Jim continued, “there was a footbridge over this beautiful stretch of white sand creek. Everyone had a great time swimming and playing on the right side of the bridge. Old Jack there jumped over on the other side, and people went crazy. Jack asked what’s wrong, they tell him his side is quicksand. Without touching bottom, he calmly swims back to the bridge jumping back in on the right side. Jack’s that kind of crazy,” ....

              Endless Times series, Volume Two: Murphys Diggins, page 51

              Oh yeah, there’s a story to this; you can’t make this stuff up, well, not easily. Here we are in Florala, Alabama, and yes, this place really exists, half a town in Alabama and the other half in Florida. There we are painting water towers in a place where half the population still lived in little shanties on stilts to keep out snakes and high water, with latrines back behind the house. I digress; the locals went nuts on our Missouri pot and turned us on to where the magic mushrooms grow out of cow-piles. Nowadays they say psilocybin can be used to treat psychosis. In our time, it was strictly recreational. Anyway, we went crazy over countless free mushrooms growing out of cow manure. We’d eat them straight out of a fresh pile or pick a peck-sack for later.



              The latter part is how the swimming story came about. Twenty or thirty of us ingested a good quantity of herbal ‘medicine’ and when we could drive, went for a midnight swim at a little creek just off an Alabama back road. Swimming was great on a hot Alabama night in July. Skinny-dipping with plenty of pretty southern girls in the bunch only added to the fun. Somehow, I ended up back on the bridge and dove in the other side. Twenty or so yelling hippies alerted me to a problem. Since I didn’t have any pants to lose, that wasn’t it, so I started listening and figured out the bottom was quicksand on my side; who knew? It was easy floating back to the bridge without touching bottom, after all, I’d just watched my big toe turn into a banana. After that trick, not being sucked under by naturally occurring quicksand was a breeze. That is ten feet tall and bullet-proof.