From a hot Closet in St. Paul Minnesota, this is Don't Remember Me Like This, a podcast of non-fiction short stories. Don’t Remember Me Like This is written, produced, and published by me. My name is Nathaniel Barber. Welcome to the last episode of season one. This episode is titled The Mud Hill. Enjoy.
The Mud Hill
After a painful year of waiting, at last, we were returning to the woods—our woods.
That was the year my friend Derek’s dad, Don, got stuck chauffeuring all four of us boys—me and Derek (both fourth graders), my brother who was then in the third grade, and Derek’s older brother Dan, who was in the fifth grade—to the Silverton campground in the cozy cab of his truck. Probably, the drive wasn’t even two hours. But to us it felt like an eternity. And for poor Don, it must have felt like two.
All of us kids were squawking and nipping at each other like wolf pups. We happily ignored the repeated overtures to calm down and be quiet from Don who’d been white-knuckling his way out of the suburbs Northeast to the foothills of the Cascade range. Suddenly, Don veered off the highway in Granite Falls, coming to an abrupt stop in the parking lot of a McDonald's.
In the drive-through, Don rolled down his window and ordered twenty-five cheeseburgers and five large cokes.
A feeble mechanical voice echoed from the drive-through speaker, “What?!”
Don draped a huge arm out his window and repeated the massive order.
There was some confusion on the other line, “I’m sorry,” said the thin mechanical voice, “How many again?”
“Twenty-five!” shouted Don, losing his patience. “Cheeseburgers. And five large cokes—you got that?!”
At the delivery window, I was agog as bag after bag of steaming fast food was handed over and passed around. We pounced on the bags, ferociously tearing into the hot, greasy burgers, washing them down with gigantic, choking gulps of cold soda.
With the sudden, enormous pile of cheeseburgers Don managed to buy himself a good twenty minutes or so of peace and quiet. On the last leg of our ride, however, our sorry caravan became a certified traffic hazard with all four kids climbing the walls and writhing frantically until we had officially worn out our welcome in the truck’s small cab. Just a couple miles from camp Don calmly pulled over to the side of Mountain Loop Highway and told us all to get out. He gave us two options. He said, either we could walk the rest of the way or we could ride in the bed of the truck.
We eagerly took him up on the later option. We rode the rest of the way leaned against the rear of the cab beating on the roof and singing as Don eased to turn from the highway into an opening in the roadside thicket.
We held on as the truck lumbered down the nondescript approach until, suddenly, Camp Silverton opened before us. It was instantly familiar—wet earth, old wood, campfire smoke, and somewhere, bacon and eggs.
Mr. Goodwin, our school librarian, taught us all about Camp Silverton—how in the early 1900’s it was first established as a ranger station for the U.S. Forest Service until sometime in the 40’s the camp was transformed into a nature camp for schoolchildren.
Nestled deep in the lush tangle of the Mt. Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, Silverton consisted of one main lodge and mess hall, a small Natural Resources Learning Center full of taxidermied specimens of local fauna, and display cases brimming with samples of volcanic ash and moss and bark and rocks and stale old photos from the area’s logging days. Surrounding these two main buildings was an outcrop scatter of cabins and open-ended A-frames furnished sparingly with rows of solid-built bunks, each with a thin, pee-proof plastic mattress. On one end of each cabin was a ladder that led to wide, open lofts.
The camp was connected by a network of pebblestone trails that cut around huge trees—red-barked cedar, big-leaf maple, and the towering deep-green spires of subalpine pines and fir. Threatening the perimeter of the camp was the dense forest floor—mats of low-bush huckleberry, wild salmonberry, and impenetrable groves of fern and marshland sporadically adorned with gigantic, putrid blooms of skunk cabbage whose rotten spathes filled the warm spring air with a permeating reek of decaying flesh.
The whole of Silverton was haunted by a far-off rushing, eerily white and calling through the dewy pines—the effervescent tumble of the South Fork Stillaguamish River, a bend of which coiled around the south end of the camp in a glacier-cold emerald green pool, deep and swirling.
This was my fourth annual visit to the camp, an outing organized and conducted by our elementary school program: The PCEP. P.C.E.P. was an acronym that stood for Parent Cooperation Educational Program. The PCEP—which was part of Washington’s Public School District No. 15—was just like normal school except about once a week, one of our parents joined our class to contribute a seminar or a series of presentations according to their speciality or pet passion.
My mom came in occasionally to teach Spanish. And on every May 5th, she’d whip up a feast of Latin flair for our class and we’d review how Mexico gained its independence from France at the 1862 Battle of Puebla. My friend Tom’s mom gave us lessons on nutrition and physical fitness. Another, I think it was Jake’s mom taught us about balancing a checkbook and financial sensibility.
Josh Powers’ mom, Sheryl, was our “Art Docent.” Sheryl exposed our class to paintings. She began her tutorials at the front of the class with a painting on a stand covered with a sheet or a blanket. Standing next to the concealed work of art—a replica, of course—she’d describe the painting to us, its subjects and its use of light and composition. An artist herself, Sheryl spoke to the technique of the artists: Renoir, Khalo, Klimt, Picasso, and Toulouse-Lautrec. She described their lives, their perspective and their place in history. Before revealing Van Gogh’s Starry Night, she played us the song, Vincent (Starry Starry Night), by Don McLean.
And then, finally, Sheryl would remove the cover from the painting. For this big reveal, I always closed my eyes, relishing the oohs and ahhs of my classmates as, at last, they could clap eyes on the painting which had received such a grand introduction. Only when the class had finally settled down would I open my eyes and let the composition soak in.
I began the PCEP in the first grade. I traveled with the same group of kids through to the sixth grade—with only a couple of additions along the way. I think that is why our class was such an especially tight group. Or, at least, that’s how it felt for me, even if all that would change with Middle School.
Slowly, Don pulled his truck—the bed of which was spilling over with fizzing lunatics—around the turnaround in front of the main mess hall. Before the truck even came to a full stop me, my brother, Derek and Dan exploded from the truck, legs pumping full-tilt for the forest.
We aimed for the creek behind the mess hall. Across the creek was an arrangement of stones we’d piled up years earlier—a crude bridge we were elated to discover was still there. Clambering over the stones we dove headlong into a wet and overgrown deer path on the other side of the creek. The vague path wound this way and that through the impossibly thick undergrowth. Our old trail was so overgrown that in some places we couldn't tell if we were hopelessly lost or still heading in the right direction. We followed our noses and found our way to the old marsh, a black bog adorned with the huge blooms of skunk cabbage. Across this formidable muck was a pathway made from a series of pilings someone had driven deep and sturdy into the swamp. We gingerly tip-toed across the pilings, not stopping to wonder who’d gone through the unenviable task of putting them there.
My brother slipped on one of these pilings and fell straight into the marsh. Rather than remaining calm and helping himself out of the bog like a normal person, he just flailed about helplessly and screamed and screamed like he was being peeled alive. At first he was only knee-deep in the fetid muck. But he was working up such a lather that he was soon waist-deep and sinking fast. Doubling back to pull him out was not such an easy task as each piling was a knob of wet slippery wood. And when I finally did reach Patrick he cursed me out for not rescuing him faster.
Off in the distance, I could hear Derek and Dan. They had happily charged on without us. Their yelps and screams were joined by a chorus of hollering from another pack of kids deep in the woods, I guessed they’d found the mud hill. We were close.
The mud hill was exactly what it sounded like: It was a tall hill made entirely of riverbank clay, thick and silky, one side of which had been worn into a flat muddy slide. The slide was steep and long and was perfectly smooth and slick. Off to the side of the hill’s gray marbled face was a thick rope that was tied to a tree at the hilltop. The remaining length of rope was draped on the ground to the side of the sheer slope. Just like those strange pilings in the bog, nobody knew who tied the rope there. Nobody cared. Just like nobody cared how a perfectly smooth, always-wet mud slide came to rise like a monolith from the old-growth Cascadian forest. Likely it’d been worn to such a perfect slope by years of kids' butts sliding down, over and over, each of us throwing ourselves down the slide like ragdolls, slowly and patiently sculpting its broad face. Whatever caused the mud hill to come to be was inconsequential. The only thing that mattered was that it was there, and after an agonizing year of waiting, we were too.
We had finally arrived.
My brother and I were greeted by the same kids that’d heralded Derek and Dan’s arrival moments earlier. These were strange mud figures unrecognizably slaked in a thick, earthen gravy. Only their voices were familiar—classmates from school who’d arrived at the camp before us and who, from the look of them, had gotten quite a head start on the mud hill. Pulling itself from the wet mash of foliage at the bottom of the slide, a looming pile of mud walked up to me and wrapped its arms around me, suddenly picking me up in a filthy bear hug. Somewhere inside all that mud was my dear friend Josh, laughing at how neat and tidy I had been trying to keep my clothes—clothes which were now hopelessly ruined.
I grabbed hold of the mud-slicked rope and, hand over hand, precariously pulled my way to the top of the hill. I stopped to catch my breath at the top of the hill where I could see the whole weekend spread out before us—the campfires, groggy breakfasts of cafeteria style bacon, eggs, hashbrowns and pancakes with all the syrup our tiny pancreases could handle. There would be fishing in the river and sleepless nights watching the stars out in the open A-frames, and listening to the lusty roar of the Stillaguamish River.
Soon, the sharp metallic clang of the dinner bell rang through the forest. Just as frantically as we’d scurried up the mud hill, the kids all slid down one last time and lit into the forest like single-file rats, stomping through the path, mincing across the bog knobs and kicking our sloppy wet shoes across the deer path back to the mess hall where all the families were gathering for dinner. There were several of our teachers as well, teachers who had sacrificed their weekend to spend it with their students and who, I suspected, also came to party with the other teachers in a cabin we secretly called the “Teacher’s Lounge.”
It was always a little weird seeing our teachers outside of school. They weren’t supposed to be anything but our teachers. I was somehow shocked to learn they were leading full and imaginative lives outside our school. One time, I ran into one of my teachers on San Juan Island, of all places (He was drinking a beer!). We shook hands and exchanged a polite hello. But that was all it needed to be.
That night at dinner, the rest of the muddy kids and I were quarantined to our own table—our clean hands, washed for dinner, poked out from a solid mud cake that was beginning to dry and crumble.
During dinner, a group of parents and teachers delivered a short presentation to officially welcome the campers and to kick off the weekend. They reminded us that during our short stay, we must treat our camp with respect, pick up our trash, “leave no trace” as they said and, ideally, depart our cabins and the campground cleaner and more organized than we’d found them. That being said, we were also advised to go wild, soak up the woods and dig our hands into the dirt. This last suggestion was delivered with a comic aside to our muddy group that’d clearly gotten a head start on everyone else. If we found mushrooms in or around the camp, it was advised that we should leave those alone. And that went for wildlife as well. And if we wanted to learn about both, and why, there were some highly recommended presentations by teachers and parents scheduled at the Natural Resources Center on biology, ecology, and geology.
I longed for a shower and to change into clean clothes.
After dinner, when all the kids scattered and the adults were left behind to clean up and gossip, I finally got the chance to take a shower. That is when I discovered I hadn’t brought any extra socks or shoes. It hadn’t even occurred to me to bring extras. At least for the socks I could wash them in the sink and hang them up to dry overnight. But the shoes I’d worn to the mud hill looked like I’d worn them to the mud hill. They were soaked through and, with each step, squashed gurgling, muddy foam from holes in the toes.
After my shower, the scorned shoes were there, waiting for me. Waiting for me to slip my clean feet into their muddy husks, to clomp around with a repulsive squish, squash, squish, as if I’d marinated my tennies in chocolate pudding. I could ignore this up to a point. But the sickening sensation was always present, whether we were throwing rocks into the river, or frantically claiming our beds in the A-Frame, my heavy, loathsome clodhoppers squelched and burped along every step of the way.
So that night, at the first campfire, it occurred to me I could dry my shoes by the fire. It was a huge fire and a large group of kids and parents had gathered around to hear Mr. Goodwin tell one of his famously horrifying ghost stories—a wonderful horror story that no doubt would be the source of countless nightmares that weekend, and these days, possible litigation. With my feet up next to the fire, my shoes steamed and sizzled, cooking my feet inside. It was only when I uncorked my feet and set the shoes on a rock by the fire did the sopping shoes really start steaming.
At one point in the story, Mr. Goodwin leaned into the fire, his face underlit by the glowing coals, “Taaaaaiillly-po!” he wheezed, bug-eyed and gnashing his teeth. “Yoooooouve got, my taaaaaily-po!”
And just as Mr. Goodwin was easing his way to the terrible end of his story, someone’s marshmallow that had been dangled too close to the coals suddenly ignited into flames directly across the fire from me. In a panic, the idiot pulled their angry marshmallow from the fire and, instead of blowing the flames from its charred rind they desperately shook their stick in the air to put out the fire. As they beat the stick back and forth, miraculously, the flaming dessert clung fast to the tip, sizzling and now thoroughly engulfed in flames. However, it was with one of these whips, the molten puff finally relinquished its feeble grasp on the stick and was launched, hurtling through the air toward my face.
It was in slow motion that everyone watched this small, dazzling ball of fire sailing over the bonfire and splatter like napalm in my eye socket. In a flash, I scraped at the charred marshmallow, pulling the long strands of burning hot sweet slime from my eye. Someone—a friend or an enemy, I couldn’t tell which—doused the flames with a spray of strawberry Shasta.
After the commotion died down, it took some doing to pry open my eye. And when I did, I was so relieved—I could see! My eye was okay! But the first thing I saw was thoroughly puzzling. Underlit by the campfire were several of my classmates, friends of mine, laughing and pointing.
Sobbing, my eye pounding with burn, I ran barefoot to the camp bathrooms to assess the damage in the mirror. The mirror in the bathroom was only a polished steel plate scratched-in with countless initials, arrow-pierced hearts, and dates. But at last, I could see what was so funny. My eye was quickly turning into a blistering wad, while my eyelashes and eyebrows had been scorched clean off my face.
I was already not a big fan of my face, but this was just too much. I too couldn’t help but stop crying long enough to laugh myself sober and, to take and breath before hobbling back to the campfire to retrieve my shoes.
Dry shoes, I thought, optimistically.
At the campfire, Mr. Goodwin had resumed his story. Someone handed me an ice-cold can of soda to press against my eye and, if it hadn’t been for the puzzling smell of burning rubber, that ice-cold can might just have been the most beautiful thing I’d ever felt.
Indeed, my shoes were dry. At least that was a plus. They’d also been barbecued to a brittle crisp. When I pulled them from the rock near the campfire, their rubber soles stretched in long rubbery strands like ribbons of hot mozzarella clinging to the lid of a pizza box.
The next morning I tried walking to breakfast without my shoes. It was slow going. I was cursing myself for choosing the farthest flung A-frame in the camp.
The pebble path to the mess hall was not a smooth pebble path. The pebbles were razor-sharp rocks. Walking to the mess hall was like walking on glass. I’d been hobbling along for what seemed like an hour before Derek’s brother Dan found me and made me put on one of his shoes. We linked our arms together and, for the remaining distance to the mess hall we hopped, me on my right foot clad in Dan’s shoe, and Dan with a shoe on his left.
Like most of my childhood, the rest of the weekend is difficult to recall. I remember waking early one morning, climbing down the ladder of the A-frame to go pee in the river (the bathrooms were much further away than the river). It was still night, night that was just turning into day, and there was my friend Stuart, patiently casting a line into the Sillaguamish River, reeling it back in, and casting it back out again. I had no idea he fished. I had no idea people got up so early. I joined him by the riverside and, like a jerk asked him what he was doing.
“Fishing,” he said, without making fun of me.
“Oh?” I said, genuinely surprised. “You catch anything?”
“Just this,” said Stewart pointing near his foot to fishing line that he’d tied around his shoe, the line leading into the river.
After he reeled in his line, he leaned down and pulled the lead, on the other end of the line was hooked a magnificent fish. Stuart said it was a Steelhead Salmon. He held up the animal for me to see, slowly rotating the gasping fish, catching its iridescent belly in the golden sunrise. The thick fish was longer than my arm. It was flopping around and gulping helplessly, suffocating, begging us with its bulging rolling eye to put it back home.
I think of these things still: The fish. The constant roar of the Stillaguamish River. My lacerated and bruised feet dug deliciously into the cool riverside loam. Many of these memories I’d jotted down, mostly as scant notes I’d gathered through the years. They occur to me when I least expect them, like some cruel ghost reaching out to me in the cereal aisle of a grocery store, or while I’m driving my daughter to her swimming lessons. The ghost is trying to trick me into thinking the stories are somehow important. Or at least it is hoping I will someday stitch them back together again and maybe bring the ghost back to life, which is of course impossible.
My notes indicate that I should end this story with me at the end of this short weekend, standing on top of the mud hill, which actually happened. It would not be my last time to the mud hill, thank god. But it was my last time for at least a year. While everyone was getting ready to leave camp, I snuck away to the hill by myself. I didn’t want to be around any of my friends. I didn’t want to be around my brother. I’d had enough of him to last a lifetime (or so I thought). I wanted to come to the hill by myself because there was something that hadn’t occurred to me during my last visit, when the whole weekend was ahead of me and I was not only ready for whatever came next, but eager.
But now, I was on the other side of the weekend. I was looking out from the mud hill. There was the river, the rolling hills of the Cascade lowlands—velvety with pine and aswirl with a thick fog. It would be another year of waiting until we would return to Silverton. A whole agonizing year that was nothing like the previous year which had passed in a blip, as had the years prior—years that seemed to be falling over themselves, evaporating with increasing momentum and leaving a residue of random memories I could only revisit the same way that Steelhead was trying to breathe, gulping hopelessly at thin air, wishing that someone would put it back.
I would only revisit Silverton two more times with the PCEP group. With each visit me and my classmates were a year older. Supposedly, we were a year wiser. For these trips (and every trip I’ve taken since) I now packed multiple pairs of shoes and more than plenty of socks and underwear.
Middle school would arrive soon after, scattering our class of the previous six years to separate, rival schools. I kept in contact with many of my old friends. Perhaps out of desperation, but still.
Not long after middle school came high school. In the hallways, I sometimes passed people who knew my deepest childhood secrets, people who had seen a flaming marshmallow burn off my eyebrow and eyelashes and who’d seen me gobble down five whole cheeseburgers and a large coke in less than twenty minutes. We might pass each other between classes without ever exchanging so much as a simple hello.
I did manage to find Silverton again once more, almost by accident. It was years later when a friend and I were driving to the ice caves a little further up the Mountain Loop Highway. The camp was dark and shuttered, chain link prevented cars from entering the turnaround by the mess hall. There was graffiti everywhere. And trash. Years after that, I saw on Facebook the camp had finally been put out of its misery—razed to the ground by bulldozers. It seems the heaving wall of foliage that had always threatened the perimeter of the camp was finally allowed to reclaim the land.
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Thank you for joining me for this episode—the conclusion to season one of Don’t Remember Me Like This. As I’d indicated in the introduction, I’m going to be taking a break from the podcast for a while, maybe a couple of months. You can still get shorter, members-only content in my patreon account which you can find either by the link in the description of this show, or by searching Patreon for Nathaniel Barber.
It’s been a pleasure creating these shows for you and I’m looking forward to what season two may bring. Until then however, please, don’t remember me like this.
