WHAT IS QUICKSAND?

By: Glenn Wilsey, Sr.

While on an airboat tour, I like to stop the boat out in the middle of nowhere and just talk about the everglades. When I stop the boat for my little impromptu class, I ask everyone to join me for a walk in the glades. While standing in the knee deep water and ankle deep mud, I am often asked "Hey GATORMAN" if we had to walk back, what would our chances of making it back alive be? What they really want to know is; "what would be the biggest threat to our making it back to our car alive, alligators, snakes, bears, panthers or QUICKSAND?" The answer might surprise you.

When asked that question I start out with a story something like this.

"Well folks, if our airboat runs out of gas and we have to walk back you have to be careful; because, if the alligators don’t get you the "QUICKSAND" will. Then I laugh and tell them that I’m just kidding.

There isn’t any quicksand in The Everglades. At least not the way it is portrayed in the movies. Quicksand is basically just a slurry of very soft and very wet mud. It can suck the shoes off your feet and you can really get stuck in it if you’re not careful but as far as drowning in quicksand, not likely.

I know on TV you see someone desperately trying to get out of a swamp. While slogging through the swamp, the person stops to rest and suddenly they start sinking and the more they struggle the more they sink. Before you know it, they’ve sunk all the way to their shoulders. Then their head starts to sink under the muck and they start blowing bubbles and then you see nothing but their fingers wiggling as they disappear under the "quicksand"

only to be rescued in the nick of time by someone with a jungle vine or a tree branch or something to pull them out. Don’t get me wrong, I love those movies because they are cool, but they are not true. Like I said, there is no "quicksand" in The Everglades, the mud does get deep, but that only makes it hard to walk.

Growing up in The Everglades, I was told some of the quicksand stories and thought they were true. Now, I have walked through every part of The Everglades, including the river of grass, the cypress swamps, and the salt-water conversion zone, and so I know better. One day when Gatorman was a boy, (and no, that is not when dinosaurs ruled the Earth) some friends and I were walking back from a small pine forest off of Loop Road and decided to take a shortcut. We walked across an open prairie of grass that led into a cypress strand. The water in the cypress strands tends to be a little deep at times and we were ready for that. However, in one spot, we could feel that the bottom was soft and as we continued forward, it got softer. At one point, we were up to our chests in one foot of water on top of waist deep, soft, sucking mud. The kind that would pull our shoes off if we’d been wearing any. We were all not quite half joking, telling each other to watch out for the quicksand. It was getting a little serious. At one point as I was walking (more like trudging through, using all of my strength for each step) through waist deep mud, I reached a point where I couldn’t feel any bottom and that made me a little nervous. If only we had thought to swim through the mud instead of trying to walk through it. It would have been so much easier. We continued on and before we knew it we were out of the deep stuff and into the knee-deep mud then back into the ankle deep mud and finally back on high and dry ground. When we got back home we told my friend’s Grand Dad about our experience and asked him if he could tell us any stories about people he new that never came back because the quicksand got them. He said he’d never known of anyone ever actually being pulled under and drowning in quicksand. He told us that the quicksand stories were not true and were made up to make the story more interesting.

As kids, My friends and I used to camp on the levee across from a place that has been gone for many years now, Betty and Johnny’s Bar and Grill on The Tamiami Trail, 3 miles east of Krome Avenue. One night, an old man told us to be careful because there was quicksand just off the levee to the north of Betty and Johnny’s. We asked him exactly where the quicksand was supposed to be and he told us. At that time, it was winter (the dry season) and water levels were dropping, exposing mud-flats everywhere. The next day we went looking for the quicksand but all we found was a large area of open mud flats. Could there really be quicksand out there? We were a little afraid, but we were curious too. We wanted to find out more about that area the old man told us about.

My friend Greg and I tied ropes to our waists and had other friends hold on to those ropes to make sure we didn’t get pulled under. We walked into the mud and sank up to our rib cages. We never felt bottom but we never got the feeling that we were being pulled under. We found out, that if we leaned forward and pulled ourselves forward with our hands in the mud, we could float in the mud and it was just like swimming only it took a lot longer to get anywhere. Years later I found out the reason why you and I can’t be pulled all the way under the quicksand. People float. You see, quicksand is about 80% water and people are about 80% water, so we can sink about chest deep in quicksand before we become neutrally buoyant which means you’re just not going to sink any further. You would literally have to force your way under the quicksand to drown in it. People can die in a quicksand hole but most people who die in quicksand die in 3 feet of quicksand or less and not by drowning! People die in quicksand due to exposure, starvation or dehydration after getting stuck. In a wet, shallow, quicksand pit, if you step in the quicksand it can pack around your feet and hold you in one place so that you are stuck and can’t get out without help. If you are stuck in quicksand for a long time you could die from exposure if the weather were too hot or too cold or you might die of starvation or dehydration if you didn’t have food or drinkable water. That’s why most people die from quicksand, not drowning.

So, when you hear someone telling a cool quicksand story, you now know the truth about it. Don’t interrupt the person telling the story to tell them they are wrong because you will mess up the story and some of them are good stories. Just file that story in your brain in the fiction section next to the stories about alligators that attack and eat people.

I hope that I have cleared up some of the mystery and the worry over quicksand for you. Remember, quicksand is really just soft mud and you can float in it and swim out of it if you get stuck.

Thanks so much for coming to read my story. I know a lot of you look forward to Gatorman’s stories and You tell me how disappointed you are when I don’t write a new story for a while. Well, I just wanted to let you all know that while I had some time off I was thinking of some new ideas for stories for this new year and I hope to have another story real soon, so check in next month.

*This story or any part of it can not be used or reproduced with out written permission of the author!