Add Water to Dirt and You Get Mud. Add Beer, Weed, and 15,000 People to Mud and You Get Michigan Mud Jam

From the November 2017 issue

It takes less than five minutes after driving through the gates of the Iosco County Fairgrounds in C/D’s long-term Ford F-150 Raptor to realize that I am altogether too sober for the Michigan Mud Jam. Now in its fifth year, the Jam transforms the normally peaceful town of Hale into what’s claimed to be the “largest bog in the North.” This, it seems, is a thing to be quantified and compared. Around 15,000 people have shown up for what amounts to a celebration of torque’s ability to conquer gelatinous quagmire, but also—judging from the Confederate flags—a celebration of rebellion. The obvious question of “why?” is one that has been turned, by the vast crowds and their near-universal inebriation, into “why the hell not?”

Many seem to be here just for the chaotic campgrounds, which have a postapocalyptic feel reminiscent of the Mad Max franchise. ATVs and trucks, a few even more immaculate than the Raptor—despite having been here since Wednesday—are driving loops through the mud, weighed down with human cargo. Many of the ATVs are hauling trailers for more passengers, with a goodly percentage of them modified with party lights and sometimes even the upright poles that characterize the sort of club that specializes in exotic entertainment. The crowd is mostly young, guys and girls in their 20s, many barely dressed apart from thick scarves of Mardi Gras beads.

Coming from the U.K. where spring means having to wear only one sweater, I’ve never attended a Mardi Gras or spring break, so I’m a virgin in such matters. Initiation comes quickly, though. As the Raptor sits in traffic, a woman saunters over and holds out a string of purple plastic beads.

“Beads for boobs!” she says, her voice slurring slightly as beery breath fills the cabin.

“Um, you want to see my boobs?”

“No, you give them to girls, and then the girls show you their titties.” Her tone expresses incredulity that someone so ignorant could have ended up with such a nice truck. “Like this!”

She drops the beads in my lap and hauls up her top to reveal an impressive, if mud-streaked, chest. Her half of the bargain done, I hand her back the beads and she puts the string around her neck with many others. Seems like a good deal. The watching crowd cheers.

With the Raptor parked, I can start working on eradicating both my unfortunate sobriety and my British reserve. By coincidence, the previous motorsports event I attended was the Goodwood Festival of Speed where, in the Mercedes hospitality tent, I drank chilled rosé and ate cucumber sandwiches with their crusts trimmed.

I ask a guy standing by himself and swaying slightly as he swigs from a can in a foam koozie where I can buy a beer. “You can’t. Not in here. You bring them in.” He nods to the cooler by his feet. Then, recognizing my lack of beverage, he nudges it open with a muddy boot. “Or you borrow one. Here.” He hands me a cold can of Miller Lite. You don’t find generosity like that at Goodwood.

This Hale area football guy is making a killing on returnables. The E36 is the generation of choice for Blazer conversions.

The bog is open for what’s pretty much a free-for-all, with trucks and SUVs of every shape and size trying their hardest to find a part of the pit they can’t get through. Some are practically bone stock; a shiny F-150 sits beached in one of the shallower areas and makes me glad I heeded my editor’s strict instructions not to subject the Raptor to the pit. But most have been lifted, sometimes stratospherically, and sit on huge tires. When trucks get stuck, other trucks come to try and rescue them, and when those get bogged, there’s an excavator and a bulldozer to pull them out. “The bulldozer got stuck yesterday,” says Carter.

If there are any rules, I’m struggling to divine them. Carter makes the “you idiot” face when I ask him about the etiquette of the pit. “Whatever’s bigger or traveling faster has got priority,” he says. “Don’t get in its way, it ain’t stopping. And don’t spray other people; that’s just good manners.”

Our high-riding platform truck, miraculously, keeps us all clean as it braves the swamp, but folks are clearly here to get as dirty as possible, to judge from the number of roofless vehicles in the pit. There are several Frankenstein specials that have spliced unlikely bodywork onto ladder-frame chassis: There’s a Mercedes W123 sedan, a Chrysler 300C, a Ford Mustang boasting the legend “Ignorant,” and—the clear winner—a BMW 3-series cabriolet. Clear winner apart from the speedboat on wheels, that is.

There are driving skills in evidence, with smaller trucks seeming to pretty much levitate to unlikely places in the bog. But most of the people in the mud pit believe that victory comes not from skill but from superior firepower. A lifted Chevy S-10 makes a spectacular run almost directly toward us, along a course that seems to have been carefully selected to take in the thickest mud and most challenging swamp elements. It earns full marks for style—engine bellowing and roostertails of filth flying at least 50 feet into the sky. But the speed creates a bow wave of mud that shears off the pickup’s grille and then its bumper, this Viking death marked with cheers, rebel yells, and the two-fingered devil-horn salute that always takes me back to rock’s worst-haircut era. Clearly inspired, a less well prepared K5 Blazer tries the same thing and judders to a stop with a smoking transmission. Moments later, to even louder acclamation, it catches fire.

Why? Why the hell not?

As the afternoon draws on, the center of the pit slowly clears as trucks leave under their own power or get dragged out. It’s time for freestyle, the closest these proceedings get to an actual competition, where the most heavily modified trucks get scored for stunts and jumps over the ramps and berms molded from the mud. There are impressive wheelies and big air, but it’s way short of the slick stunts of Monster Jam, with a surfeit of enthusiasm over expertise. There are long pauses as many of the competitors suffer expensive-looking crashes, rolling and then needing to be righted by the excavator. Later on, there’s a tug-of-war with an equally high rate of mechanical attrition, including a Jeep Wrangler that chews up its massive rear differential as if it were made of cheese. Nobody seems to mind their trucks breaking. Wrecking stuff is part—or maybe most—of the fun.

The next day, dawn breaks loudly over 10,000 hangovers, and the mud pit is full again shortly after breakfast. My first sight of it is an excavator pulling a tow truck that’s pulling a Chevrolet with a broken front axle. An ex-military Hummer is out playing, looking as dinky as a child’s toy next to the massively lifted machinery that surrounds it. T-shirt slogans are sometimes witty but overwhelmingly obscene, ranging from “Ditches Eat Bitches” and “Your Hole, My Goal” to a hundred variations on the “your mama” joke and questions about the reader’s parentage. In the campgrounds, music plays from vehicles and PA systems—an eclectic mix of country, rock, and rap, all of it loud and much of it terrible. A couple of the immaculately dressed state troopers who constitute the law hereabouts deign not to notice a heavily amplified blast of “Fuck tha Police” as they roll past on gleaming ATVs. Their olfactory receptors seem to be similarly immune to the pungent aroma of marijuana, doubtless medicinal, that hangs over the site.

But by late morning, the Jam is redolent with more than the fragrance of sweet Mary Jane. A blazing sun is reddening necks to an appropriate degree, and heat is rising to the mid-80s. The Porta-John toilets are starting to reek—the campsite has been open for three days already—and the thickening mud is smelling pretty bad as well. To escape the choking miasma, we head farther into the camping areas, back to where the ATVs are still circulating and many spectators have set out signs saying, “Big or small, let’s see them all.” I ask a guy holding scorecards what his highest rating has been. “Coupla nines, mostly fives or sixes, and plenty of ones and twos. Sometimes they’re hauling their tops up, and sometimes they’re hauling them down, if you get what I mean.” This man is clearly a connoisseur.

Wandering deeper, we find the 3-series cabriolet that impressed us yesterday being strapped onto a trailer. Owner Paul Sivyer is getting ready to head home. “It did better than we thought it would do. We launched it and blew the transmission when it landed.” Underneath, it’s a Chevy Blazer, Sivyer having chosen the E36 cabrio after discovering the two wheelbases were surprisingly similar.

The almost-BMW is parked next to one of the huge freestyle trucks, a one-time Chevrolet Colorado that now sits on a fabricated chassis tall enough to put its door handles above head height. I saw it yesterday in the pit and was drawn to its name as much as anything else: White Trash. It belongs to Chris and Julie Lendvoy, who have spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars creating it. “If you wanted to replicate it, then you’d be looking at probably $50,000,” Chris says, before trying to give me a technical rundown. It’s got a 632-cubic-inch Chevy V-8 and what he describes as a “plant axle,” but the details of the suspension might as well be delivered in French Creole for all the sense I can make of them. “I wrecked it last year,” he says. “We finished it on Tuesday and came straight here. I’d like to do more competitions, but it’s all about getting the seat time. I built it to jump big, real big.”

By Saturday afternoon, many other broken trucks are being loaded onto trailers for the journey home, others wait for salvation in the pit. Things are winding down, but not for everyone. I return to the Raptor to find three young guys sitting in the bed of a beat-up F-150 parked beside it, looking at the bead-wearing women with the bug-eyed expression of the newly arrived. The truck is wearing an Iowa license plate.

“We saw this on Wednesday on the ‘Trucks Gone Wild’ Facebook page and decided to come straight here,” explains one of them. “We finished work and drove 10 hours straight.”

Mud Jam does feel like the gathering of a clan, of self-proclaimed rebels drawn to an event with the trappings of motorsports but without the challenge of actual competition. But that might be overthinking it. It’s also just a party with trucks, and mud, and the chance to see a few boobs and maybe even rate them. Yet the time and effort that people put into preparing for what’s obviously a major highlight of their year is striking, and it’s clear that the same “build it, break it, build it better” ethos that guides even the most exclusive race series is alive and well in a man-made swamp in northern Michigan.

With the V-8s, endless mud, and a barter-based economy that sees plastic beads traded for peeps, it’s also an indication of what the end of the world will probably look like. It looks like fun.