[wat10000]

I was told this was a potential last-ditch way to escape if you stalled while crossing railroad tracks.

In hindsight, stalling while crossing railroad tracks, like quicksand, is a much less common danger in adulthood than I was lead to believe as a younger person.

[riffraff]

what's the thing with quicksand?

I was born in 1980 and it seemed people would get stuck in quicksand on tv regularly when I was a kid, but it seems a kind of danger that has almost disappeared from the collective narrative.

Why was it popular before? Why isn't it anymore? This baffles me.

[th0ma5]

You still can very much die in quicksand but the problem is that you get like your foot stuck in a way that you just can't escape and then you just die out there like that. But the idea that you sink down and drowned is some kind of weird combination of a swamp and not really quicksand but is much more filmable.

[dmurray]

You get your foot stuck in and then the tide comes in and you drown.

Most quicksand I'm aware of is in tidal flats [0] [1] and it really is dangerous to take a short cut over them. Come to think of it, most normal sand I encounter is in tidal flats, too.

[0] https://www.98fm.com/news/north-dublin-beaches-quicksand-war...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/southend-on-sea-deadly-...

[bityard]

I don't know why, but I expected quicksand to be an Australia thing. "Even the dirt tries to kill you."

[riffraff]

well, dirt does kill you in Australia. In multiple[0] ways[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldust [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkholderia_pseudomallei

[RGamma]

Nintendo taught me that quicksand is located in deserts.

[_carbyau_]

"Quicksand" is the harder sand just above the water line that is more solid and faster to walk/run on.... /s

[eqvinox]

Great, now the smartass in me thinks everywhere is quicksand because it's just a bunch of compacted sand¹ on top of the groundwater aquifer…

¹ yes I know soil is not sand

[justin66]

> Why was it popular before? Why isn't it anymore? This baffles me.

Television moved on to lava in the interest of progress.

[thinkingemote]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuicksandSucks

TV Tropes suggests the idea whilst even existing in fiction for hundred of years before TV, is now "discredited".

---

Personally I prefer more interesting madcap cultural theories. Here's one from the top of my head:

Quicksand refers to anxiety about the natural world from an increasingly urbanised and ecologically disconnected population. Or maybe Quicksand represents an increasing urban populations attitude towards nature. It represents the opposite of a safe, technology, capitalist, consumerist industrial world of the post WW2 era. Nature was literally seen as hostile. Nature can make a person stuck, capture them, and kill them. It's allied with getting lost in the woods stories, a trope which emphasizes both physical and existential disorientation in the face of nature's indifference

Quicksand on TV existed throughout the early ecological hippy inspired new age of the late 20th century but the seeds were being sown. This changed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as we witnessed the convergence of environmental concerns (e.g. plastic bags, straws, global warming) with the logic of neoliberal capitalism, together with an increase in bureaucratic management on behalf of people. Nature is not scary but something to be protected from harm. Nature is reconfigured from a place of danger to a place of stewardship. Avatar, the movie represents the change the most.

Thus, the role of cities and technology as agents of death and destruction have changed. It is not nature that entraps or destroys, but rather the infrastructures of urbanization, capitalism, and technological progress. Ironically this valorisation of nature is happening at the same time as increasingly technological manipulation of the rural environment - mechanisation of farming, house building, terraforming, weather modification. Nature is no longer wild, is not even tame, it's another resource to be shaped and used.

Quicksand not only is discredited as being inaccurate, it's ideologically impossible for nature to be dangerous anymore.

[riffraff]

I like this theory, especially connected to how few shows deal with open nature anymore (stuff in the savana or jungle or old west with pumas everywhere etc). We seem to have become thoroughly urbanized even in imagination.