I did not go to the beach.
Wendy pointed out that mileage-wise, I drove almost halfway across our country.
So then I started thinking about it and if my geography were better, I might know how many European countries that would equal.
But what I really want to talk about is quicksand.
If you are a person from the 1900s, and particularly if you're from the slice of the 1900s that includes a youth in the 1970s, then we may have shared common fears.
We didn't have a TV when I was a kid, but in any case, this was before the age of cable, and the bulk of programming in India and Bangladesh would've been local.
When we lived in Dhaka, each week we would go to the house of our dear friends who had a small black and white TV to watch Flipper the Dolphin and Little House on the Prairie.
Little House was a huge part of my childhood. My mom and I read the books together. And Mrs. Medley, my delightful second grade teacher, was reading them to us as well.
One day we had a substitute teacher, and she pronounced Almanzo's name wrong, and I was outraged.
Also, when we'd go spend time with my grandmother in North Dakota, we got to watch a whole lot of TV and always watched Little House. We were in Minot, which was the big city, but after all, not so far from the prairie.
Like, when my mom was a kid, they'd walk on the prairie and find arrowheads.
On a side bar, we also watched a nature show sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, though I've forgotten the name of it. And of course we watched Lawrence Whelk.
We ate dinner, which we called supper, at 5:00 pm, and sometimes we got to use TV trays and watch television while we ate.
It was all very decadent. Unimaginable in real life. And really, probably only possible because my dad was not with us.
We were so fascinated by television that we watched any and everything we could. I watched soap operas—their stories, my grandma and aunt called them—in the afternoon.
Each summer, I would become, over the span of two weeks, deeply invested in The Young and the Restless and One Life to Live.
In any case, I desperately wanted a bonnet, and in retrospect, I find it surprising that my mom didn't make one for me, since she sewed so well and made us so many cute things.
But what I'm saying is, we got our American pop culture in bursts.
And we got enough that I genuinely believed that quicksand was an ever-present danger.
In case you aren't from this particular era and don't know how to save yourself: If you try to walk or run out of it, you're a goner. You have to spread your body weight and use a swimming motion to safely get to solid ground.
Also, back then the Bermuda Triangle could swallow you at any moment, never to be seen again. It didn't matter that Bermuda was on the other side of the world from us, and we'd never flown, as far as I knew, even remotely close to it.
The Triangle was there, and waiting.
As if those weren't enough, you could always be knocked on the head and suffer from amnesia. That wasn't terrifying, the way quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle were, but it was still a regular possibility.
So throughout the 1970s, you had to be emotionally prepared to die of quicksand, disappear from the air, or suddenly have no idea who you were.
Were there other fear list items? Surely there were, but those were my big ones.
So imagine my tremendous joy when a couple weeks ago I learned that a woman fell into quicksand on a beach in Maine!
Her husband immediately pulled her out. So she's fine. I wouldn't be rejoicing her demise or anything.
But quicksand!
It felt like when I know I'm right, and my husband insists on doing something his way, and then it goes badly and at some point it becomes clear that if he'd just done it my way in the first place, things would've been so much easier.
That kind of satisfaction.
I told my friend Pam, who I was staying with in Portland, and she was all delighted as well.
Quicksand! Ha!
I will admit that I kind of wanted to go to the beach and see if we could find any, but it was 62 degrees and raining and I didn't want to investigate my childhood terrors that bad.
On our trip up to Maine, we spent two nights in Boston with friends. The drive to Boston should've taken eight hours, but because Waze told us to go through Connecticut, it took 10 hours and approximately five years off my life.
I was like, what the fuck with Connecticut, which I've always considered an inconveniently-located state in the first place.
A friend who does the drive regularly then offered me a better route that avoids Connecticut completely. But on the return trip I was visiting my beloved college roommate Lesley in Hartford, so there was no way around it.
I feel like this is kind of turning into a chicken for dinner kind of diary entry.
And I am not kidding you, my childhood friend Debbie peeked at her neighbor Alyssa's diary one time, and the entirety of one entry was "we had chicken for dinner".
It drives me crazy that I can't list more than maybe 10 US presidents, I retain almost no historical facts, and my geography is appalling, but I know what Alyssa—who I barely knew and found kind of irritating—wrote in her diary in like 1982.
One might wonder if I had amnesia, but I think it's just the quicksand.
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom!
ReplyDeleteOoh, yes! Thank you! Hugs! LJ
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