To you, O LORD, I call;
my rock, be not deaf to me,
lest, if you be silent to me,
I become like those who go down to the pit.
Hear the voice of my pleas for mercy,
when I cry to you for help,
when I lift up my hands
toward your most holy sanctuary.
—PSALM 28:1–2 ESV
There are one million little memories that foreshadow the direction of a life. This is one.
As a boy, I lived down a long North Texas dirt road that divided a series of single-family lots from the expansive cattle ranch of a Texas tycoon. I remember the red dirt, the way the dry south-western air held dust suspended, how the summer dust covered everything just so, how it dulled all brilliant colors. The scissortail flycatchers dropped from telephone wires and mulberry branches to the tips of thigh-high switchgrass. I remember the mesquite groves, the neon thistles that rose from the hardpan, the dried-out cattle chips that sometimes served as a boy’s makeshift frisbee. My young world smelled of dust and sweet dung.
There were no less than three cattle ponds in the field, my favorite of which was the deep hole on the far boundary of the property. It was a safe distance from the eyeshot of my mother, and each summer it would dry into a burnt red crater with soft, swampy sides. It was the largest mud puddle in all of Texas.
It was a boy’s dream.
My parents were not wealthy but did the best they could with what they had. One bright Lone Star day, my mother walked into the house with a paper sack and a smile. She had pinched pennies and gone to the store for a bit of shopping. There she bought me an outfit: a secondhand pair of white tennis shorts, a white Izod shirt, a pair of white canvas shoes. There is no doubt that Mother intended to save the bleached-white garb for some particular dolling up of me.
She might have asked me whether I liked them. I might have said yes because I knew it would make her happy, but I don’t recall. What I do recall, though, is that my mother had reckoned these clothes as special, and I wanted to get my hands on them.
One searing summer afternoon, I sneaked around back our clapboard ranch home and crept into the shrubs lining the side of the house, new clothes in hand. I stripped down to my jaybird skin, stuffed my old cutoffs and Aggies T-shirt into one of the shrubs, and put on the fresh white outfit. I crossed the road and crawled under the barbed-wire fence with the determination of an explorer who knew the exact location of a new world.
As I slid down the side of the old cow pond, my foot sank deep into the red clay. I felt the pull, the suck of the mud. My shoe held fast; my foot came free. This happened first to my right shoe, then to my left. Undeterred, I made my way to the bottom, where little more than a tablespoon of water had survived the heat of midday. But this was where the mud was the thickest; this was where I wanted to be. This crater was a wild, forbidden kingdom, and I was its king. I built clay men and horses, perhaps a totem or two.
Yet the hole collected the warmth of the sun, and soon I could not resist it. I laid my head back in the rust-red mud as the god of the noon star fired all my creations in nature’s kiln.
It was bliss, until I woke.
Panic set in when I first noticed how the mud stained everything—my hands, my arms, my feet, my tennis shorts, even the green alligator on my Izod. It matted my hair in clumps. At first I considered stripping naked and afraid, but then I reconsidered, attempted to run from the bottom of the pit up the steep embankment. I lumbered and lurched, my feet sinking deep into the mud. The mud threatened to suck and swallow me into the earth like the shoes I had already lost. Concern for my soiled clothes evaporated in the high heat. I called for my mother, but she could not hear me. I called for my father, but he was at work.
My kingdom had turned on me. I was stuck. Maybe forever.
Desperate now, I wiggled first my toes, freed them enough to rock my foot from side to side. I pulled, heard suction reversing in a thick slurp. Foot by foot I repeated this until I’d struggled to the top. Free at last, but feeling no thrill of victory, I backtracked across the field, back through the thornbushes and switchgrass, back under the barbed wire. I crossed the dirt road, the outer boundary of the front yard, and then I froze.
There she was waiting with a molten expression. She was at once squinting her eyes into tiny slits and also lifting her eyebrows so high that I thought they might dislocate (if such a thing were possible). Her lips were in the sourest of pursings, and as an adult I now reckon this was her way of keeping from cussing. She was shaking. I knew this because she was holding my cutoffs in her left hand, and the frayed, stringy edges shimmied like grass blades in an earthquake. My new whites were now burnt sienna, and her cheeks were filling with fire at the sight of them.
“Where have you been, boy?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” I said. This is my first recollection of the self-preservation instinct.
“Were you at the pond again? And are those your new clothes?”
I looked at her as the blood rushed to my cheeks, as my heart pounded in my temples. Then I did what any self-respecting emotive five-year-old does.
I ran.
I didn’t make it far on account of the fact that I was barefoot and my mother was long and lean; she was athletic on rare occasions, but always when necessary. I won’t bore you with the details, but let me note that these were the days before the anti-spanking movement had taken firm hold and timeouts had not yet become the punishment en vogue—at least, not in Texas. My mother, who had along the way traded my tattered cutoffs for a switching stick, hollered something about “all the bleach in Texas” and dragged me inside by the back of my muddy shirt collar.
It wasn’t the last time I visited the pond, but it was the last time I climbed down its red-mudded side. And fearful of the stinging Texas mesquite switch, I always left my white knickers behind.
I have a history of foreshadowed truth; I’d wager we all do. We each have miry holes that lure us, that soil our special outfits and leave us shoeless. Today, I’ll make no judgments on your condition, nor will I superimpose metaphor on the particularities of your life. Perhaps you have no affinity for mud holes, for soiling all your clean clothes. Maybe you don’t feel the magnets in your hands and feet pulling you through the mud embankments into the deep metal of earthy underground. Maybe you have no urge to wallow in the mud, to rejoin the dust, to become one with the sludge. Maybe you are not stuck in your bottle, your extramarital lover, your money lust, or your bulimic malaise.
This I will say for me, though: I’ve never seen a set of unstained clothes that didn’t beg to be dragged through the mud pit—at least once, even if in secret. Even then, at least in theory, I know how it will end. I know I’ll end up stuck, like I find myself these very days. Still, the mud calls.
These days, I’ve found my feet sinking in the dark gravity of the mud, mud that smells sweet and botanical, hazy and juniper wild. But in the sticking, I see it in truth. This mud is poison for the punishment. This is not the water hole of freedom I’d imagined from a distance. I’ve found myself stuck, screaming myself hoarse and hoping for rescue from a God who seems deaf or someplace else. And if he should come to my rescue, will he bring a mesquite switch?
“We all have something that we hide behind those whiskey smiles, and those sad cowboy eyes,” sings the indie-folk band Carolina Story. I reckon this is true. It’s one way of saying that there’s a reason we go into the mud pit. There is something that pulls us to the bottom. There is a drive behind addiction. But what is it?
Even tonight I am pulled into my thirst for gin. Gin is just the salve, though. It is not the medicine for what ails me.
It is almost ten o’clock this evening, and I am wallowing in the knowledge that I am stuck. My anxiety rises with the hounding thought that I should not be stuck. I am, after all, an accomplished believer in Jesus, a by-God lay minister in a Bible church in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I lead worship for the congregants at my church, host home groups, and discuss theology with my friends. Yes, I am the most accomplished Christian fraud, and this is a thought I’d rather like to quell with liquor tonight. Instead, I’ll close my eyes; I’ll take long breaths; I’ll smell hot jasmine tea and take small sips until the cup is empty. I’m finding that these quiet practices fortify my resolve and help ease my anxieties.
On the front porch, I hear the low hum of Fayetteville night drivers. The neighborhood dogs are quiet this evening, there being no moon at which to howl on account of the low clouds that blew in on the surge of fall. The crickets are singing a colder, more urgent song, and somehow their chirps, the hum of the night drivers, and the quietness of the dogs have concocted a sturdy serenity on the front porch.
I hear the muffled dialogue of one of Amber’s television dramas, and I’m thankful for a wife who has given me space to process this tender sobriety. My neighbors have settled into their beds or are waiting for Jimmy Fallon to cross the tube. One neighbor down the street, a churchman, is sitting with his dog in his lap, I imagine. Maybe he’s reading his Psalms or saying his quiet prayers. He seems like the quiet praying type.
If I cry for help, will the wind hear me? If I turn my thoughts upward, will there be the invisible father? Will he be here? I’m still not sure I’m ready to find out. I’m not quite sure whether I’m ready to be unstuck.
A gentle rain sets in, bounces from leaf to leaf. The sound is like a thousand fingers tapping, a rhythm rippling through the water and the oak and the night, and my eyes are drawn to the sound. My eyes are drawn up.