Last weekend, I was up on the Red River. I was mucking around right by the riverfront, looking for a better camera angle on some pictures. I eventually stepped into some fairly thick clay mud.
Then I thought, what if this is the edge of quicksand? I didn't panic, but I told myself "get out now!" That was even as two lenses spilled out of my camera bag, with the top strap click-locked, but not cinched as tightly as it could be.
Well, that slippery red Choctaw clay, per the folks who gave Oklahoma its name (I was below the high water mark on the south bank so I wasn't in Texas!) wasn't quicksand, but it IS slippery, and I was sliding on any stuff that had dried out on top but was wet beneath. Fortunately, there was a "sawyer" snag downed right in front of me. I grasped it, then cleaned some of the stuff off my shoes after I got on terra firma.
So, why had I thought it was quicksand at first, at least possibly?
Well, I'd read a Backpacker article about a boyfriend-girlfriend hiking in backcountry in Zion National Park and pushing the weather. They got to a big muddy area with some bits of water in/on it, and figured they could hike through. But the GF soon hit what was quicksand. The BF got her free but got more seriously stuck himself.
He couldn't get out. He told her she had to go for ranger help. Worse? She'd never hiked with anybody but him. (Sidebar: He may have pushed her hiking development level too quickly, methinks.) She eventually did so.
Well, they were also pushing the weather there in Zion. Said BF got a fall snowstorm dropping flakes on him even as he wasn't fully dressed for the weather. (BF was not only pushing GF's hiking development too quickly, but was being young and not fully preparing, methinks.) Well, rangers eventually got there, but they all had to spend a night on the floor there as the guy's one leg was too numb from a mix of being stuck AND how forceful a wrenching (with a rope around his body connected to a ratchet) was needed to haul him out.
After I hit terra firma, I realized that had likely been in my mind.
At that point, conscious of it, it's no longer "priming."
But it surely was before that.
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