Mud Filled Memories
T
By Karla Jacobs
he ambush was a surprise, as ambushes so often are. In the fog of battle, I don’t remember who threw the first mudball (it was a boy) or who it hit (one of the girls), but I do remember how it ended. The entire North Hall High School cross country team was covered from head to toe in mud. It was in our hair, our shoes, our clothes, our noses, our ears. Wet, sticky Georgia red clay. It was the summer of 1985 before school started my sophomore year, and we were on a retreat at Lake Rabun for a mix of workouts and team building. My family had recently bought a tiny 2-bedroom, 1-bath fishing cabin with our friends from Gainesville. Built more for function than a layout in Architectural Digest, it had a large fish cleaning sink set up outside the front door as you came in. The lake was much quieter back then. In our section between the Narrows and the Big Basin, the shoreline across the way was nothing but trees, and there were few houses on the Brandon Mill Road side of our cove. It was a Saturday. The morning’s workout was 10 driveway sprints up the long, steep dirt driveway, and Coach sent us out in a steady rain for a long run after lunch. It had been raining all week, and the road was a mud pit in both directions. Inspired by Rambo, the blockbuster in theaters that summer, about a half mile into the run the boys coated themselves in mud camouflage and laid up against the mud banks waiting for the girls to catch up. We were doing more talking than watching where we were going, and when we got close, the boys jumped out of the bank and started throwing mud at us. We threw mud, knocked each other into puddles, dropped handfuls down the backs of shirts, and made mud angels. We were filthy and enjoyed every minute of it. The run was scrapped. Who wants to run in squishy, muddy shoes? We waited what we thought was an appropriate amount of time and headed back to the cabin. We had a double decker pontoon at the time that was tied up to the plain wooden dock. The boys took turns jumping off the top of the pontoon and seeing who could make the biggest mud ring when they hit the water while the girls grabbed life jackets and swam to the other side of the neighbor’s boathouse to get the mud out of the inside of our clothes. The miles from the missed workout were tacked on to Sunday’s long run, or we had to do extra driveway sprints— memories are hazy on the specifics—but the punishment was worth it. The down time between workouts was why
we were there. Lazy stretches of laying out on the dock, evenings full of games and stories, and nights of sitting on the back porch talking about our plans for the future bolstered a feeling of belonging that made us more than a group of athletes. We became close friends too. We were fierce competitors. Both the boys and girls teams made it to the State Cross Country Championship that year. However, the competition was just part of it. We were a group of kids who loved each other, were accepting of each other, and supported each other. We enjoyed being together, and for many of us, that bond started on our retreat at the lake. We’d fought side by side in an epic mud battle after all. Lake Rabun has changed a lot since then. The once empty shoreline across the water is filled with houses now. The tiny fishing cabin and dock are gone, replaced by two respectable houses and their corresponding boathouses. The lake is much busier now too, both in the water and on the roads. Those kids have changed as well. We grew up to be teachers and writers, actors and small business owners. One of us followed a career in the U.S. Army and served two tours in Iraq. Another is a Superior Court Judge. We scattered after high school, each following our own path, but we are bound together for a lifetime through friendships forged in the heat of competition and memories infused with more than a little lake magic. Karla Jacobs is a freelance writer, a soccer mom, and a community volunteer with deep family roots in the North Georgia Mountains. When not writing about pop culture, policy, and politics, she can often be found hiking backcountry trails with her family. She lives in Marietta, Georgia with her husband and their two teenage children.
June 2020 - 9
