Mud

A man stands on the bank of a fast-moving river. It looks like almost 70 or 80 yards across and is mostly whitewater, except for near the banks, where it’s very nearly calm. He’s tired, so tired, and covered with the dirt and dust of a long journey. He wants desperately to be clean. He plops down on the bank without looking and hears a splat. He looks down and notices the ground consists chiefly of sticky brown mud, and now he’s covered in that, too. He stands and his body makes a sucking noise when it frees itself from the mud.
Great, he thinks.
He steps out of his shoes and takes off his shirt, and steps down into the shallows near the bank. The bottom is sandy here, and his bare feet are able to grip it. He splashes some of the water on his face, arms and chest, then reaches down to the bottom and scoops up some of the sand, scrubbing himself with it, getting off most of the dirt and mud—at least what he can see. The water feels good on his skin. It looks like it would be cold, but it isn’t. It feels like life, flowing around him, dripping from his face, his arms, and running down his chest. He feels clean, for the moment, and it’s almost as if he can see the filth that had covered him slipping away downstream.
Invigorated for the moment, he looks across the river, up and down the bank as far as he can see, trying to find a way to cross. Nothing but more muddy bank, and emptiness behind it. He turns around and looks behind him and can see the path he followed to the river, with all of its twists, turns, and pitfalls. He steps onto the bank again and turns to face the river.
“No,” he says. “I’m not going back. I can’t.”
But if he doesn’t go back, he has to go forward, and that would be suicide. The river’s moving too fast, and besides, there’s nothing on the other side. He’s heard differently. People say Heaven, or Paradise, or wherever people go is across the river, and there are all kinds of crossings. They say you’ll see everyone you’ve lost on the other side, and that if you’ve been good in life, if you’ve done good things, then you’ll be rewarded. They say it doesn’t matter how you get there, so long as you’re able to cross.
The man can’t see anywhere to cross, and what’s more, he’s beginning to feel dirty again. He looks down at his feet and the mud is slowly creeping up over his feet, and winding around his legs. He can tell that if he stands still long enough, it will creep up and cover his entire body, coating him in filth, and hardening into a shell. And he will never be clean.
He starts to step off the bank for more sand to scrub with when he hears a voice on the bank behind him.
“That isn’t going to work.”
He spins and sees a teenage boy standing on the bank. He’s wearing baggy denim shorts and a white T-shirt that looks about fifty sizes too big for him.
“What do you mean?” he asks. “I just did it a minute ago and got clean.”
“Yeah,” the boy says. “And now you’re dirty again. Standing in the shallows and scrubbing yourself with sand isn’t going to do it. You have to go deep. There’s dirt you can’t see, and that’s the only way to get to it.”
“Look, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but what do you know about anything? You’re a kid.”
The boy just stands there and smiles at him. “Look at my feet.”
The man looks and sees the mud creeping up his legs, too.
“It doesn’t care how old I am,” the boy says. “Or what I’ve seen or done. It only wants to make me unclean.”
“So what are you going to do about it,” the man asks. “The river’s going too fast to get past the shallows. If you go deep you’ll get swept away. There’s no place to cross, and there isn’t so much as a tree on the other side. And if you stay here, you’ll get coated with this stuff.” He reaches down and scoops up some mud, letting it slide through his fingers and drip back onto the bank.
“I’m not going to stay here,” the boy says, “and I’m not going to cross.”
“Then you’re out of your mind. You can’t throw yourself into a river. It’s stupid. Do you want to die?”
“No, I don’t. I want to be clean, same as you. And I want to live. But there’s only one way to do both. You have to trust that the river won’t let you drown, and that it’ll take care of the mud.”
Without another word, the boy strips off his shirt and wades into the shallows. He turns to face the man and raises his arms. “Think about it,” he says. “This river has always been here. And it wants me to trust it with my life. Can’t you feel it?”
The man closes his eyes and steps into the water so that it’s up to his waist. He feels its warmth swirling around him, and the idea of really being clean sounds wonderful.
“Yes,” he says, “I feel it.”
When he opens his eyes, he sees the boy stepping into the deeper part of the river and he’s suddenly gone. The last the man sees of him is his arm, waving above the surface of the water as he goes around a slight bend in the river.
He thinks of the journey to the river. He thinks of the cost, not in dollars and sense, but in pain. So much pain to get here, so many traumas. So many losses. He thinks how filthy the world has made him, how much he’s allowed it to. He thinks of how it took a lifetime to get covered in mud, and that it would be so great to have it all swept downstream. To be clean. How sublime it would be to just float into the river and trust it to take him wherever it willed. It could be that the only way to Heaven was the river.
Yes, he thinks. That’s it.
And it feels right. It feels like truth. And as he steps into the deep, he can feel the mud slipping off his body and the clean new skin beneath. He feels himself born aloft on the water, and he can feel it sweeping the inner mud away as well. He feel the crust of mud that had built up around his heart over the course of his journey breaking apart and dispersing into a million particles, scattering downstream in the rapids.