Never cared about sweat; grew up and played sports in the Houston humidity and heat.
Probably the dirtiest I’ve ever been was one summer when a friend’s dad had some kind of drainage project that he wanted us to dig some old stuff up on, then replace it with new pipes and fittings. For whatever reason, it was about 4 feet deep in gumbo clay… and since the drainage wasn’t working, it was like a huge mudhole.
My friend and I ended up covered from head to toe in this stuff, and it worked its way out of my ears for days afterward.
Other than that, I remember quite a few August footbal practices when it would rain in the early afternoon, thereby humidifying things even more, and then the temp would be in the mid 90s come practice time, so it would be a hideous mix of non-evaporating sweat and mud for 2 hours.
A 10 day Philmont trek hiking in the NM mountains in Boy Scouts was probably the ripest I ever got- I think we ended up going 6-7 days without showering at some point. Believe it or not, there is a “stink maximum” that you hit and don’t get any stinkier from there.
Not my story but heard it this morning on a podcast. it’s a very graphic story of a bad experience an OR nurse had. Do not read within 30 mins of eating (spoilering and breaking the link just in case. There are no actual pictures of the incident.)
My brother and I dug a hole about ten feet wide and three feet deep one summer. (It practically took all summer; that was one heck of a hole. We imagined that we’d get to China eventually.) We filled it with water in August and had the world’s best mud fight. I was getting grit out of my teeth, hair and ears for several days following. Of course, it was pretty clean as mud goes. I’d rather do that again than face sewage or garbage.
My father kept bees when we were kids. I remember some cases when we were spinning honey out of the frames that we’d end up sticky from head to toe by the end of the day. Plus, when you’re doing all the extraction from hive to jar, you end up with little dead bee parts stuck to you as well.
In 1981, I was hauled to the hospital by ambulance covered in mud.
There was a mudwrestling event for charity in my town and I was assigned the final tag team match with my good friend Marcia. One of our opponents managed to pin me but on the way down, you could hearthe bones in my left leg snap.
The ER staff not only managed to get my leg set and plastered up, but get me hosed down as well.
Ok I go a strange one.
Replacing a step chain track on escalator. The track was aluminum. Where the wheels of the step chain ran over the aluminum over the years 20+ year a grove was worn in the flat part of the track. The grove was about 3/4 inch wide and 3/16 deep, and about 30 feet long. The aluminum power from wear mixed with oil from oiling the chain monthly. Everything was coated in this mix. It was a little like the antisize use to keep nuts from freezing to bolts. After removing all the steps and step chain we had to get inside the escalator and remove the old track.
That goopy grease coated anything it touched. It soaked through my coveralls, uniform, and even my under wear. At the end of the day I took off my greasy overalls and closes. Put on another uniform and drove home. Undressed in the garage, bagged that uniform. Then went to the shower and wire brushed and scrub my body. I even had to have my wife scrub back. Each night I had to go through that for the week + it to complete the job.
Side note one of us manage to get a piece of that goop on the loading dock. A customer stepped in it. the go into his new Mercedes with tan carpet. When he got home he walked into his house with white carpet. Talk about it hitting the fan!
This is the procedure most dreaded by many general surgeons. What’s unusual about it is that in this case, it was a woman. This is almost always a male complaint, and often has few or no symptoms until it’s really bad.
When I was a kid - maybe 6 years old - a friend and I were playing on the site of a house that was under construction. The basement walls had been poured and tar had been sprayed on the outer surface of those walls to waterproof them, but the worked hadn’t backfilled the soil yet so there was a gap of 1-2 feet around the outside of the entire basement wall. I stood close to the edge of the gap, and threw a heavy rock in - and then lost my balance and fell in, landing in a deep puddle of tar and coating my hands, arms side and legs. I walked around most of the length of the wall, looking for a place where I could claw my way back up to ground level. I was stomping through tar the whole way, and with uneven ground and occasionally narrow passage, I was leaning against the tar-covered wall with my arm and my body a lot. Between the tar coating on my body, the overspray on the dirt wall, and the dirt itself, I was pretty messed up by the time I got out. After walking maybe a 1/4-mile home, my sister cleaned me up, using rags soaked in gasoline to wipe the tar away. Not my healthiest experience.
Reminds me of trenching a new sidewalk next to the Chiefs’ Mess at Rosie Roads, PR. 1/2 inch of topsoil and then solid coral, except instead of giving us a jackhammer we did it with a pick and mattock. In August.
Mud volleyball numerous times. Thick mud up to your shins, but of course, I didn’t stay on my feet. Creek nearby made for super easy clean-up so it was fun. Not like some of the other stories.
I was about 8 years old, climbing on some playground equipment, and got a bit too cocky and lost my grip. Splash, landed face first in a huge mud puddle. Head to toe, engulfed in it. I can still taste it.
I once worked at a lab that often needed several gallons of blood. So I would take a 5-gal bucket and a half-inch diameter pipe attached to a tube to the slaughterhouse. On the kill floor a worker would stun a cow by smacking its head with a pneumatic hammer. He would then wrap a chain around the hind legs, hoist it up, slit the jugular, and insert the pipe. I would collect the blood in the bucket.
One time the garbage disposal on the floor drain was clogged. The kill floor was flooded with 8 inches of clotted blood. No problem, that’s what rubber boots are for. The hanging cow was a mess of snot and blood. And then as I was collecting the jugular blood, the cow gave a big twitch. Its head slammed into my chest and threw me onto my back. In a pool of clotted blood and snot.
Yeah, I was thinking about my caving days as well. There were a number of times when I’ve come out of a cave in WV or western VA covered from neck to boots in mud, and the only thing for it was to strip down and jump into the nearest stream.
Also, there was my summer job after my junior and senior years of HS, working on a landscaping crew. ‘Landscaping’ in this case didn’t mean flowerbeds and shrubbery; it meant putting down lawns in newly-built suburban neighborhoods. First a guy with a tractor would grade the bare soil around the houses, then a crew with rakes would rake the rocks out of the top couple inches of soil and get it a bit more smooth than the tractor guy could manage, then a hydroseed truck would come along and spray hydroseed mixture on the soil.
I was on the raking crew. Not only was it hard work, but by midday you’d be sweating like crazy, and with a thin layer of dirt stuck to the sweat all over you.
Similar to caving, in the badlands of South Dakota is some of the nastiest dirt/sand crap you will find that when wet turns into the worse slick, slimey. and sticky mud you will ever encounter. And yes, its weird how sticky this stuff becomes.Ssomething to do with clay or something but its hard to get off.
I think the dirtiest I’ve ever been was the weekend my wife and I laid sod at our (then) new house. We were both just absolutely filthy by the time we were done.
Working on a friends horse ranch in winter…many of the paddocks flooded and we were out there trying to deal with things. I stepped into one of the paddocks thinking I knew where solid ground was. It wasn’t. I sunk down into the mud up to my knees. Got one leg out, but lost my boot when trying to pull my other leg out. Lost my balance and fell down. Whole back side of me was covered in mud; mud that was made up of dirt and horse manure.
I developed a reaction to something in cioppino. I thought I might try it just once more on the off chance that my reaction was to something else. While violently puking in the toilet I started violently shitting on the bathroom wall.
[If you’ve an interest in ‘dirty stories’ you may want to stream Wetlands