Let us begin with a definition: Mud season is a phenomenon of northern climes; a transition from brittle winter to soft spring; a period characterized by snow melting, rain falling, and ground that has been frozen solid for six months finally (albeit slowly) thawing out. The thaw proceeds top to bottom, exposed surface to hidden depths, which means an impervious horizon of ice-fused soil—a plate, basically, a pan—underlies the newly liquified upper strata for a number of weeks. This in turn means oversaturation, runoff with nowhere to run—copious mud, voluminous mud, catastrophic mud that can, on occasion, recall the artist Hokusai’s famous woodblock print of a curling, boat-dwarfing ocean wave.
Accurate enough. But besides the nod to art, that’s a rather technical approach to understanding a non-technical, not-in-the-dictionary, widespread colloquialism. Mud season, also referred to as the fifth season, is less rigorous science (denotation) than messy culture (connotation). Accordingly, it asks for a sweeping survey, a wide-ranging
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