Water and Sand 
2003 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance
I realize that the young age of this contestant disqualifies him for any manner of award, but I think that the incredible lack of judgment displayed here will make even children of similar or younger ages shake their heads and pronounce his foolishness to all.
Both I and my wife are paramedics who work in the city of Oakland, California. At the time that this story took place, myself, my wife and a group of friends from work of our were vacationing in Texas on the Gulf Coast. We had rented a small beach-front house near Corpus Christi and were enjoying a week-long vacation away from the hectic bustle of the city. One night we were all sitting out on the back porch of the house, grilling some hamburgers when we suddenly heard this high-pitched, desperate sounding cry for help coming from somewhere on the darkened beach.
All of us immediately dropped what we were doing and rushed down onto the beach to see what was going on. In the dark, we had difficulty following the cries which ceased altogether half a minute later. As we searched, my wife tripped over a large garden hose sticking into the dirt and fell with a quite loud splat into a patch of wet sticky sand with the consistency of glue. She called the rest of us over to her where we dragged her out of the mess. One of our group followed the hose back to the source, a neighboring house, and shut it off, whereupon we all began to dig around the area in which it was buried. Sure enough, after but a couple minutes' digging, we unearthed the head and shoulders of an 11 year old boy, dressed in swimming trunks, who had been buried within the beach. Someone began CPR immediately and we were able to successfully re-awaken the child while an ambulance was summoned to the scene and carted him off to the hospital. I and several others chose to accompany the ambulance to the hospital as the boy had no identification and we all wished to know how such a strange situation could have developed.
The boy made a full recovery in the hospital and his parents who lived in the same house next door but were absent that night, arrived to take custody of him. All of us wished to know what had transpired, and eventually were able to get the boy to tell us just how he had gotten into that precarious situation.
Like many kids who live on a warm coast, the child (who shall be called 'Jimmy' though that is not his real name) was an avid swimmer. Unlike many of them, Jimmy disliked swimming in the Gulf as the salt water "hurt his eyes and made his skin feel sticky" (his words). Jimmy preferred swimming in pools but his house being on a beach did not posses one, so Jimmy had taken to swimming in large pools of fresh water that he would make himself by filling a large depression in the ground up with water from a garden hose. Over the course of these swims, Jimmy had noticed that when sand or other substances were mixed with water, the water would become thicker and make floating much easier.
The only problem to this plan was that Jimmy disliked having to find another depression for his swimming holes from the ground around his home every time he wanted to go for a swim. Trying to find a solution, Jimmy hit upon an idea to make a large depression in the ground that would be fairly permanent without digging and at the same time mix sand with the water automatically to increase the buoyancy.
The day before his unfortunate event, Jimmy took a small shovel and dug a small, 1 foot deep pit in the ground into which he fed the end of a garden hose. Reburying the hose, he walked back to his house and turned the hose on to a small flow of water and waited. He reasoned that the water would carve out a large pit in the ground already filled with water that he could swim in. He waited all day for his parents to go out to dinner, donned a pair of swimming trunks, and followed the hose back to the fateful spot on the beach. Feeling the ground with his toes, he located the edge of the murky wet pit, thick with sand. Figuring that floating on this watery pit would be a breeze, Jimmy jumped in.
His mistake.
The hose that had been pouring water in for hours now had carved out a pit allright, a huge deep pit filled with watery sand, a substance known to laymen as quicksand. While the heavier sand had been mostly floated down to the bottom, some remained on top. Jimmy, seeing the lighter and thinner area on top assumed that the entire pit was filled with this sort of stuff and jumped in. Unfortunately, while quicksand is far more load bearing than water and can easily support a prone person's weight, when one jumps into the and one puts all one's weight on one's feet, this is not the case. Thus Jimmy, instead of floating as he would in water, found himself in an altogether different situation.
According to him, when he jumped he sank in as far as his swimsuit. While still not that deep, the thick sand's viscosity prevented him from being able to pull his legs free. Worse yet he found himself slowly sinking into the pit he had created. He told us that he thought about trying to get free, but as he sank in past his legs the sand started to rub against his skin underneath his swimsuit and "tickled him", he apparently enjoyed the sensation so much that he did not cry for help or attempt to get free even as he sank in past his waist and stomach. Eventually though, as he continued to descend up to his chest he realized the situation he was in and began to try and get free.
Struggling to free oneself from quicksand is not recommended and all that he managed to do was to accelerate his rate of decent. As he sank in deeper and deeper, He began to panic more and more, causing him to struggle more and more, and continuing his acceleration. Soon the quicksand had pinned his arms in its sticky grasp and he was left to slowly settle into the sand bit by bit.
Soon the quicksand was up to his neck. Unable to move and still sinking, Jimmy began to frantically call for help, the same cry we heard. As we began to search the beach, Jimmy who could not see or hear us over his own cries, continued to shout frantically for assistance as the quicksand pulled him slowly in up to his chin, then up to his ears, then up to his forehead, and then finally completely under the surface of the sand. He said that at that point he tried to hold his breath but soon his oxygen ran out and the last thing he remembered was an awful pain in his chest before passing out.
Fortunately, due to the fact that we happened to be present that night, little Jimmy lived to tell of his adventure, but both I, my wife, and the rest of our co-workers thought that the story deserved mention here.
Submitted on 03/26/2002
Submitted by:
Luke Seifert
Reference:
Copyright © 2002 DarwinAwards.com
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