Playing in the Mud, Virginia Beach

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"So, this is a story about mud. Growing up around the Chesapeake Bay, the tidal regions around the Chesapeake Bay, there was always a lot of mud, and it was a thick, slippery, slimy, gray-brown smelly mud that I have come to learn is called Pluff, and if you're not from the coastline, or the East Coast, or from a region that's affected by tides, it's hard to imagine the smell of this mud. It smells like rotten eggs, and at low tide you get this very distinctive rotten-egg smell that permeates everything.

Some people find it to be pretty egregious. I think it smells great. I think it smells like home because that's where I grew up, and that's where I played in the summertime was in the pluff. When you get in the pluff, you're likely to get stuck in it. You're likely to lose your shoes in it. Your likely to come home covered with slime, but it's a lot of fun for a kid, and the best thing about the pluff were the fiddler crabs that made their homes in the pluff in tiny little burrows.

They would come out at low tide, and as a kid one of the most exciting things was trying to catch the fiddler crabs and not get bitten by them or pinched by them because they have larger pinchers . . . but a very exciting thing, and it wasn't until a year or two ago that I actually learned that there was a name for that mud, the pluff mud that's so pervasive along the east coast in the United States, and I was so happy to finally put a name to the mud that had meant so much to me as a kid."

Asset ID #6683

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