Here’s one little-known aspect of existing as a Gen X — the fear of sinking to death in sand. Perhaps you escaped this particular horror if your television exposure was moderated, but I’ve asked around, and I’m not the only child of the 80s to approach wet, sandy areas with extreme caution. Films and cartoons conveyed the idea that sinking into sand, never to be seen again, was an ever present danger.
This is why, when our village was recently required to switch from septic tank to town sewerage, I panicked a little when I realised our plumber had turned our entire back yard into a sinkhole:
Clearly I did get out alive.
BUT IS QUICKSAND EVEN REAL?
Yes, but quicksands not as quick as all that, unless you flail about in a panic, or deliberately try to sink yourself deeper:
A quick-thinking dog owner has described the moment she got caught in quicksand while trying to rescue her toy poodle at a beach in southern Tasmania as akin to the infamous swamp scene in the 1984 film The NeverEnding Story. […] “There wasn’t any suction stopping me from getting out but it felt like there was nothing stable for me to stand on”.
Sand can be dangerous in other ways. My high school friend’s older brother suffocated to death under a collapsed sandcastle on Nelson’s Tahunanui Beach in the 1970s at the age of nine. Though nowhere near as common as drownings, children dying in sand still happens. However the popularity of the old quicksand trope suggested quicksand was a disproportionate hazard, when I should have been warned instead about burying myself too deep in sand holes:
It used to be a standard trope in action movies, although you don’t see it much these days: a patch of apparently solid ground in the jungle that, when stepped on, turns out to have the consistency of cold oatmeal. The unlucky victim starts sinking down into the muck; struggling only makes it worse. Unless there’s a vine to grab a hold of, he or she disappears without a trace (except maybe a hat floating sadly on the surface). It was a bad way to go. Quicksand was probably the number-one hazard faced by silver-screen adventurers, followed by decaying rope bridges and giant clams that could hold a diver underwater.
There is a VICE documentary about quicksand fetishists:
Quicksand Fetish
At the height of its popularity quicksand appeared in one out of 35 Hollywood films. It has since disappeared from the mainstream psyche. Regardless of quicksand’s cultural status today, impressionable audiences who grew up during its heyday, have given birth to an aging community of quicksand fetishists that re-create versions of our favorite quicksand films with an erotic twist.
There’s a disturbing misogyny behind many of the live action quicksand scenes of the 20th century. Look up famous quicksand scenes from cinematic history and it readily becomes apparent that a sexually desirable woman flailing about and pleading in quicksand is a common male saviour fantasy, which is one thing, but I suspect it’s also a ‘trapping and dispatching with women’ fantasy.
When it’s two men flailing about in the swamp, it’s likely there’s a comedy vibe to it. Stanley is a revenge film from 1972. It gets 4.2 on IMDb and I doubt anyone would watch it for the serious drama. Quicksand tips a dramatic story into melodrama:
This how-to video makes me feel a lot better about quicksand.
The horror of sinking into some suffocating substance apart from water remains a powerful trope. It is used in the horror film A Quiet Place, but in that film it’s not sand — it’s grain in a granary.
According to this guy, who lives in a part of the world with genuine, slightly scary quicksand, it’s probably not going to be the suffocation that kills you. He also makes a good job of describing what it feels like to be stuck in quicksand.
The quicksand trope is used far less commonly these days. You know what basically killed the quicksand trope? The moon landings.
Quicksand is a common and deadly element of swamp, jungle, and desert terrain. Science Fiction stories written before the Moon landings are also liable to describe thick layers of extremely fine lunar dust on the Moon’s surface that are treated as functionally equivalent to quicksand.
TV Tropes
Strange as it seems now:
Prior to the first Moon landing, scientists had good reason to believe the lunar surface was covered in a fine layer of dust. While this might not sound like a big deal, it presented a host of concerns to the Apollo mission planners. […]
First and foremost, and as proposed by Gold, the lunar dust might swallow astronauts like quicksand. Indeed, without any prior experience of standing on a celestial body aside from Earth, a concern emerged that the soft regolith on the Moon wasn’t compact enough to support the weight of the Lunar Module or astronauts out for a stroll. Nightmarish thoughts of astronauts getting swallowed up into the lunar dust prompted further investigation.
The courtship of the stork and the crane. Go a-courting one another across the marshes but never come to an understanding, as each time either one or the other changes his mind.
Today we associate sinking with bodies of water, but it’s surprising how many ancient folk tales are about objects, people and buildings sinking into the earth or into rock. Beware of carrying very heavy items, as this may cause you to sink into solid rock.
A number also feature sink holes. A sinkhole is a depression in the ground that has no natural external surface drainage.
Alarming Tales, January 1958“I’ve dropped into a swamp!” Swamps don’t cover all that much space, but it’s amazing how often characters jump from a plane into a swamp in fiction. This is a panel from Baffling Mysteries magazine, September 1952Brian Bolland cover to 1987’s Swamp Thing Annual #3Man Walks on the Moon matchbook cover 1969, illustrator not creditedAlarming Tales #3 January 1958The Everglades is a natural region of tropical wetlands in the southern portion of the U.S. state of Florida.
“The Scarlet Ibis” is a classic short story by James Hurst about an older brother who is ashamed of his disabled younger brother. One day they are both out in a thunder storm. The older brother runs for shelter, leaving the younger brother behind. The younger brother is struck by lightning (we extrapolate) and dies.
The symbolism and pathetic fallacy of this story is clear. When the big brother teaches the younger brother to walk, they go down to a swamp.
Mallards over the Marshes by Roland Green
Where there is swamp, there is the possibility of death and danger. But it’s not just about sinking to death. Bogs, swamps and marshes have a murky history. Case in point:
My favourite story concerns the ossuary at St. Paul’s Cathedral—old St. Paul’s, before the Wren cathedral was built. In the middle of the night, this huge group of carts pulled up outside of the cathedral, and they took all the bones in the ossuary, loaded them into the carts, took them down to the local marsh, threw them into the marsh, and threw dung on top of them. It’s this obviation of the dead, because they decided they want to stamp out any Catholic tendency to pray for the dead.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A MARSH, BOG, SWAMP ETC?
The different kinds of wetlands:
MARSHES— no trees, lots of grass, exist at the edge of lakes and streams
SWAMPS— murky water, lots of trees, muddy, full of pits and quagmires
FENS— dominated by grasses, alkaline water
BOG— accumulates peat (deposits of dead plant material), mosses aplenty
All varieties of wetland are essential to the ecosystem, but symbolically, in stories, they function quite differently. The fen is basically a watery meadow, offering little real danger to humans — on fens we can see for miles around — we’d see predators approach. As for the swamp, well that’s a different matter. The swamp contains the worst of all worlds — the shadowy depths of an ocean combined with the foreboding of the forest. We have no visibility in either direction.
Bogs and swamps seem more ‘sinkier’ than fens and marshes, probably because of the English language collocations such as ‘swamped at work’, bogged down by homework’ etc. I’ve never heard ‘marshed at work'(though someone should make that happen).
Sidney Richard Percy – On the Mawddach Marshes, North Wales 1877
IRONIC SWAMPS
When a story is told from the point of view of, say, a frog (who needs it for survival), then swamps can function as utopian landscapes.
By Gary Larson
The wetlands of The Wind In The Willows are a genuine utopia.
At this point I’d like to mention The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, by Beatrix Potter. Beatrix Potter has the undeserved reputation for writing sweet, utopian stories about animals dressed like people. But that’s not true at all. Jeremy Fisher is the story of a frog, set by some wetlands. These wetlands are no utopia, but a dangerous, deadly place. There is nothing happily ironic about Potter’s wetland environs.
FURTHER READING ABOUT SWAMPS
A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.”
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
The Princess collects Bog Down 1913 Theodor KittelsenSpring, High water, Isaac Levitan, 1897American Marsh Shrew (Sorex palustris) from the viviparous quadrupeds of North America (1845) illustrated by John Woodhouse Audubon (1812-1862)
Swamp Bottom is a location in the Studio Ghibli film Spirited Away. Chihiro leaves the bath-house and travels there with No-Face, Boh and Yubaba’s bird. They board the sea railway and get off at the sixth stop to visit Zeniba.
Bog Bodies are cadavers preserved in peat bogs. The oldest known bog body is Koelbjerg Man, who dates to 8000 BCE. The most famous is probably 2400 years old, Tollund Man. The Nazis were fascinated with them and used them to justify their persecution of LGBTQ+ people.
The water in peat bogs is very acidic with no oxygen. These conditions mean any bodies in them are very well preserved. The acid bleaches the hair & tans the skin. Many died violent deaths & it’s unclear if this was ritualistic, punishment, or murder.
Side note: bog bodies are so well preserved they are often mistaken for recent murder victims when they are discovered. In Macclesfield, in 1983, the head of a woman was found buried in the ground, some 300m away from the house of local man Peter Reyn-Bardt.
When the police asked him to explain the head he immediately confessed to the murder & burial of his wife, Malika de Fernandez some 20 years earlier. Further testing revealed the woman had actually died in the late Iron Age.
Reyn-Bardt was convicted of his wife’s murder, even though her remains were never found. The discovered head became known as Lindow Woman. Back to the story.
The Nazis went to extraordinary lengths to appropriate Norse & Germanic history & mythologies to prove themselves the “superior race”. For example, a lot of nazi propaganda pushed the idea they were descended from Vikings, who they portrayed as “racially pure”, noble savages.
Another side note – this still happens today in far right groups who still appropriate Norse iconography & mythology.
The effort to rewrite their history was considerable. How does this fit in with bog bodies? Well, the two leading theories about bog bodies were that they were, A. killed as ritual sacrifice, or B. punished for some kind of criminality. (Pictured. Yde Girl’s body & reconstruction)
The criminality theory comes mostly from the work of the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus, who wrote Germania in ACE 98, a work that portrays social customs in the northern parts of the empire. (Facial reconstruction of The Girl of the Uchter Moor)
It’s not known if Tacitus ever actually went to Germany, but his work described the Germanic tribes as being very noble, honourable, brave, restrained, etc. Basically all the things the Nazis thought they were, so they loved this.
These were the “noble savages” the Nazis wanted claim descendent from. So desperate were they to “prove” this that Heinrich Himmler established an archaeological institute, the Ahnenerbe, to do just that.
Tacitus doesn’t write about BBs but he did write this about Germanic laws, “The punishment varies to suit the crime. Traitors and deserters are hanged on trees; the cowardly, the unwarlike and those who disgrace their bodies are drowned in miry swamps under a cover of wicker.”
Well, that was enough for the Nazis. The BBs were CLEARLY the “cowardly, the unwarlike, and those who disgraced their bodies” – or, to the mind of mass murdering, nazi f*ckheads – gay people.
This was viewed by Nazis as proof that they descended from ppl who punished homosexuality. I don’t need to tell you how powerful history can be, so the idea that there was a precedence for homophobia & murder was soon pushed as the *only* explanation for bog bodies.
In a 1937 speech about the homosexuality, Himmler referred to the bog bodies to justify the persecution of gay people. He said: “Unfortunately we do not have it as easy as our ancestors did. They only had a few abnormal degenerates.
Homosexuals, called Urnings, were drowned in swamps. The worthy professors who find these corpses in the bog are clearly not aware that in ninety-out-of-a-hundred cases they are faced with remains of a homosexual who was drowned in a swamp with his clothes and everything else.”
The research of the Ahnenerbe was also used to justify the Holocaust, Germanic imperialism, and all manner of crackpot Nazi ideas. Following the end of WW2 & the defeat of the Nazis, new research was allowed to flourish
It was eventually proven the bog bodies are widely dispersed across Europe & are not uniquely Germanic. It was also shown that they vary greatly in date – some from 8000 BCE & some to the 20thC. The reasons these people ended up in the bog will never be fully understood
Final thought – Indiana Jones was pretty spot on with claim the Nazis were pillaging the globe for fabled, lost artefacts. In fact, as well as making up crap about gay people and bog bodies, they really were searching for the holy grail – and for Thor’s hammer
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days… Lightly, lightly — it’s the best advice ever given me… to throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…
