If you read my first blog, you are probably curious about this quicksand in Georgia. I will post this story first and see if you can top anything as bizarre as this one!
Ben was about 10 and Brant 7. Bart was just a baby. Ben and Brant and our neighbor's two boys, Ivan and T.J., were all about the same age and had played together for years. But as they had gotten older, they had become braver in their adventures together. About a mile through the woods behind my home is our town's very small industrial park. A new business had just finished up construction. The boys had been playing army in the outskirts of these shared woods. But on this day, they ventured farther and stumbled upon this facility.
As they were walking around checking things out, one of the employees spied them. It was a Saturday, and typically only a handful of people were even working. He told the boys they needed to move on, which they complied. But instead of walking down the drive to the street, or even through the woods back home, my oldest son, Ben, was curious to what this pipe was sticking out of the ground right below the drive.
Of course, Brant followed Ben. He was just as curious, but was also in the habit of following his older brother's lead, too. As they walked down the hill towards the pipe, they began to notice that the soft sand began changing into mud...what fun!! A little mud is always great when you are 7 and 10! As they ventured closer to the pipe, the mud became a little more difficult to maneuver. But they couldn't stop now...they were nearly to the pipe!
Ben and Brant were now standing about knee-deep in this silky sand from months of run-off from the construction, which was also the holding pond. It had essentially dried out from lack of rain, except for this area in the middle of the pond that was nothing more than a large area of mush. It also explains what this pipe was that had Ben so intrigued.
Once Ben realized that there was danger in going any farther into the mud, he and Brant began trying to go back. They couldn't. The mud, which I will now call quicksand, had wrapped it's silky fingers around their little legs and was literally pulling them under! Brant began to cry and Ben began yelling for Ivan and T.J. A 6th grader and the oldest of the group, Ivan decided he would go to the end of the drive and wave a car down. Because it was a Saturday, there wasn't any traffic in the Park, which Ivan soon discovered. T.J. was only in the third grade and his instinct was, "I'm going home!" But as he started back through the woods, he got scared that he wouldn't know his way home alone, and turned back around. It saved my boys lives.
Upon coming back to the pond, T.J. could not find Ivan. He asked Ben where was Ivan, at which time Ben's sense of danger must have really kicked in as he lied to T.J., "He's gone under..now go up there and get help!" Up there was back to the facility where the worker had come out and told them to leave.
You would think this would have been the first place everyone would have thought to go for help. But the boys were probably just a tad scared that they would get in trouble if they bothered the worker again. By now, even T.J.'s sense of danger was in overdrive as he began pounding on the door and luckily, a worker heard the noise. His first instinct was just to get the boys out himself. He found out without even going knee-deep that there was no way he could. He dialed 911.
During this time, Brant had begun to cry. Ben had figured out that the less you moved, the less you were sucked under more. It was hard for Brant to understand he needed to be still. By the time the fire truck, ambulance, city police, and the County Sheriff's department all arrived and they were finally pulled out, the quicksand was chest high on Brant and about waist high on Ben. If T.J. had not gone for help when he did, another hour and my two sons would have literally drowned in quicksand.
By the time the city dispatcher called me and stated, "I have two Jones boys stuck in the mud over at the industrial park," my first reaction was that he had called the wrong Jones family. My boys were not old enough to drive! I had visions of boys mud-bogging and how could it possibly be mine? After he convinced me to drive to the site, I was leaving when Ivan appeared on the scene. Red-faced and sweating from running all the way back through the woods, it was then that I understood that it was in fact my two boys. But being in mud still didn't register to me as a life or death situation.
I drove casually towards the center of town and it wasn't until I began passing the county sheriff's cars that I began to feel a little sense of panic. Normally, you won't see several cars at once in our small little town. By the time I topped the hill at the industrial park and saw all the lights and emergency response vehicles did I understand something was terribly wrong!
When I drove up to the building, a fireman was hosing down my two boys, covered in mud. When he told me what had happened and how close I came to losing my two boys, I think I went into total shock. As I loaded them up into the backseat of the car and started driving home, the looks on their faces told the real story. They were totally quiet and had the most somber looks on their faces, all the while shivering from the cold water that had just been washed over them.
Steve had been at work that day and had missed it all. When he got home, he and I drove back over to the industrial park. Not until then did it really hit me when I looked out across the pond and saw the small holes where my two boys had been pulled to safety how close we came to losing our two boys!
Who would have thought that there was quicksand in Georgia? I thought it was only in places like Africa! You may wonder what kind of punishment Ben and Brant received? Are you kidding? Being in the quicksand was punishment enough!
