Mudlarking for Real People

The water in our pasture has once again subsided to the edge of it’s swollen banks. Now’s a good time to go fishing — especially for brown river trout. It’s also time to think about mudlarking along the banks.

Until the worldwide drought last year I had no idea what the word mudlarking meant. Summer times when the water was low we would just put on our rubber Muck Boots and wade around the rivers and streams near our property and for shiny things like old bottles, but we did not know what it was called.

There are of course flukes but not like you read on your phone or watch in the news. Once time when the water was especially high, my husband, Tim, did go fishing in his small canoe in our pasture while I took photos hoping to get a picture in the local paper. Our land is known in these parts as “the flood zone and it does flood each spring.

Not only did he get in the paper, but now Tim holds the Vermont record for a river trout — this fish weighed over 6 pounds and it took 8 of us to eat the meat after we took the fish from the flood zone to the taxidermist.

When we go mud larking we look for everything: old cork bottles, ceramic jugs, steel pennies — anything that catches our fancy.

We have found a pair of old runner skates, an ancient car horn from a Model T or A Ford, and many other things that look interesting but we don’t know what they are doing in the river.

Once we found an entire car but we could not see it very well because so much sediment had settled over it through the years.

Will we ever find a Roman coin like mudlarkers do along the Thames in England? Or become insanely rich from unearthing buried treasure?

I think not, but its still fun to see what people threw away 100 years ago.