El Pantano

En un lugar de La Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, I came to a small country inn, looking for a place to sleep and a bite to eat. After a hearty lunch of grilled sausage liberally irrigated with local red wine I fell in easy conversation with the long-faced, skinny bar wench, to whom I posed the question about what was to be seen in the town. After stating bluntly that the only thing worth seeing in the tiny town was herself, she mentioned the stone tower, the old chapel down the road, and el pantano (the swamp), pointing vaguely to the valley that separated the town from some very interesting cliffs. Being a geologist I felt it my duty to go explore the geology of the place, which from the distance looked to be a very thick sequence of red beds (a molasse deposit in olde geologic parlance). So I headed down to the valley, humming a tune, and pretty soon I ran into a barbed-wire fence and a curtain of brambles that dared separate me from the cliffs beyond. In my best trespasser form I ducked under the barbed wire, and sacrificing a few tears to my nice shirt I made it to the puny little creek, which I jumped with a simple stride. A swamp, indeed!

The cliff turned out to be a series of thin-bedded silts (flood plain deposits?) and thin sand interbeds (crevasse deposits?), with none of the coarse sand deposits or gravel lenses I would have expected from a continental alluvial fan bajada. Admittedly I was only looking at a few meters of what must have been a sequence several thousand meters thick, but it goaded me into following the cliff upstream to look for more outcrops. It was then that the ground started getting mushy. Turns out that this portion of the valley is just downstream of a small dam, and that this dam must leak quite a bit, so it has created a sort of "forebay" or rather a foreswamp, and in no time I was surrounded by it. No worries, this is not my first time to the rodeo. The trick is to follow the "ridges", stepping on the high tufts of grass. That is, until you slip off the grass and find yourself knee deep in a gray, stinking mud, that sucks your shoe off your feet as you stumble around trying not to fall flat on your face (a CH/OH for those of my students who might be reading this memoirs). Of course I could not leave my shoe behind, so I dug deep in the mud to pull it out ... ah, but to every action there is a reaction ... and as I pulled one shoe out of the muck the other sunk deeply into said muck. I repeated the feat time and again, until I lost my footing and landed flat on my chest!

I try to be a minimalist, but still carry a lot of stuff in my pockets (particularly when I travel), so out spilled my credit cards, my passport, my cell phone, and my ear phones! I recovered quickly but most things got muddied (I want to think that my passport has been blooded), and for the first time I felt a pang of panic. What if I fell flat in this sucking mud and was unable to pick myself again? I tried to control my panic and forged ahead to the other side of the swamp, only to find out it was an impenetrable wall of brambles. I made my best to break through them, but they were too thick and all I got for my efforts were a torn shirt and bleeding arms. There was nothing to it but continue downstream along the swamp, stumbling and wallowing in the stinking mud, until I spotted a farmer working on a field a few hundred meters away. I hollered to him and asked what was the best way to get to him. He hollered back that there was no way to cut across, and that I would have to go back up to whence I came!

I just couldn't do it. I was exhausted as it was, and could have never gone through the brambles again, so I soldiered down the river (swamp) until I spotted a low cliff covered with brambles, and with force grown out of desperation I scaled it to safety. I was a mess, but I was safe. Ronnie has never been as coated with mud as I was, and if anyone had seen me at that time they would have run away in panic screaming that they had encountered the monster of the green lagoon. My shoes were two big bricks of mud, and my bleeding feet were encased in muddy socks covered with stickers and spiny seed pods. In this sorry state I approached my hostel, left my shoes at the sidewalk, and sneaked in into the living quarters and the shower. It was a mud fest. Everything I touched was covered in stinky gray mud, and the walls of the bathroom were soon liberally splattered with dirt. After emptying my pockets I just walked straight into the shower, clothes and all, and for the next 10 minutes delivered a constant stream of mud into the drain. Fortunately there was no one around, so I sneaked, butt naked, into my room, grabbed some detergent, and adding detergent to the pile of muddy clothes stomped on them  like I was pressing grapes until the stream changed from dark brown to light brown, at which point I called it good.

As I write this note I still detect a distinct smell of rotten vegetation all around me, and my legs are starting to throb with the myriad of scratches I got while climbing out of the swamp. Next time I am inclined to go do something wild, would someone please whisper in my ear el pantano?