I fought the muck and the muck won. It wasn’t even a contest.

To understand why I was fighting muck, we must go back to late February when our farm pond suddenly drained itself at the end of a record stretch of extreme cold temperatures. Overnight the water left, and the abnormally thick ice collapsed to the bottom. Then came spring and the ice melted, leaving a shallow pool of water 20 feet across. Still with fish in it, can you believe? I did not expect any to survive. Pond turtles, too.

For a closer examination of the damage, I had to wait for a stretch of dry days, which we got last week with 80-degree temperatures and no significant rainfall. The upper 10 feet of the pond’s sloping clay bank dried out so I could walk on it, so long as I wore decent shoes. This dry clay zone is littered with hundreds of five-inch-long shells of freshwater mussels, opened and eaten by opportunistic raccoons after the pond drained. Whole and alive, mussel shells are no threat to bare feet, but opened and especially if crushed, they’re sharp as broken glass.

Below that dry zone the muck begins, and somewhere in that muck was the four-inch drain pipe that the ice somehow broke. It drained the pond and is still draining the remaining pool.

Pond muck looks and acts like stinky black Jello. The further down the bank, the deeper the muck.

I thought if I put on muck boots – yes, that’s the proper name – I could wade out far enough to locate the end of that broken drain pipe, figure out what happened and plan how to fix it.

When I told son Seed I was going to wade into the muck he said emphatically, “Don’t do it!” I think he was remembering how hard it was to walk in muck when we intentionally drained the pond to clean it out back in 1992, when he was 12.

“I have a plan,” I said.

My muck boots are tall, coming almost to my knees. Two steps into the muck, it was halfway up the boots and I couldn’t lift my feet, other than out of the boots. They weren’t stuck to the muck. They were stuck to the pond’s clay bottom below the muck.

New plan: I would walk on top of the muck.

Seed’s youngest son, The Favorite, overhearing our conversation, had suggested laying down the carpet strips I use between rows in my garden.

I gathered sticks off the bank and laid them across the muck for support, unrolled the carpet, then placed scrap boards on top. This worked, sort of, but the muck moved underneath my jerry-rigged walkway, threatening at every drunken-sailor step to fling me sideways into open muck.

Nevertheless I got to the pipe end, cleaned around it with my hands and fished out broken sections. I tried shoveling muck, but it tended to stick to the shovel blade. With each shovelful flung I risked flinging myself out, too.

I didn’t mention it earlier, but there is another drain pipe under the first one, and I could not find that one without wading in.

I thought if I wore an old pair of shoes and attached them really tight on my feet I should be able to lift them off the sticky clay bottom. I stripped to T-shirt and shorts, reluctantly leaving my cellphone in the truck. If I got stuck someone would see me eventually, wouldn’t they?

I sat down on the last board, put one leg into the muck and stood up. When I put the second leg down, I found I could not lift either foot. Lifting really hard finally changed something. I felt around and found that I had pulled the soles off the shoes, all but at the toe. I undid the Velcro heel straps, stood up barefoot, dug my shoes off the bottom with my hands and sat down again on the board-carpet landing.

By now I was pretty much covered in muck and ready to give up. Fearing to cross the broken mussel shell zone barefoot, I put my floppy-soled shoes back on, the Velcro straps miraculously attaching despite all the slime. I walked up the heaving carpet strip like a sailor who is both drunken and crippled, using as canes my shovel in one hand and a length of broken pipe in the other.

Unwilling to muck up the interior of my truck, I took off my shoes and all my clothes, threw them in the truck bed, drove home naked and hosed myself off outside, hoping the lady who is currently living in our garage apartment did not happen to be near a window.

When I said I was giving up I of course did not mean permanently. I searched the internet for help.

Pond muck, I learned, being composed of organic detritus such as fish poop, is incredibly rich in nutrients and makes excellent garden fertilizer.

My new plan involves vacuuming muck out of the pond with the two-inch trash pumps I use for irrigation and hosing it over my garden and pumpkin fields.

Stay tuned.