A, yes, quick sand, the bane of my childhood.
My mom once actually stepped in quicksand (thankfully only up to the top of her boot). It was in Canada. Yes, Canada has quicksand! She was visiting my uncle in Saskatchewan.
Unlike the movies, it fits its name. One minute she was walking, then suddenly it was like she fell into a pit, but couldn’t get her boot out. I can’t remember how the story ended. This was like 35 years ago that she told me about it.
Couple of years ago, I walked through a forest somewhere in the middle of The Netherlands, called the Waterloopbos, and I came across a blocked off area with quicksand warnings.
I kinda wish I had lost my shoes there, because the shoes I was wearing weren’t good for forest walking.
That was the first and so far only time I had seen quicksand in my 44 years of existing on this blue marble.
Reading all these adventure books and comics made me really fear quicksand as a child… I was living in East Berlins suburbs. The most comparable thing to quicksand would have been a mud puddle!
When I was a kid there was a Norwegian children movie called “The hunt for the kidney stone” where a kid travels into the body of his sick grandpa to find out what’s wrong with him (kidney stone). After the movie I asked my mom what kidney stones are, and where they come from. “You can get them if you eat too much salt, for example” she says, and after that I was TERRIFIED every time my parents would put salt on anything.
I read a story somewhere of someone getting them from the oxalates in peanut butter.
They were eating like 1 kg a week for a month or two though.
Sometimes I look at the wide open sky and think “What if gravity suddenly reverses and I fall up into the sky and then space? That would be really dangerous.”
I had a clear childhood memory of when gravity temporarily vanished and we all had to duck and cover under our desks. Years later I learned how gravity worked. A few years after that I realized my memory was impossible though it felt very real. This may be the root of my trust issues…
Stephen King wrote a story of just that happening to a guy. Except gravity didn’t reverse he just kind of lost mass, but the result was the same.
Dude wasn’t even dieting what was crazy is for all intents in purposes no one could tell he was losing weight. He looked the same weight but when he get on a scale it show him losing weight. You really should read it. For some reason its a stand alone novel, but its actually really short for a Stephen King novel.
Roaming black holes
Gamma ray bursts
The germans invading
Electrified bodies/puddles of water
Yknow, the usual stuff kids are afraid of…
