into a bland early 70's style middle class neighborhood. I started a new school that year and met my future best friend in gym class. We both started school late so we were right next to each other in the calisthenics line. He was a semi-dorky looking guy, a little pudgy with glasses and a constant smart assed smirk on his face.

During the various floor exercises the coach would call out these fucked up terms we had never heard of. Two point stance... What am I a fucking deer? Break? Where's my card board and boom box? Feet shoulder with the part...What the fuck? What part?

Me and the other late comer would kind of stand there trying to keep up with everybody else who supposedly understood this odd ball language. I found out my fellow gym partner was named Paul. We had to write our names on the back of our gym clothes because middle school coaches was kinda slow in the head.

It didn't help matters much that our gym coach was the same faggot I mentioned here. The coach had apparently sucked so many dicks that he had developed some kind of lispy speech impediment mixed with a southern drawl that made his exercise commands sound like "Heeeoo haw hummp brawnal hoop". My new friend, got fed up and started making up his own exercises. such as, "hump the floor" "Pretending to be on a unicycle that is missing a seat, "mock the coach with the gay pony prance" I couldn't stop laughing.

It's especially hard to stop laughing when you know you you could get in serious trouble. Paul and I hit it off immediately. Turned out, that he lived in my neighborhood. We made plans and after school I walked the short distance to his house.

Paul asked me if I had ever been to the swamp. I hadn't, so we walked out of his back yard into a drainage ditch that carried all the rain water away from the neighborhood streets. There was a dirt road that went behind all the houses and dead ended onto a forest path. I had no idea any of this stuff was there.

In the middle of the woods was a large pond that had dried into a murky mud pit. I could still see the fish corpses decaying under the brackish water. In the middle of this swampy mess was a large mound of dirt and a couple of dead trees that formed a small island.

We had to get over to it. It was pre-ordained. I looked for a place in the mud that had dried and cracked so I could possibly sprint across. Dumb idea. By the second step I was waist deep in sucking mud.

I lost my shoe about 4 feet down and had to reach my arm into the hole my leg had made to get it back.

I was a frigging muddy mess. but I was still determined to get across. We went back into the woods and found an old piece of sign made of 1/8 inch thick plywood and some rope.

Light bulbs went off in our heads simultaneously. We broke the old sign into large squares, poked holes and used the rope to tie the boards to our shoes.

I made Paul go first. He didn't follow my advice. He made his "mud shoes" too small, got out to the middle and began sinking.

I threw him some old boards and he was able to crawl out. By this time we were both muddy as hell. We finally got the shoes the right size and began plodding our way through the mud.

We soon found that you couldn't stop to rest or the thin corner of the mud shoe would sink and make it damn near impossible to get started again.

Finally, we made it to our island. We were true adventurers. (sans pith helmets)

Suddenly, I heard a muffled cry for help. We looked all around and didn't see anything. I walked around the base of the dirt mound and saw a kid holding on to a small branch of a dead tree. He was almost completely under the mud only a small part of his face and arm were exposed.

We grabbed him and began trying to pull him out. He was stuck. We managed to get his head out to where he could breathe. I asked him what happened. The kid said "I was trying to ride my bike across the mud and didn't make it" " Where is your bike?" was my next question. "I'm still on it" was the kid's answer.

"Let go of your bike you stupid asshole or you are going to fucking die in there." I was never one to mince words in a crisis.

Reluctantly, the kid let go of his bike and between Paul and myself, we were able to pull the mud laden kid to safety. Instead of "thank you" all he said was, "what about my bike?" I was sort of empathizing with a soon to be bike-less kid. I reached my muddied arm as far as it would go into the hole from which we plucked the kid. I have really long monkey arms and I reached down till my face was touching the surface of the muck. I groped around in the thick gooey muck for about 15 minutes but finally came up empty handed, I said, "Fuck it dude.. it's gone" the kid angrily told me that I better not steal his bike after he leaves.

Paul chimed in: "Leave?" "How do you expect to get out of here? We are the only ones with mud shoes"

I knew there was a reason I liked Paul.