Quicksand Sports

In 1967 we discovered a flat little clay area, about 50 yards across, off the road to Nooitgedacht. When it was dry, there were little cracks in the surface, when there was enough rain, it would turn into a shallow pond only an inch or two deep. The way I remember it, somebody (probably Reggie) decided to wade out to see if the water got deep enough to swim. The edge was deep wet clay silt and he was over his knees in silt after only wading out a few feet. As he tried to take bigger steps, he kept sinking lower and lower and eventually got pretty stuck. We had to form a human chain to drag him out. The next day the gang returned to try and figure out how deep the quicksand was. I seem to recall we even brought rope once, in case someone had to be hauled out. Of course the parental units would have had a fit if they had an inkling of what we were up to. We couldn’t find the bottom, so curiosity about quicksand rapidly turned into a challenge to see how far we could go out into the quicksand before getting stuck and having to get rescued. Knowing what I know now, the reason we could not touch the bottom was the quicksand was so dense we were buoyant enough to “float” with our shoulders out of the water. However, if you went in vertically up to your chest, it was almost impossible to move. We learned a lot about quicksand – the hard way – trial and error. After a couple of days, we had learned how to spread our bodies out at the surface and move slowly forward with a special sequence of body motions, so no more rescues were needed. However, travel in this stuff consisted of moving a few inches and in the process getting mired down for a few minutes before being able to get in position to move a few more inches. Eventually somebody had the “bright” idea to have a race across the lake and back. It may have been the ultimate slow motion race, but it took lot of effort and a lot of concentration and a lot longer than expected to complete the race. After that, it became a sport – quicksand racing. There was a lot of technique in successful quicksand racing. The start was all important, if you just jumped in, you would be hopelessly bogged down – basically the technique was to run as fast as possible at the lake, until your feet started to get mired down, then to lunge forward in a low sliding belly-flop. Execution of the sliding flop was crucial, because coming down too hard would get you bogged down immediately, but the biggest trick was knowing how many steps to take before lunging. Every extra step gave a huge distance advantage, but was a direct trade-off in initial miring, reduced speed and reduced slide. We didn’t often race all the way across the lake, because of the time required, but even a short racecourse was highly entertaining with lots comedy and lots of time for the usual taunting by young boys of each other’s struggles. We never stopped laughing the whole time we played in the quicksand. Needless to say, after playing in this muck, we were coated head to foot in clay, and it would dry as we biked home. Fortunately it wasn’t smelly, but we still had to hose ourselves off thoroughly before being seen by a grown-up.