“Quicksand!” By John Carenen

Gunpowder & Peonies

Quicksand!

Little kids today not only don’t care about quicksand, they’ve never heard of it.

I was different. I saw a TV show (on the only channel we got back then) in which a man wandered into quicksand and slowly found himself being sucked under until only a few bubbles marked the spot where he had been inhaled by Mother Nature.

I was traumatized. Still am. Being slowly, inevitably, pulled into a goop-smothering death did things to my imagination. Icky things.

Shift gears now to a sunny summer day in rural Iowa in the mid-50’s, and the lure of a picnic at the creek about a mile east of Low Moor down a dusty gravel road. My sisters and I had visited the spot before and enjoyed ourselves. The creek fed into a big pond and also offered a small beach where one could sit and enjoy dining on peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, and maybe an apple.

There was also a railroad trestle over the creek where enormous, thundering Chicago & Northwestern trains would roar by sometimes, scaring the hoo-hah out of us. But most of the time a picnic at the creek was a bucolic blessing. Pre-quicksand times. Innocent.

Now, post-TV show about quicksand death, another picnic unfolded. We had just arrived when Sandra said, “You know that swampy area over there?”

“Yeah,” I responded.

“It’s quicksand,” she said.

“Isn’t!” I said.

“Is!” Sandra repeated eloquently.

“Is too!” Linda added, equally verbally adept.

“Isn’t!” I said again, clever in my repertoire of witty rejoinders.

“Let’s experiment,” Sandra said. “See that big rock over there? Let’s toss it in and see if it sinks.”

Even way back then, my infertile mind questioned their scientific approach. It seemed somehow flawed, but I kept my trap shut.

So my sisters, working together as demons often do, hefted the rock, waddled over to the side of the swamp, and heaved the rock in. I watched, transfixed. The rock sank. Bubbles bubbled.

“Come on over here, John. We need you for another experiment,” Sandra said. “You can be a scientist!”

“Nope,” I said, edging away from my sisters’ slow advance, then turning and sprinting away from a terrible demise. I was grateful that, even then, I could outrun them—my future as a permanently fifth-place sprinter on the high school track team just beginning.

Ever since, when I think of horrific ways to die, quicksand death slowly rises to the top. I read somewhere reliable that there is such a thing, “a soupy mixture of sand and water that can no longer support weight,” and that one can only sink in as far as their waist.

But what if you’re short, as I was? Or what if I had been pitched in head-first? Huh?

When I think back on my quicksand days, I realize, and am pretty sure, that my sisters were just trying to scare me. Pretty sure they wouldn’t have tossed me in. Pretty sure. Pret-ty sure . . .

It was in a ninth-grade science class, thinking back, that I realized, well, you know, rocks sink. It’s a scientific fact.