MUD

Well....I think I'm going to write today's post in honor of a friend of mine that has spent the last year at the South Pole. His name is Jeff Derosa, from Bath, Maine and for these last 12 months has seen basically nothing but the white of ice and snow, except for a couple of months during which everything was all dark because the sun made a big exit and decided not to come back up.

Today he got on a big ol' airplane and is on his way back toward the sun where things are a little warmer and much more colorful. He'll get back home in Maine just in time for a New England winter where things have been just a little bit crazy. At the Mt. Washington Weather Observatory where he used to work they had a wind gust of 158 mph......it was enough to rock the whole building, which is made out of 10-inch concrete. They've also had 10-foot drifts of snow up there too, making things as white as where he came from.

Now I'm sure Jeff can relate to to the pictures I'm showing you today. He played football himself for the University of Southern Maine. He's 6-4 and weighed about 240. I say it in past tense because he's just a little bit thinner from his experience down at the pole. I expect he himself has had the good ol' barnyard look like you're seeing in the picture at left. It usually takes a few minutes for a football player to get his body used to this but after a while they begin to love it. I covered a game a couple of weeks before this one where a team played in a driving rain and by the end of the game the guys were doing belly slides in the puddles surrounding the field. The mud gets in your helmet, in your hair, in your eyes and sometimes into a few other orifices. I must admit I don't know the taste of it but I'm sure these will tell you it's just a bit gritty. At least they're getting their minerals. This particular game was between North Harrison High School out of Ramsey, Indiana and Greensburg High School to the southeast of Indianapolis. It had rained all day and at the beginning of the game it wasn't that bad. But as the game progressed the middle of the field turned into a nice thick soup, but not one your grandmother would have made.

The outpost where Jeff has been was at a spot of an altitude, I believe, of over 9,000 feet. The funny thing is that about 8,000 feet of that was ice below him. I've always wondered about what kind of creatures might be buried in the ice that deep. There could be things the likes of which nobody would ever dream of. It's about like not knowing what might be in the mud that you're getting into every hole on your head. A lot of little wriggly creatures crawl around in that stuff too. We're usually too busy thinking about the other things at hand. Of course when it comes to mud I doubt that we would NOT want to think about what might be in there. But anyway my good friend Jeff should now be back on the much greener lands of New Zealand about now. I expect he's probably trying to locate the biggest REAL steak he can get his hands on and guzzling down a FRESH beer. The good thing is now he doesn't have to feel the ice and snow between his toes. He can wiggle those little guys in the mud. By the way.......he'll have a complete dish of lasagna waiting for him here. Garfield is no contest when it comes to that.