SPOTLIGHT : TRIED & TRUE : One Woman’s Mud Is Another’s Muck

I had joked with a friend the night before: “Doreen, tomorrow I have one of my toughest assignments in 10 years at the paper. I have to take a mud bath at Murrieta Hot Springs.”

She gushed: “Take me with you!”

Now I wish she had gone without me.

The stench, familiar to most anyone who has been to a spa, hit the moment I walked in the door. Trying to keeping an open mind, I thought: It’s a good stench, the stench of replenishment, rejuvenation, health.

Murrieta’s natural hot springs bubble up from the earth at 140 degrees, replete with calcium, magnesium, potassium and other minerals that are “absorbed into the body,” I’d been told by the management. That stimulates such natural bodily functions as joint lubrication, hence relieving stiffness and soreness.

The smell was simply sulfur, one of the hot springs’ natural elements. So what if it stunk like rotten eggs?

The next part wasn’t so bad either. Hey, I’m a grown-up, I thought; I shouldn’t feel weird about walking around wearing nothing but a blue sheet. So what if this place, like most other spas, didn’t segregate the sexes? Lying face down on a plastic-covered massage table wasn’t heaven, but I could deal. I was, after all, going to be covered with imported mud--shipped all the way from Austria--that would extract my toxins and exfoliate my dead cells. My skin would feel like buttah , and my cares would vanish.

But when my cheerless “Bodyworker” slathered burning hot mud on my calf with a paintbrush, I lost it.

“Owww, that’s too hot!” I screeched.

Bodyworker ran out, returning with a cup full of ice. She poured the ice into the bowl of black mud, and, apologizing, slathered up the rest of me with cooler mud. Then the real torture began.

She wrapped my slimily muddy body snugly in plastic-- gross-- and said she’d be back in about 20 minutes. My collarbone, splattered with a little mud, started to itch like mad, which was a major problem because my arms were pinned at my sides, mummy-style. I had a little room to move, but I didn’t want to feel the slime sloshing around between the plastic sheets. Gross.

I tried to relax.

I lay there, praying that Bodyworker would come back early, but she didn’t, so I gritted my teeth, took a breath and moved my arm through the slime and plastic to scratch. It was as squishy as I’d imagined, but, ahh, relief.

Until both legs started to itch. Then my left arm.

Bodyworker had said before she left that I could holler if I needed her. Yeah, right. Above the din of a nearby mineral bath-cum-bubbling hot tub, I couldn’t hear much myself, let alone expect her to hear me, so I did this horizontal dance thing for the remaining, interminable 10 minutes, jiggling and twitching to momentarily quell the itching.

Finally, Bodyworker returned, propped me up and waddled me to the mineral bath to rinse off.

As I sat there bathing in my own, now toxin- and dead cell-flecked mud, scratching my itch with a mud-stained loofah, I concluded that a hot bath and a loofah at home would have had been just as good. But relaxing.