For someone up to his knees in mud, and sinking fast, the Dutch high school student seemed unusually adept at philosophizing. “Not windmills, not wooden shoes, but this, this primordial ooze, is the essence of the Netherlands,” he said.
With a grassy, sheep-dotted outer dike of the Dutch coast well to shoreward of us, with the barrier island that was our destination still hidden in the morning haze, and with me already deeper in the mud than the high school student, I had no trouble recognizing the merit of his argument — and suggesting that we ought to get moving.
The student and I, along with two dozen of his classmates, were among the tens of thousands of people who annually participate in a distinctly Dutch and distinctly odd activity known as mud walking.
Wadlopen, is the Dutch word for it. You put on an old pair of high-topped tennis shoes that you’ve deemed absolutely valueless for any other purpose. You meet at the appointed place with a licensed guide, who has checked the tide tables to make sure the skills required of you will not include the amphibious. Then you slosh forth across the Waddenzee, or shallow sea, on a journey of up to 12 miles, out to the Frisian Islands, that will test not only your endurance but also your ability to act as a responsible adult in the face of the overwhelming urge to play in the mud.
As a sport, mud walking has been around since just after World War II, when the coastal-dwelling Frisians, who up until then had ventured afoot onto the Waddenzee with about as much enthusiasm as the three little pigs would have attended a butcher’s convention, discovered that people would actually pay money to be lead through the muck.
“It confirmed for us what we already believed — that outsiders are a strange lot,” said one local man, whose only pedestrian venture beyond the dikes had been to retrieve a cow who was in danger of being lost at sea. “But the money helped with village improvements, such as rebuilding the church, so some of us were happy to oblige.”
The most active mud walking center is Pieterburen, a mainland village from which I set out for the island Engelsmanplaat. The walk is said to be the easiest island crossing, but not by me or — I presume — by anyone who has ever done it in company with a group of high school students who think that part of the exercise is to see if they can get even the adults to tumble face down at least once.
Actually, except for keeping an eye out for kamikaze attacks from the high school students, the walking wasn’t difficult. The thickest of the mud was adjacent to the shore, in an area that was a few hundred yards wide, and the biggest difficulty was getting up the courage to take the initial plunge into it.
Beyond the first mud flat, the going was mostly across hard sand in ankle deep water. Occasionally, however, we’d come to water-filled gullies, where our guide would wade in, sometimes chest deep, to show us the way across. The guide, Willem, a university student, said that if you don’t know what you are doing the dangers of mud walking are real enough. Sometimes there is fog to contend with. Sometimes there are swift-flowing gullies that can’t be crossed. Sometimes the mud flats, even though they are seldom more than knee deep, can wear down the endurance of even those who think themselves physically fit — as police and military units on training exercises have discovered.
On this day, though, a lovely if slightly hazy one near the beginning of the May to September wadlopen season, we had no problems beyond the minor ones associated with Willem’s constant need to remind some of the students, who were burdened with the competitive type of personality that compelled them to attempt to turn every physical endeavor into an athletic contest, that the rules of wadlopen required them to remain behind the guide.
For an hour or so we slopped and squished and stumbled. Most of us were soon coated with thick, black mud at least up to our thighs, with more of it liberally caked on hands, chins, cheeks, and — most commonly — rear ends. Those few who remained unacceptably pristine for too long were nudged, tripped, or — in one case — gang tackled, until they too came in line with the acceptable community standards of cleanliness.
On Engelsmanplaat, which a storm tide could have made disappear, we ate lunches we’d carried over in knapsacks, then walked back to the mainland. As we neared the shore, where the thickest of the mud flats were, I noticed that even one of the teachers seemed to be falling down and wallowing around a bit more than in most circumstances would have been considered acceptable adult behavior.
Back on solid ground, curious to know if coming in such close contact with the essence of their national soul had produced the same kind of thought-provoking effect on the other students as it had on the knee-deep philosopher, I asked some of them what they thought of their day on the Waddenzee.
“Wonderful,” one of them said, “especially since our other choice for a class project was to visit a museum in Amsterdam.”
A note from Bob: This is a condensed version of a story that first appeared in the January/February 1992 issue of Islands magazine, where for more than a decade I was a Contributing Editor, specializing in stories that kept me out of the U.S. Northeast in winter.
