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If you, like me, grew up in the 90s, you probably thought that quicksand would be much larger in obstacle in life than it turned out to be.
Between Indiana Jones movies and countless hours spent playing Super Mario 64, I was pretty sure that I was going to have to fight for my life at some point due to quicksand.
Alas, that turned out not to be the case.
Unless, of course, you’re Jamie Acord, a woman who was almost swallowed alive by quicksand while recently walking on a beach in Maine.
“Literally it was kind of like I just dropped into a manhole cover,” Acord told PEOPLE. “We’re walking along, just talking, and all of a sudden I went into the sand.”
So, what did she do next? Did she panic? Because I absolutely would have panicked.
“It was kind of one of those moments where I didn’t know what to do. This is a new thing that’s never happened before,” she said. “And I go to that beach all the time.”
Thankfully, Acord’s husband was able to pull her out with only minor injuries.
“And as soon as he pulled me out, we turned around to look to see what had occurred because we just assumed I’d fallen in an actual hole and there was nothing there,” she adds. “It looked just like the beach. It had filled itself right back in.”
Well, that’s terrifying.
But there is good news for anybody who has now decided they’re never going to a beach again. You can’t actually drown in quicksand.
The good folks over at Mythbusters tested the theory several years back, and determined that because human beings are less dense than the sand, they will eventually reach a buoyancy point.
You can, however, get stuck. And that’s where problems arise. So if you’re going to walk on the beach, do it with another person or when other people are around, lest you wind up in a perilous predicament.