Life can be Dangerous

I recently got some feedback that my life is more mundane and less interesting because it is not as dangerous now as when I was in places like Africa. That is true for the most part. But I have had brushes with death since I left the dark continent, even some brushes with death when I least expected it in sunny California.

For instance I took my son out for a walk one day. He was going on two years old and we went up to a park near our house called Tilden Park. The Bay Area has some great parks and this is just one of them. We went to Jewel Lake with the plan being to walk around the shoreline trail to see the turtles sunning themselves and maybe some ducks swimming around or a garter snake slithering along the path if we were lucky.

It had been raining hard for a few days and we had been stuck inside while it poured down but today it was sunny and warmer. There had been some mudslides around the Bay Area from the copious amounts of rain we had been getting. A couple of houses slid down some steep hillsides and some roads were covered by avalanches of mud up in the hills. California soil has a large amount of clay in it. When the clay gets wet it absorbs water and starts to swell. That swelling has an awesome amount of power to it. Even very large heavy buildings are easily lifted up by the power of the expanding clay. It also gets slippery when it is wet. The combination of forces causes landslides whenever we get heavy rain.

We weren't too worried about landslides as we were just hiking along a mostly flat section of trail with just a few small hills which we easily hiked up and down. Even a toddler like my son had no trouble with these little hills. The trails were muddy but getting dirty was part of the fun for both of us. I am just a kid at heart. Therapists have labeled me as having a Peter Pan complex. I just laugh at them when they say that. I don't ever want to grow up and don't think I ever will. We enjoyed watching the turtles. We even saw some fish swimming in the shallow water near the shore. We tried to catch a frog we saw in some reeds but it was too quick for me to grab it. We both were laughing hard at my attempts to catch the speedy frog. If I had managed to catch the little bugger, we would have just looked at the frog and released it again. We checked out a pack rat's nest at the far end of the lake. The mound of garbage the rat had collected was almost ten feet high. Obsessive compulsive behavior is not limited to humans from the looks of this guys nest. I pointed out some deer in the woods and after a long stare my son finally saw them and he got very excited about them for some reason. We were having a blast, just two kids walking and playing in the post rain mud.

My son got tired after about an hour of hiking and playing so I started to carry him. We walked up a small incline and near the top there was a big puddle of water. I was going to jump across the puddle but holding my son it was tough to jump since he weighed in at close to 40 pounds already. I placed my hand on a tree trunk thinking that I could use the tree as a balancing reference and to push off from it. I put my right hand on the tree trunk and held my son tightly with my left arm. I leaned onto the tree and got ready to jump but before I could jump the ground below me suddenly turned into quicksand and I immediately started to sink. I panicked and threw my son as far away as I could as I quick as a blink sank into the suddenly soft mud. He landed about eight feet away unhurt but scared and I sank until my feet got tangled up in roots from the tree and then I stopped sinking. I was buried up to my hips. The ground then resolidified and I was stuck with tremendous pressure pushing in on my legs. My son wanted to get up and run back to me but I was afraid he might get sucked into the mud too so I yelled at him to stay put. He listened to me for once and stayed where he landed but started to cry hysterically. I was scared that I could slip off the tree roots and sink all the way out of sight. I started to try to dig my way out of the mud but as I dug, the water from the puddle just refilled the mud back into the hole I was making. I started to wiggle and pull myself up by holding on to the tree. If I pushed against the tree the ground would soften up and when I let up on pressure against the tree the ground firmed back up. I was in some sort of suspension with the water and clay where the added pressure of the tree roots turned the mud into a liquid but without the slight pressure it was a solid. By alternately pushing against the tree and pulling myself up as hard as I could I slowly made progress getting out of the mud. It took me fifteen or twenty minutes of serious hard work to get myself out of the predicament but I was finally free and able to roll away from the puddle and quick sand like mud. I lost my shoes and socks in the struggle but I was extremely lucky to not have lost my life also. I could easily have just been sucked completely under the mud and just disappeared forever. I don't think I would have ever been found if I had gone totally under. Who would think to look for me buried in mud?

I picked up my son and we hugged like there was no tomorrow. He calmed down quickly, but myself, I was a wreck. I was scared shitless to say the least and shaking like a 240 volt vibrator. I very carefully and quickly walked straight back to the car with my son clutched in my arms. When I got near the park headquaters near the Little Farm I informed the rangers what had happened and suggested that they close the trail around the lake which they quickly did. I walked to my car. My car was only about a week old and we were both covered head to toe with tons of California clay. It was raining again so I rinsed my son off in a puddle and put him in his car seat. Then I tried to rinse off myself but I was too covered with mud to get even close to clean. I looked around and there was nobody in sight so I just stripped off all my clothes and rinsed off in a puddle as best as I could and jumped in my car to drive home. I drove home naked. When I got home I honked the horn to try to get my wife to come out and bring me some towels and clothes. She just happened to have about ten of her girlfriends over at the time and they all had to come out and laugh at my predicament. I laughed along with them but I was still petrified from my near death experience in the mud.