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Quicksand

Posted on 27 September 2009 by Barbara Beckwith (0)

My husband lays shirt, shorts and boots on the sandstone. Pink and nude as the rock around us, he strides toward the water that blocks our way up this narrow canyon in southern Utah.

The waterpocket ahead of us looks about 20 feet wide and 30 feet long. Jon will check its depth. If the water comes no higher than his chest — and my chin — we’ll lift our packs over our heads and wade across. Any deeper and we’ll turn around and try to find another route.

We’re Easterners. We’re familiar with fog and ice. Maine blackflies. Tree roots and twisted ankles. Although we love desert canyons, we know their perils mostly from books.

Jon steps into the chilly water. He yelps like a puppy, but strides on, buttocks bouncing. Soon, he’s thigh-deep. “Easy wading!” he calls. His words end in a squawk. Jon’s hands fling up, elbows stiff, fingers splayed. I hear that dread word: “Quicksand!”

Quicksand is geologically odd stuff. A bed of silt becomes saturated with water so that its grains no longer cohere. Heavy objects — a cow, a log, my husband — sink readily but can’t easily rise. Quicksand creates a suction that makes it difficult to move anywhere but down, which is why creatures caught in it often die from exertion or starvation. The locals assure us quicksand is a hassle, not a danger. “Do not panic,” our map instructs us. “You will most likely not sink past your waist.” But this quicksand is under five feet of water. If Jon sinks to his waist, his head submerges by at least a foot. He’s already up to his armpits.

My husband of 37 years is disappearing, body part by body part. His face looks stiff, as if struck by a rattler. He lifts his brows as if that might elevate his body. He turns to me, the only human around. He expects me to save him.

I look around for a long stick, but floods have scoured this canyon clean. I’d throw Jon a rope — if we had one. I vow to take rope in the future. If we have a future.

Jon sinks deeper. I pace the water’s edge. I imagine a Ranger rescue team arriving, too late, to find Jon’s nude body just below the water’s surface, torso upright, arms outstretched, eyes open, like a bug preserved in amber.

A mid-pool commotion dissolves my imagined scene. I peer centerward to see what’s happening. Frothing water obscures my view. Is that a goodbye wave? Or is my husband splashing to shield me from the awful sight of his final descent into the muck?

No. Jon is smacking his hands against the surface of the water and lurching forward. He looks silly but has moved closer to shore. I reach out, grab his arm and pull. Finally, he emerges — a miracle of pink flesh.

I dry his mudcaked legs. Mystified, I ask how he escaped. He says he recalled something he once read in a book: quicksand takes a couple of seconds to break up.

Slapping the water for leverage, he drew each leg up, very slowly, and then tiptoed across the quaking surface of the siltbed before it could collapse. In that fashion, rather like a giraffe posing as a member of the corps de ballet, he’d improvised a crossing to safety.

Jon is shivering. His legs are wobbly. But he has escaped the quagmire. Was it method? Imagination? His formula, whatever it was, worked. I get back my husband, whom I much prefer to a bug in amber. We get to take future trips — next time, with rope.

[published in Smithsonian Magazine]

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