FEAR OF QUICKSAND

As a child, one of my greatest fears was quicksand.  Because there were so many opportunities to drown in quicksand where I lived.  You could literally not walk to school without falling into a giant pit of quicksand. And if that wasn't bad enough, you almost always were tripping on the heads or hands of beautiful young, scantily clad persons of the feminine persuasion.  

In television and movies, quicksand was everywhere.  It was a common danger in those days, what I call my Wonder Bread years, between 5 and 15.  We knew nothing about cholesterol, or alcohol, or almost anything at all.   But we knew the perils of quicksand.  

There was a strange show called The Wild, Wild West with patriot Robert Conrad.  It was all about his wild adventures in ...you guessed it...the Wild Wild West.  To make matters worse, his name was West.  Jim West.  I don't remember Jim West drinking any damn martinis, like a suave Englishman of similar bent.  He was quite the macho dandy, with guns that slid out his sleeve.  I actually don't remember too much about the show, except it was a weird mashup of a Western, Fantasy and Science Fiction, perhaps a precursor to Westworld.  

There were about 100 or more episodes, and it ran from  1965-1969 before falling victim to the efforts by Network TV to reduce violence on television.  Considering that every night, we were watching burning children and other atrocities live from Vietnam, assassinations of President Kennedy, his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald,  Martin Luther King and the President's brother, reducing violence was somewhat ironic.

 

I am not even sure there was an episode with quicksand on The Wild, Wild West, but it would have fit right in.   My mother told me once of a time, when as a teenager,  she and her friends were caught out on the mudflats near Crescent Beach, and narrowly avoided the fate of quicksand.   

True story.   That she told me a story, that part was true for sure.  The other part about the quicksand, I'm not so sure.

At some point, I guess that I lost my fear of quicksand.  Don't misunderstand me,  I'm still terrified of drowning in quicksand. But even though I live in the Tea Swamp, it is the houses that are sinking, not any young scantily clad vixens.  

While it is a known fact that quicksand loves vixens, like dogs love kleenex, I also don't run into many vixens these days.  But that doesn't mean they don't exist.   Somewhere, vixens are still being lured into quicksand, while my dreams are more like how "they" are turning hotels into apartments, or how I forgot my pants on the way to work.   

 https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1627700761?playlistId=tt0058855&ref_=tt_ov_vi