Mud Run Muddle

I finished the night shoot at four in the morning and decided I had earned something stupid. That is usually how my best decisions start. The gel order for the lighting wash had gone out on time, the dye tanks were cleaned, my hands were stained faintly pink to the elbow no matter how much I scrubbed, and I was thirty-two years old with nothing to do until my ride showed up at noon.

So when the driver mentioned in passing that there was a mud run course ten minutes down the road, out past the dunes, I said drop me there. He looked at me like I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. It was Morocco, it was my first real day off in five weeks, and I had been mixing dye for film lights for so long that the idea of throwing myself into a pit of red clay sounded honestly romantic.

The Merzouga Mud Run, the sign called it. Someone had put real money into it. There was a start line, a long bench made of old railway ties, and next to the bench a weathered plaster wall panel painted with desert motifs, camels and palm fronds and a sun that had faded to a soft orange. Half-sunk obstacle structures poked up out of the marsh beyond it, and the whole thing sat in a bowl of thick red clay that looked like melted chocolate mixed with rust.

Nobody was there. Of course nobody was there. It was six in the morning and hot already.

Except there was one person. A man stood at the wall panel with a toolbox open at his feet, poking at something near the edge of the plaster with a screwdriver and a handheld meter. He was tall, black hair going silver at the temples, mid thirties maybe, wearing a work shirt with the sleeves rolled and a name patch that said EZRA.

"Course is closed," he said without turning around.

"It's a course," I said. "Who closes a mud pit."

"Me, until this timer works." He glanced over his shoulder at me. He had a good face, tired around the eyes. "You're the dye girl from the film shoot. I saw your van up the hill last night."

"Dye woman," I said. "Sasha. I'm thirty-two, I mix color for lighting washes, and I have been awake for nineteen hours, so forgive me if my small talk is garbage."

"Ezra. Thirty-six. I fix things other people break." He went back to the timer. "The guy who was supposed to drive me to a job site is two hours late. He says two hours again every half hour. I think he means it as a joke now."

We stood there for a minute while he muttered at the timer. I sat on the railway ties and looked out at the marsh. The clay was smooth and dark red in the low light, and the obstacles looked like the ruins of some cartoon temple. I will say that the longer I looked at it, the more it looked like the most fun thing I had ever seen.

"You should run it," I said. "Kill time. It's your course, technically."

"I'm on the clock."

"You're standing in the desert waiting for a man who keeps saying two hours." I stood up. "I'm going to run it. You can time me. You have a timer right there."

"It's broken," he said, but he was already putting the screwdriver down.

That is how it starts, reader. Somebody says something dumb and somebody else puts the screwdriver down.

We walked to the start line and he drew a line in the clay with his boot heel and said, "First one to the canopy structure wins. Bragging rights, nothing else."

"Deal. On three."

He said three before I did, the rat, and we were off.

I have run the Merzouga Mud Run exactly once in my life, that morning, and I can report that television does not prepare you for it. The first three steps were fine. The fourth step the clay took my foot and kept it, and I pitched forward with all the grace of a dropped sandwich and landed chest deep in the marsh. Somewhere behind me Ezra was laughing so hard he had stopped running entirely.

"Bragging rights are mine," he called.

Then he took his own step and went down too, flat, a great red splash, and then we were both lying in the mud and I was laughing so hard my ribs hurt. I got up first. I got a running start, if you can call three steps a running start, and belly flopped into the deeper channel beside him, and this time I got him. A wave of clay went over his head and came down in sheets.

"Oh, that's how it is," he said, wiping his eyes.

"That's how it is."

He lunged for me and I dodged, sort of. The clay does not reward dodging. I went sideways and he caught my ankle, and I went down laughing, and he pulled me back toward him through the marsh by one leg like I was a canoe. I kicked free and he grabbed again and we ended up wrestling in six inches of red slop like a couple of idiots, which is exactly what we were.

Somewhere in there the canopy structure got between us and the start line, an overhead frame with slats, half its shadow lying across the water. We stumbled under it out of the sun, both of us filthy to the hairline, breathing hard.

And that is when I noticed him noticing me.

My top was thin cotton, the kind I wear on set because solvents eat everything else. It was now soaked through and plastered to me, mud in all the wrong places and clay water everywhere else, and the ribs of it were showing clear as a window display. I crossed my arms out of pure reflex and then decided that was stupid, because the man had already seen me eat mud.

"Enjoying the view?" I asked.

"I was going to say your shirt survived better than mine," he said, tugging at his own, which had lost a button somewhere in the channel. "But no. Yes. Both. Sorry!"

"You're terrible at apologizing."

"I'm excellent at it. I just don't mean this one."

I looked at him. He looked at me. The water dripped off the slats above us in a slow tick tick tick, and the clay had dried on his