Robert Gardner -- The Verdict

Just to show the faithful reader that this column is not necessarily

made up of meaningless fluff, I shall embark on an educational venture.

The subject: quicksand.

Once upon a time, or in the beginning -- take your choice -- we had

quicksand around here, particularly in our rivers. Because I haven’t the

foggiest idea of the origin or cause of quicksand, the educational part

of this venture will be a bit short. You simply have to accept my word

that quicksand existed.

Quicksand was a staple of certain class B -- or C or D -- movies in

which the only unforgettable moment was when the villain met his

well-deserved end by drowning in a large puddle of quicksand. It was

unforgettable -- a hand and a fist protruding out of a sea of quicksand,

the hand clutching and unclutching helplessly. You just can’t beat a

class B or C movie for sheer drama, and that was the general image of

quicksand. Ours wasn’t quite so dramatic.

The best way I can describe quicksand is to say it is a combination of

sand and water that looks like sand, but the percentage of sand is a

little thin. After every heavy rainstorm, we had puddles in our riverbeds

that looked like ordinary puddles of water but weren’t. They were little

puddles of quicksand. Thus, when you stepped into what looked like sand

covered with a thin sheet of water, to your shock, you sank.

Fortunately for all of us urchins who played in or with quicksand, the

quicksand around here was invariably shallow, no more than hip deep.

Nevertheless, it was great fun to lure an unwary city boy out into a

patch of quicksand and leave him screaming, visions of the movie

villain’s demise running through his mind, while he tried helplessly to

flounder out of it. You can’t beat urchin boys for pure torture. I am

sure teenage boys were used as torturers during the Spanish Inquisition.

Then the powers that be paved the bottoms of all our rivers and the

quicksand disappeared. And so with the relentless passage of time, we

have lost, together with the saber-toothed tiger and the mastodon,

quicksand.

I don’t rightly know what urchins do today to torture other urchins

but haven’t the slightest doubt that they have developed something

suitable.

* ROBERT GARDNER is a Corona del Mar resident and a former judge. His

column runs Tuesdays.