Well, I’m not sure if “quicksand” actually exists. Whatever, it worked like the popular conception of quicksand. I sunk in several feet, and struggling just made me sink deeper. What ever happened to quicksand anyway? Back in the 80s, every third movie had a quicksand scene.
So anyway, I was planning to do a photography trip day. You get the best pictures at dawn, especially in the desert. Weather report said it’d be partly cloudly, but when I got up at 4am it’d been upgraded to “cloudy”. Hmm, well, depending on what kind of clouds, it might not be so bad, and I already got up, so what the hell.
So I get out there, worst photography day ever. Vegas experiences like, 8 really overcast gloomy days a year, if that, and this was one of them. No golden morning sunlight, several layers of clouds just diffusing and sucking the life out of everything. Awful, a waste. Oh well, I’m already out there, so I guess I’ll turn it into a scouting day, explore everything and come back on a better day.
So I end up exploring there and all around Lake Mead. I follow some random gravel path off Lake Mead Blvd. for like a mile or two and end up at some weird little peninsula vaguely beach-like protusion into the water. It’s actually kind of nice - at least by “holy shit there’s some water in the desert” standard, so I was hanging around.
Some ducks and seagulls flying around, so I was moving around a bit to take some pictures, walking along the shoreline. There’s actually some real sand, along with some rocky parts. I take a step and my right foot sinks in about a foot. My momentum carries me forward and I fall and catch myself with my left leg, which sinks in a little above knee level. I try to pull myself out - won’t budge, except that struggling actually seems to make it worse. My left ankle is twisted under there, which makes it even more of an anchor. I also had just spent the whole day climbing rocks and hiking through sand and I’m not at all in the shape to do that stuff, so I was already pretty heavily worn out and somewhat dehydrated by this time.
Welp, this sucks. No one is around - this is some weird gravel road in the middle of nowhere, just saw one RV down the road and they were probably cooking meth. Maybe they’d somehow stumble onto me, but they’d probably try to rape me. I’m a very tempting rape target. So there’s no one around to help and I am quite thoroughly stuck.
There’s some really weird pile of some sort of growing pit of white goo next to me, I should mention. I have no idea wtf it is execpt that it’s definitely some sort of horrible. About 3 feet away from my left leg. It might try to eat me.
On the plus side, I stopped sinking when I stopped moving. I was able to turn around just enough to get my ass on a rock, and from there I could pull my right foot out. Left one wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t plan the right leg to try to help free the left one, cause there was no solid ground under it, it would just sink again.
The birds I was following to take pictures of are now circling above my head, waiting for my inevitable death to eat me.
The absurdity of my situation hit me, I was legitimately stuck. Cracked me up.
But since I was stable enough with my ass on a rock, I was able to start digging. Had to dig a pit to get free.
I had my camera in my hand when I sunk in, so it got gunked up a decent bit. I realized I should document the retarded predicament I was in, so that after I sank into the earth and perished, and was one day dug up by the mole men that will replace human kind, I would have documentation of my fate with me.
Had a long telephoto lens, though - not able to photograph the ground in front of me from where I was, too close. So I did what all ballers would do - wiped my caked up mud hand on my pants and executed a one handed lens change on my expensive camera with a muddy hand.
Kept digging, after about a half hour I was able to get my leg free. Lost my shoe, had to dig that out.
I missed an opportunity here. My K5 is coated in this thick, horrible muddy quicksand stuff. I’d also changed the lens with a muddy one handed awkward change, and then taken a bunch of pictures with it. So it was pretty thoroughly abused. So I went ahead and walked out on a rock by the lake and splashed it around in there to clean it off. But I forgot that I had a backup camera in my pocket. What’s the point of having a backup camera if you don’t remember to take pictures of your main camera totally coked in mud?
It would’ve made a cool demonstration video for youtube to show the shape it was in and then splashing it around in the lake. Damn. Oh well. When I got back to my car, it was still kind of ugly. I wasn’t able to get all the mud off of it, just most of it, so after I rinsed my hands with a gallon of water I’d had in the car I went ahead and dumped it in the camera.
Couldn’t do much about the rest of the mud. Tried to shake it off my legs and shoes but it was pervasive. Somehow while I’m driving home flakes of mud are flying out of my hair. No idea how that happened, I didn’t dunk my head in it. My glasses are all muddied up too. It’s too bad - I took the scenic route home and got tempted to stop for pictures, but I figured I should probably give the camera a more thorough cleaning before I keep using it.
So I got home, threw all my clothes in the washing machine, and then the camera and I took a shower together. It was very erotic. I forgot to shut it off during the shower too but it doesn’t seem to care, it’s working just fine.
My only concern remains wtf was that horrible white goo pit of doom? I had a fissure/small wound in one of my fingers that got caked in mud repeatedly, which kinda looked black and nasty after I washed it off, so now I’m concerned that some sort of alien bacteria is now growing inside my finger. So I may yet die from this. But at least those greedy birds won’t be eating me.
The pictures are not terribly descriptive. I had limited range of motion and I couldn’t actually see what I was taking pictures of, so the angles are odd.
Where I was, in my supervillain submarine
Keep in mind that was after I’d already gotten the bulk off of the camera by splashing it around in the lake, that was just the leftovers.
