Episode Nine - Mud Season

Ezra discusses the cause and effects of mud season, an annual weather event in southern Vermont, and attempts to explain why mud season is especially bad this year.*

*Actually, snowfall in this region has been plentiful this winter of 2025.  The deep freeze dynamic Ezra talks about in this episode occurred in the winter of 2023.  

Transcript

Episode Nine:  Mud Season
I Wish I Was a Mole In the Ground, first verse ---

Oh, I wish I was a mole in the ground
Yes, I wish I was a mole in the ground
‘F I’se a mole in the ground, I’d root that mountain down
I wish I was a mole in the ground

Ezra:  Um…I like to talk about the weather [chuckle]…yeah, yeah, you probably noticed that by now…and, uh, there's somethin’ goin’ on up here right now, it's called mud season. Now, mud season, uh, in this part of the country is, uh, it's an annual event, happens every year. March-April, somewhere in that vicinity. Uh…it hit here in late March, uh, this year, aaaaand it was a, hm, it was a bitch, um, and it ain't over yet, it's, it’s okay right now, they got, you know, they graded the roads and, uh, dumped, oh, I don't know how many tons of gravel, so the roads are passable.  But a couple of weeks ago, there were cars, stuck everywhere. And several of the roads were marked, posted, uh, you know, closed…and…man, I've been, I've been goin’ long way ‘round [chuckle] to the grocery store for the, the past three weeks, just tryin’ to save the chassis and the suspension on the car.  And the pick-up, doesn’t matter, I’ve had that stuck, too, and, uh, and I'm not imagining things, it's b-, it's bad, I mean they're talkin’ about it, they're writin’ about it, it's one of the worst mud seasons in, uh, in decades. Uh, now how, how do we know that, how is that, how, how do you, how do you document that --- that's always, that's always something that we got to do, right, we got to document that, so here's how you document that. You, uh, you [chuckle] just measure how many tons o’ gravel you're dumpin’ on the goddamn roads in a given week, and that will tell you somethin’, yeah, so, uh…here's apparently what's goin’ on this year and why it's so bad. Uh, the deeper, the deeper the freeze in the soil, the worse the mud's gonna be. The deeper the freeze, the harder it is for --- when winter, when winter warms up and that moisture wants to go somewhere, it can't go down because it's still frozen down there, so it moves up to the surface and, uh, and you've got mud. If the freeze, if the freeze isn't too bad, you got some mud, if the freeze is real bad, you got a whole lot of mud…and, uh, uh, we got a whole lot of mud, like I said, this, this, uh, this year, uh --- now, why, why did it freeze so deep this particular year, it froze so deep because there wasn't enough snow cover.  Uh, we had, uh, oh, I don’t know, we had snow here.  Some people in other parts of the country might say we had a lot of snow, but for this part of the country, no, it was a snow drought. And, uh, without that, without that extra snow cover, the, the, the dirt, the soil, it freezes deeper, th-th-uh it seems strange, I know, but the snow actually insulates the earth, and, uh, and if there's not a lot of snow, then that freeze goes deep, and so that's what happened.  Wasn't much snow, January was cold as hell and it went way deep, the freeze went way deep and we got ourselves a mud season. 

Hm, hm-hm, yeah, it's kind of funny, you know, uh, we live right here on the, on the town line and, uh, yeah, you turn right you’re on pavement, you turn left you're on a, well, you're on a dirt road. [Chuckle] So the cars and trucks, they come tearin’ up the road here and then they see the… [chuckle]…they see th --- where the, where the pavement ends and they see the mud pit, and they, they, they stop, and they sit there. I don’t know what they’re doin’, prayin’, maybe, some of ‘em.  Some of ‘em check their phones, probably callin’ their dispatcher or whatever, sayin’ what the hell, am I supposed to go through this or what?  Uh, so that's kind of a, a diversion here, to sit here in the front room and watch thee-uh, the automobiles pause at the town line.

I Wish I Was a Mole In the Ground, fifth verse ---

Oh, I wish I was a lizard in the spring
Yes, I wish I was a lizard in the spring
‘F I’se a lizard in the spring, I’d hear my darlin’ sing
I wish I was a lizard in the spring