re: Have you ever encountered quicksand?

It’s not like in the Tarzan movies, I put in an addition to the sewer system in Zwolle years ago, that whole town is sitting on top of quicksand

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Have you ever encountered quicksand?

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Yes.

I remember being on a canoe trip on the Bogue Chitto with the boy scouts when I was a kid and one of the canoes tipped over. We pulled our canoe over to help in the rescue. I hopped out and took the bow line to tie it off, while the other scout in my canoe went up along the bank to salvage the stuff that had floated away.

While tying off the boat, I noticed that the sand on the bank was totally loose and unconsolidated. I had experienced something similar on the bank of the Mississippi when we used to try to work our way down into the sand, so I started doing the same thing - moving my feet up and down, working the sand into a kind of soup while holding the end of the bow line I had tied off on a tree branch. By the time the other scouts had come back towards my canoe, I had worked my way all the way up to my armpits. Everyone started freaking out, screaming, "quicksand!" and as they rushed up to me, I simply pulled myself out by the rope, laughing. There was one close friend there who used to hang out with me in the batture who knew exactly what I had done and was laughing too.

Good times.

FAR more scary than quicksand, is falling through flotant marsh. I don't recommend doing that.

I don't know about quicksand but Ive been caught up in swamp mud a couple a couple times. Once I lost a shoe down in grand isle.

Well, several years ago there was an Alaskan lady that was clam digging and got stuck in the sand. Several people tried to get her out by several methods and couldn’t. It became real when the tide came in. She breathed through a water hose for a while but eventually drowned. I would call that death by quicksand. And horrible