Velociworld

QUICKSAND

I always scoffed at quicksand in movies. Nothing could be so soupy and yet so grasping, so bottomless and yet so wide as to suck a man down, he not able to swim through the oatmeal porridge of it to safety. On the upside, I can't recall ever seeing anyone succumb to the quicksand that didn't deserve it, so, as they say, there's that. What we aficionados call the Big Gurgle.

This mindset obtained until a certain day in Savannah in 1982. There is a huge marshy jungle near downtown, bordered on the south and west by Wheaton Street, on the east by the Savannah Golf Club, on the north by President Street. When they built the Truman Parkway through it they had to erect a bridge, forty feet off the ground. It belongs in a fucking Tarzan movie, really. If they still made them. And, hell, if you adhere to the continental drift theory this area broke off what is now Gambia, or something.

At any rate, a friend and I had been trying to restore a stained glass window in his studio on Wheaton Street, a hopelessly destroyed piece of work whose only redeeming value was the fact we figured we could hump a few hundred dollars off the church desiring the restoration. We suffered from the dread disease mafundsalow at the time, and so we spent a few hours drinking vodka so cheap it came in one of those old black and white GENERIC containers, casting jaundiced eye upon this piece.

We finally decided we couldn't return it to its original image, which as I recall was the seventh station of the cross. But we could make a pretty bitching Satan taunts Jesus in the Wilderness out of it. And so, of a common mind, we decided to take advantage of the sunny afternoon, and explore that jungle behind his studio, carrying our sloshing vodka screwdrivers with us.

The first half mile or so was pretty interesting. Certainly "old growth" forest. Vines, oaks, strange stuff I couldn't identify under subpoena. And then I stepped on what I thought was a puddly area of swamp grass, and plunged in.

I immediately sank to my hips, and felt that little prickle of alarm race up my back. This wasn't like that sandy oatmeal in the films. It was like the flat gray oozing mud on a saltwater estuary riverbank, only a bit more liquid. It grabbed my sneakers, filled them, pulled at me like a black hole sucking in an unawares teenage mallrat star into its filthy, corrupt van. The van with the tinted windows in the shape of a playing card Club.

I said to my friend "I think this is some kind of quicksand." He said "Yeah, looks like it. What should I do?"

I said "Grab a long branch, dumbass. Like the movies."

He grabbed said branch, while I was attempting to worm my way through this shit back to firm ground. Trouble was, it wasn't that it so much sucked you down as formed like concrete around you. First branch broke. Second branch broke, only my friend fell in when it did so.

Now we were fucked. Except for the fact he could eventually, after clawing his way, grasp some sawgrass on the edge of solid ground, and finally worked his way out.

This time we went with vine, and he dragged me to safety. I'm sure I would have eventually gotten out on my own, but that shit was like a rip current, sucking you in the apposite direction of where you needed to head. And it tired you tremendously. And it was deep.

I was kind of scared, actually. And firmly sobered.

Did we continue the trek to President Street? Nope. Lost my tenny-pumps in that morass. Smelt like a hog's ass, too.

I think about that bog now and then. We all fall in the metaphorical quicksands from time to time. Sometimes somebody else gets you out, sometimes you get yourself out. I've found it's usually a team effort, though.