Muddy Fingers

There is really no feeling that compares to the sensation of fresh, wet clay between your fingers. Squishing it so that it melts through the cracks in your hands and plops! at your feet. Letting it stick to your skin as it dries, and feeling it crack off piece-by-piece; the dark grey muck slowly growing paler as it sucks the moisture out of your epidermis.

As a little kid growing up in “The Land of 10,000 Lakes,” it’s a feeling I grew accustomed to. Minnesota is lake country, so I didn’t spend my summers swimming in pools, drenched in chlorine. I preferred the muddy, brownish-green of the lakes my town was built on. 

For the first ten years of my life—give or take—I lived in “Litchfield, on Lake Ripley!” Lake Ripley was a small, chigger-infested lake, and it was the pride of the town. The beaches were swarmed as soon as the weather was nice enough to melt the ice-fishers off the lake. That’s the way it was in Minnesota. 

For real lake-lovers, though, those of us who didn’t mind tiny, dirty beaches or looking for leeches between our toes, there was really only one lake to spend the first ten summers of my youth.

Lake Manuella was even smaller than Ripley. It was the favorite of fishers and young girls who loved the feeling of silt between their toes alike. I belonged to the latter group. The water was always pleasantly cool from the first moment that the water rushed over my head. I would use my hands to pull myself forward on the shallowest parts of the lake, where the bottom was covered in rocks, smoothed over by years of wakes eroding them. 

 I would sit on those smooth rocks and let the waves coming from fishing boats gently rock me; my head and shoulders peeking out of the water, the hot sun slowly tanning me as I swam. In the deeper parts of the lake, my dad would launch my brothers and their friends to the edge of the swimming area. My best friend, Rayna, and I would play mermaids on the shallow shelf until our bodies were sore.

But the best part about Manuella, by far, was the clay. Hiding beneath the top layer of silt was cool, wet clay. We would dig toes deep under the warm dirt—getting our feet filthy in the process—just to feel that squishy, moldable material. It was addicting; we would pull it up to throw at one another, making our mothers furious. We were happy, though, just digging up our clay. 

And one hot summer day, we put our youthful exuberance to good use. We—my brothers, our closest friends, and I—took empty ice-cream buckets out to Manuella to harvest that grey gold.

All dressed up in my one-piece swimsuit, I waded into the shallow water, my feet sliding against the slick rocks. Once I reached the soft, silt layer I plopped! down, my swimsuit billowing as I displaced the mud beneath me. We all got to work, like little miners looking for precious resources. 

The clay was watery and unrefined: full of dirt and sticks and other minerals that no sane sculptor would use without a long purifying process. We were little kids though and we didn’t care about the quality of the clay, just that we had any to begin with. Soon we had enough to fill our buckets until the handles stretched against their weight. And we were filthy. Our fingernails were filled with clay, our hair was coated with thick clumps, and our swimsuits were covered in mud from sitting on the gunk-covered shelf.

So we set our treasure-filled buckets on the shore and dunked our sun-dried heads into the grimy water. We “bathed” ourselves, letting the cool water wash the muck off our skin. We raced to the deepest part of the swimming area and tried to touch the bottom. 

When we were “clean,” we drug ourselves onto the prickly grass. We wrapped colorful towels around ourselves as the hot afternoon sun cemented the dirty lake water to our hair. We piled into our Chevy Suburban: buckets of clay heavy in our arms. My legs stuck to the hot leather. My body ached.

 The Suburban pulled into our driveway, illuminated by the mid-afternoon sun. Like a herd of buffalo, we poured out of the car, holding our prize in our aching arms. 

We quickly got to work on our “art”; crafting the congealed clay into unrecognizable shapes. Sitting in the driveway, baking in the hot sun, we dug our hands into the buckets and pulled out chunks of the cool material. We rolled it into smooth coils and pinched it into bumpy cups, until we had a wide array of “pottery.” 

We left our precious handiwork to dry out in the summer heat. Rayna and I ran up the stairs to my bedroom and peeled off our sticky swimsuits. Our warm, dry clothes felt like delicate silk after spending a day in scratchy, cheap swimsuits. Crashing against the pillowy couches, we treated ourselves to decadent, buttery popcorn. Watching Cars, or Megamind, or some other animated movie to hold our interest, we turned off our brains and rested our lake-weary bodies.

As the sun drifted into the west, we scurried to check on the status of our creations. They were cracked and didn’t hold together. How could it? Without a kiln, we were hopeless to preserve any of our “pottery” for longer than a day. But it didn’t matter. We spent the day together, and we spent it doing what we loved.