Slick & Mired

As heads bobbed lazily in Cedar Lake, the Mud Man hopped along, letting the regulars at Hidden Beach know, “It’s ready.” He greeted late arrivals with a formal welcome: “Good afternoon!”

On the right day, when there’s just the right amount of water in the mud, the mixture sucks your feet in and produces hilarious flatulent noises. Mud fights among the willing are inevitable. After some nonpolitical mudslinging, the facial war paint is applied, like they do in Lord of the Flies and Fear Factor. This is followed by a full-body mud bath, a complete drying, and a final glorious dive into the water, leaving behind a wake of redistributed silt.

The mud at Hidden Beach could be a noxious brand of urban glop, containing sticks, rocks, and the sort of trash that proliferates in Minneapolis parks. But the Mud Man wouldn’t have that.

Stephen Vasseur is a landmark to regular beach dwellers. He speaks with a dramatic severity that instantly makes you think you’ve done something wrong. “I started coming down here more or less in the summer of ’93, but I started what you would call the caretaker assignment on a seasonal basis the following year, ’94,” he said, with an odd, unsolicited precision. Vasseur constantly monitors the pit for foreign objects, mostly sticks and beer cans. He is proud of the relative cleanliness of the mud, and he has a strong sense of ownership.

“I have never had any problems. There are some who have very sensitive body chemistries and who get what you would call an allergic reaction after playing in this stuff,” he said, diplomatically alluding to the occasional mud-transmitted rash. A friend of mine claimed that a bullhead in the mud pit once nipped him, but Vasseur had no knowledge of any bullheads in his domain.

“We occasionally get small sunfish and perch in here, but that’s only when the water levels are high,” he assured me. We waded in together. By way of conversation, Vasseur schooled me on the clearing of some trees leading up to the beach last year.

“In Aught-two, that’s when the Park and Rec forestry department had to clear the buckthorns, mulberry, and standing dead trees.” Now he was really getting warmed up. Words flew out of him in an abrasive but informative torrent. “But they had a problem. They only had five days on site, and that wasn’t enough time to do everything they wanted. That one big dead tree down there,” he said, pointing vaguely to about a half-acre of heavily wooded parkland, “the five days were up before they could get to that!” Vasseur looked and sounded like Dr. Emmett Brown in Back to the Future, but with thick glasses, shorter hair, and a beach cap.

The Mud Man is a resident of the Beltrami neighborhood, but he hops the bus (number 25) to the lake, “time and weather permitting.” As the season winds down, he will gear up for his wintertime vocation: He is a scoreboard operator and announcer for boy’s high school hockey.

Summer was fading around the edges, and a toddler squealed hysterically as her mother lowered her into the goop. Vasseur scooped up a handful of the good stuff and showed it to the child, who was soon chucking mud with gusto. Vasseur is not only a caretaker, but in a lazy, summertime kind of way, he’s an educator too. “This is something that God has given me to do on a seasonal basis,” he said. “And I will do the best I can.”
—Geoff Ziezulewicz


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