What happened to quicksand?

Joined
Oct 18, 2009
Messages
14,601
Reaction score
20,622
Watching TV when I was a kid it seemed like folks were getting trapped in quicksand all the time. You could cheer as the bad guy went down or when the good guy was saved. Or learn a moral lesson if the good guy saved the bad guy.

I rarely see quicksand scenes on TV anymore. Could the lack of quicksand on TV be contributing to the moral decay of society?
 
Register to hide this ad
I worked for a lumber & building supply company for a number of years, and we sold concrete mix in 80# bags. It was called Quikrete. After so many years of using quicksand on TV and in movies, they found that it was an excellent ingredient for concrete mix. So much was sold that there no longer was enough to use on TV and in movies.

Now you know. . .

. . .the rest of the story.


Andy

;)
 
You're right....

Quicksand was as much of a pitfall as falling off a cliff or being attacked by a wild animal (bear??). Really it got old seeing people pretend to be stuck in a tank of water with colored cork floating on it. Mythbusters said (and I'm not sure I believe it) that someone would only sink about up to the chest then stop. I've been stuck in knee deep pluff mud, my brother got stuck while fishing and had to be pulled out. I don't doubt that you could easily be killed this way even if people die of exposure or thirst. I guess that's not as dramatic as being up to your neck in cork.

Random quicksand traps were about as common as man eating plants in those old jungle movies. Of course they always tried to eat the scantily clad woman until she was 'saved'.

PS Does floating on your back really work??
 
Last edited:
It all dried up because all them big cities is using up all of the water.
You think gold is the ultimate back up medium? Watch and see how valuable water rights and access to good water is going to become in the very near future.
Ask California this summer.
 
I rarely see quicksand scenes on TV anymore. Could the lack of quicksand on TV be contributing to the moral decay of society?

I don't think it would be possible to top this scene.

quick.jpg


There will never again be a movie like this, and with the demise of the WB cartoons the gradual decline of Western civilization is inevitable.
 
Lassie was pretty talented, but Skippy the Kangaroo could follow multi-task instructions, including climbing a tree, tie knots and throw rope. :cool:

Skippy starts to show his stuff about 3min in (might want to skip the first 2min)

One of the best quicksand animal saves ever!

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KDTsElhJyM[/ame]
 
Last edited:
We sure have quicksand here about in the bottoms!

While you will (supposedly - I haven't actually tried it) only sink up to your diaphragm - the stuff becomes a REAL problem if there's more water over it than the distance from your diaphragm to your eyes.

The usual REAL problem is that the sand gets INTO EVERYTHING :( and you may loose your footwear while being extricated...

I do know from experience that AS SOON AS you get into it you want to get OUT - It's a scary feeling! And you sink FAST - just like stepping into water...

BTW - The BIG deer like the deep bottoms because sane deer hunters ain't wandering around down there --- And then there's me :)
 
Last edited:
Actual quicksand is more northern as the sand has been pumelled under stone in areas that formally were covered in Glacial activity. Nt to saw you can really sink in some wetland locations!
 
I think I can clean this up enough to pass the prude police here. OK, I belong to a club. And back in the 1980s the local arena would put on races indoors they called "mud bogs". It was kind of fun, and very lucrative for us because they'd hire a crew to man the event. They'd put it on by trucking in load after load of local river bottom mud, mostly kind of dry. They'd solve that just by watering in nearly to death. So the idea was to make a run at the mud trench and go as far as you could. But before the one nights events were to start, they had a dash for cash.

One of the local DJs got a few $100 bills and was standing out in the muck about 3/4s of the way along. Then the contestants, callers to the radio station, probably the 5th one or some such, all got to line up together and at the starting gun, run for all they were worth toward the guy with the $$. Looked like good clean fun, except for the clean part. You take river bottom mud and add more water and you get honest to gawd quicksand.

Well, it wasn't really an honest race. One of the runners was kind of tall and lanky, and when you saw him in action you just knew he'd played in the mud before. So yeah, he won easy. But one of the girls, a cute young chickadee, probably had never been dirty before, or at least with mud. But to her credit, she tried. But maybe 25 feet along she got tired out and just stopped moving. Of course that was right about where I was stationed. Another of our club guys came over and offered to jump in just a bit with one foot (a hind foot, he was kind of a bear). Well he couldn't reach her, so I was elected to go out past him.

And I got out far enough I could reach the girls arm and still had big Toby in reach. But the problem was the girl was stuck. Someone passed us out a towel to wipe her arm and hand off. She wanted to wipe her face, but that wasn't going to get her out. Oh, did I mention mud is slick? So anyway I got hold of her near side hand and was pulling for all I was worth (not much). She needed to kick or something to break the suction the stuff had on her. But by then she claimed to be too exhausted to help. She didn't want to participate, she wanted to be rescued. So I started to talk with her, explaining all she needed to do was kick her legs to help. Then suddenly she started screaming. Her pants were staying in the mud but she was moving! :) I solved the problem by telling her not to worry, the crowd would love it if they came off. With that she became a swimmer and nearly propelled herself past me.

If you've ever been in the stuff, you don't make light of it.
 
Back
Top