Alaska tried to KILL me today. She dramatically sucked me in, but (thankfully) decided to spit me back out. Quicksand. No joke. A friend and I decided to head out to the tidal flats so she could show me how to harvest some Dungeness crabs. Walking through the muddy low tide areas in our rain boots is common thing here, so we didn’t think anything of the sticky mess at the beach...until our boots suddenly sunk in to our shins. We both got stuck at the exact same time. Nervous laughter was combined with lots of tugging, heaving, and then sinking deeper. Nothing was working. She had a cell phone, but there isn’t really service out there. Siri? Hello...SIRI?? Where are you when I need to google: “How do you get out of quicksand without dying?” There was not a single person in sight. Just us...stuck like two dinosaurs in a tar pit. Neither one of us could move. Here’s the thing about Alaska. I’ve heard that when her tide is in, she is twice the size of Texas. When the tide goes out, she is 3 times the size of Texas. For those of you who are landlocked and have no reference for this, this would be like having water from your creek/river suddenly flood MILES of the land right next to it. Every. single. day. We went out at low tide (the best time for finding stranded crabs). The tide was gonna head back in. It was already starting. In a few hours, how deep was it going to be where we were irrevocably planted? 5 feet? 10 feet? The tide forecast for today’s high tide was 15’3”, but how much of that was going to be at the exact place where found ourselves stuck? To make matters worse, we had told no one of our plans. No one would even notice that we weren’t around until I didn’t show up and the kids were abandoned after school...And that would be an hour before high tide. After lots of grunting, sweating, shaking, shimmying, and a few quick prayers; I thought about our empty 5 gallon crab buckets. I could pull my socked foot out of my entrenched boot and stand that foot in the crab bucket. That wouldn’t sink as quickly, right? Surface tension and all that? While I stood one foot in the bucket, I somehow pried the empty boot loose from the mud and moved it as far as I could towards the less-ooky mud and stepped back into it. Then, from an awkward splits-type position, I repeated the mess with the other foot, which was now even more wedged due to my writhing. It was probably a REALLY good thing no one was around to see these horrible shenanigans. A few awkward boot scoots sideways and I was back to the mud that looked EXACTLY THE SAME but didn’t want to gobble me up for dinner. My friend did the same, albeit with a few Tom-Cruise-in-Mission-Impossible near pitches lengthwise into the quicksand...and then we were both free. Shaking. Still kinda nervously laughing. Smelling of mud. Like true pioneers...off to the crab hunt we went. Long story short: We did our best, but found zero crab today. And I just ordered Dominos. Alaska is just gonna have to try harder to knock me off some other day. I’m sure she has more than a few ideas up her sleeve to do me in. I’ve only barely been here a year now.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 02:28:58 +0000
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