Quicksand!

A rather sticky situation learning to trust my intuition

Before too long, I found myself — to my surprise — in Chatsworth. This little town lies in pasture country on the far western edge of the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest. I had driven far enough in the “wrong” direction the night before to end up closer to Chattanooga, Tennessee than to Atlanta!

Rolling countryside, Chatsworth, Georgia. Image: Photography by Suzan on Google Maps.

I could have driven over to Dalton, hopped on I-75, and made it home in about an hour and fifteen minutes. I needed to get back to the house on Robin Lane for food/financial reasons — I only had four dollars left in my pocket and a few gallons of gas left in the tank.

But I hadn’t given up on getting something out of this pilgrimage. (Read part one here, if you missed it.)

So I headed down the 411 and cut over on the 76 to Ellijay, which had struck me as a potentially magical little town every time I’d driven by it. I wanted to stop and meander around, but there were rednecks bombing around the square in loud pick-up trucks and I couldn’t find a place to park and I was a little strung out on a combination of spiritual yearning, fear of poverty, not much sleep and very little food.

So I kept driving.

Around eleven in the morning I was cruising along state highway 136, at the southern edge of Carters Lake, a few miles south of Ramhurst. Driving across a bridge over Talking Rock Creek, I noticed a gravel drive where I could pull off and park. Down under the bridge where the creek crosses under and widens out into Carters Lake, I thought I could find a nice spot on some rocks and do some writing in my journal.

So I put my notebook into a trash bag I’d packed at the last moment for situations just like this one, put on my raincoat, and headed down to the creek. I felt a strong attraction to a flat, grassy area on the opposite bank of the creek but I also wanted to walk down to the lake and explore.

I crossed under the bridge and set off across the mud flats to where it looked as though I could get across the creek without too much difficulty, and from there, make it to a little flat beach area.

Before too long the going got squishy. I realized I wasn’t going to keep my boots clean.

A few steps further and the mud was squishing over the tops of my boots. I knew I wasn’t going to keep my pants clean.

But I managed to pick my way to firmer spots of ground until I reached a shallow ford across the creek. I took a step towards the other side and my leg sank in the mud up to my knee.

I was able to pull my leg out of the mud but it wasn’t easy. I was starting to think crossing the creek wasn’t in the cards and that maybe I’d be better off making it back to higher ground on the side I was on.

So I started walking at an angle back towards the shore, making a V shape from where I’d entered the creek zone. It was tough going but I was already dirty and — if I could just make it back to the shoreline — there were plenty of rocks there where I could walk without sinking into the mud.

I trudged my way to within 50 feet of dry land. Only one stretch of soft-looking mud left to traverse and I’d be back on solid ground. I took a step forward and my leg plunged into the mud up to the middle of my thigh. I took another step, praying for something solid under the surface to support me but my left leg sank even deeper into the mud.

The mud all around me was now gurgling and making loud sucking sounds. As I sank deeper in, dozens of tiny bubbles boiled up to the surface and popped, filling the air around me with a faintly-sulfurous smell.

Within a few seconds, I had sunk in the mud up to my waist. A huge surge of adrenaline flooded my body and the thought hit my brain: Quicksand!

I didn’t know there was quicksand in Georgia!¹ A technicolor memory of a Gilligan’s Island episode where Gilligan gets stuck in quicksand and has to be rescued by the Skipper flashed across my mind.

I was on the edge of full-blown panic. Here was I in the middle of nowhere, sinking into this mud that had a grip on me like wet cement. I knew I had to somehow go back and retrace my steps but I was stuck so firmly that I couldn’t turn around.

I didn’t seem to be sinking any deeper, so I took a moment to breathe. I looked over my shoulder at the beautiful, empty lake in the near distance and suddenly started laughing. Wouldn’t that be a funny one — if the end of Pilgrimage #3, and all of my wild, out-of-comfort-zone efforts to learn to trust my intuition ended with me slowly sinking below the surface in a pool of sucking mud, never to be seen again.

It occurred to me that since I wasn’t sinking any further, I could just stay here. Someone, a fisherman on the lake or a local driving over the bridge, would eventually have to notice me. Or, I could try what I remembered reading somewhere in the distant past as being the only way to extricate oneself from quicksand: “swim” across the surface of the mud.

This reminds me of the perhaps-apocryphal story of Keith Moon, drummer for The Who, getting really drunk at the Holiday Inn in my hometown of Flint, Michigan, and driving a Lincoln Continental into the hotel pool. As Moon recalled it, he saved himself from drowning by suddenly remembering a lesson from his high school physics class as water was filling up the car:

In a startling moment of logic, I said: “Well, I can’t open the doors until the pressure is the same”. It’s amazing how I remembered those things from my physics class. So I’m sitting there, thinking about me situation, as the water creeps up to me nose. When there’s just enough air in the top of the car to take a gulp, I fill up me lungs, throw open the door and go rising to the top of the pool. So I went back to the party, streaming water. - Loudersound.com

I took off my shoulder bag and put it under my raincoat, hoping to save my precious notes. Then, and I still don’t know how I did this, I used my hands to wiggle my right leg free and pry it above the surface of the mud. An epic struggle that took several minutes, accompanied all the while by the hideous sucking and gurgling sounds.

This accomplished, I twisted my body and planted my right leg behind me in the direction where the mud had been firmer. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t free my left leg.

I was afraid of the next maneuver. Visions of my horizontal body, face down, being swallowed whole by the sucking mud flashed across the screen of my mind. But the adrenaline was running strong and I planed my body flat onto the mud. Kicking with my free leg, I thrust both arms down in front of me and pulled as hard as I could. On the third attempt my left leg popped to the surface and I was able to, over the course of several minutes, “swim” across the 20 yards of mud that separated me from the firmer ground near the shoreline.

The exertion was immense. I had to stop every few strokes to rest, holding my face just above the sulfur-smelling surface of the mud. But I finally reached a spot where I could stand up and only sink in to mid-calf.

I glanced up toward the bridge and saw, to my surprise, that someone was leaning over the railing watching me. It was a cop, wearing a sheriff’s hat, standing next to a brown sheriff’s vehicle parked on the bridge.

I floundered over to a big piece of driftwood and sat there gasping for air for a couple of minutes before I had the energy to wave to the cop that I was OK. I was feeling a lot of shame for having gotten myself into such a stupid predicament and some part of me was afraid he was going to arrest me for trespassing or vagrancy. (From the time I was a teenager, I was haunted by this persistent fear of being busted for being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be.)

The cop just shook his head slowly and then got in his car and roared off. At which point, I realized that in some strange way, the Universe really was watching out for me. I mean, this spot really was in the middle of nowhere — no houses, no businesses, no traffic — and somehow the local sheriff just happened to pass by and stop at the moment when I really might have needed rescuing.

Back in Marietta, I puzzled over the meaning of the pilgrimage. I hadn’t found the idyllic meadow I’d attached my thoughts to finding. (Interesting, looking back at my notes, that this meadow was actually described in my meditation as “a desolate place” — which I certainly had managed to find.)

I hadn’t gotten the lightning bolt of enlightenment that I was desperately seeking and that I remained firmly convinced (for several years) must be just around the next corner.

What I had no way of knowing at this stage of my spiritual journey was how much trauma I still needed to clear (trauma that was still being kept at bay with drugs and alcohol and other ego-addictions) to be able to consistently access the wisdom of my higher self and interpret its guidance correctly.

I grappled with “the meaning” in my journals for the next few days but I couldn’t come up with any all-encompassing answer that would assuage the ego. The closest I probably got was this:

I think one of the meanings of my latest pilgrimage could be: “Just do it. It doesn’t matter if you understand. Are you willing to keep doing it, keep following the voice, even when it doesn’t make sense? Even when no explanation is given?”

Looking back, I feel a lot of compassion for my younger self. I would certainly do my best to guide him to some more graceful ways of finding his authentic Self if I could. I might point out that perhaps the deepest benefit of these pilgrimages was that he repeatedly backed himself into positions that forced him to confront his loneliness, and his inability — due to unacknowledged and, indeed, unsuspected childhood trauma — to trust himself or trust Life. Forced him to come face to face with his black-and-white thinking and with his intense desire to be free of the toxic-shame-based addictions that kept him separated from Life and from inner peace.

What do you think? I’d love to know if this pilgrimage sparked any insights for you or if you resonated with my younger self’s burning desire to find a better way of living than the mental and spiritual prison of consensus Matrix reality. Please share your thoughts in the comments!

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1. Opinion on this seems to be divided. Some people say that quicksand only occurs in desert terrain. But it is used colloquially to describe the sucking mud that happens along creeks, rivers, and marshes in the South.