Then there was the Time I Got Caught In Quicksand While Trying To Escape From A Spider.

I was 24, Nate was around 2, it was a summer day and we were visiting the farm that my family owned in Indiana. (The same one I lived on when I was a kid). The farm is about 600 acres. There's a cabin and a small house on the front few acres that face the main highway. Deeper into the property there's a creek (which is a small river, really, or a really big stream), and across the creek are lots of woods and some cultivated areas as well as the remains of the house we'd lived in. When I visit the farm, I always like to go down to the creek and have a look around to see how it's changed course since I was last there. To me, it's the heart of the farm and I feel a strong connection to that place.

My father was living in the cabin on the farm at this particular time, and several of my aunts and uncles were visiting as well. They were all sitting outside the cabin on the porch and were probably either cooking or eating. In my family, that's just what we do. I decided to take Nate for a little walk down to the creek. To get there, you had to walk about half a mile, between a big cornfield on one side and a fenced pasture on the other, then there was a little wooded area right before you got down to the creek. At the wooded area, the path forked -- go left to the 'crossing' or right to the 'swimming hole'. Usually, I go to the crossing. I'm not sure how they did it -- probably involved tractors -- but my dad and my uncles kept the crossing shallow enough to drive across (hence it's name). Maybe they were dumping gravel in. I don't know. On this day, instead of heading to the crossing, I decided to walk down to the swimming hole.

To get to there, I followed the path until I came to a steep drop off, which was about three feet high. Or low. Depending on whether you were on the top or the bottom of it, I guess. Anyway, this bank was covered in tall grass and although it was steepish, Nate and I were able to climb down without much difficulty. At the bottom of the bank, there's an area about fifteen feet wide of sand and rocks, then the creek. The creek had changed course quite a bit since the last time I'd been there. I didn't really recognize which part exactly had been our old swimming hole. Immediately on the other side of the creek was another steep bank, this one about five feet tall and covered in mud.

Nate and I passed a pleasant ten or fifteen minutes looking for flat rocks and skipping them across the creek. (Well, I was skipping them and Nate was flinging them in and giggling joyfully). This might sound hokey, but it really does something good for my soul to be down there. It's beautiful. It's isolated -- I was far enough away from the cabin that I couldn't hear my rowdy relatives at all. All you can hear is the wind in the trees and the sound of the water running and various insects buzzing. Beyond the mud bank on the other side of the creek is another big cornfield, and I could see the tassels on the corn, and huge hills and trees behind that. It smells good there too.

After soaking up the experience for a bit, I decided we should walk down to the crossing and see how that was looking. I took Nate's hand and started to climb back up the grassy bank where we'd come down. I was only a step or two up the bank when I saw the biggest spider I'd ever seen sitting on a weed right directly in the middle of the path where I was climbing up. It's butt was as big as a large grape. A very large grape. I'm an arachneaphobiac from way back and I knew as soon as I saw it that 600 acres was not big enough for me and that spider. Any thought of me climbing up that bank at that point was totally out of the question. The bank to either side of the spider was not climbable. There were bushes and various other obstacles that made it impassable. The only alternative I could come up with was to go across the creek, walk down to the crossing from that side, and then wade back across and go back to the cabin.

I looked at the mud bank. It was steep, but I didn't think I'd have any trouble climbing it. In fact, I thought it might be fun in a G.I. Joe sort of way. I looked at the creek itself. At it's narrowest point, it was about four feet across; a little too wide to leap across with a two year old in my arms. I thought about wading down the creek to the crossing...I could see sand bars that I could walk on that stretched out a long way in that direction. I actually went a long way in that direction until I came to a place where there were no more sand bars and I wasn't sure how deep the water was. I knew from swimming in the creek all my life that in certain places it was very deep. I also was aware that the sand bars weren't safe because there were patches of quicksand. Of course that was something I'd heard and never actually believed -- still, I was very careful.

Eventually I found myself back where I started. My only choices were to cross the creek where it was only four feet across or to climb up the grassy bank and hope I didn't run into the spider. I didn't even really consider the second option. I was mostly thinking, 'it's only about four feet wide, it can't possibly be that deep right here.' The problem was that I couldn't actually see the bottom.

So I picked up Nate and took a step into the water. It wasn't quite up to my knee. I took another step. And another. And then I sank to my knees in quicksand, which meant the water was up past my waist at that point. It was all I could do for the next few seconds to just avoid panicking. I could barely move my legs, but I slogged forward a bit and managed to sink to my thighs. I was holding Nate above the water and trying not to scare him while I stood there and tried to figure out what to do. I couldn't move forwards or backwards. I was afraid that I was going to be sucked down and die a horrible death. We were only a couple of feet away from the muddy bank at that point and I gave some serious thought to flinging Nate to the other side, but I was afraid that he'd slide down the bank and end up drowning. I stood there long enough, panicking and trying to figure out how to avoid taking Nate with me, that I slowly realized that I wasn't sinking anymore. I'm sure I was in quicksand, but I think there must have been something more solid under it. Once I realized that I probably wasn't going to be sucked down to my death, I calmed down and started leaning forwards and slowly managed to work my way the last foot or two to the mud bank, climbed up with no trouble, and ended up safe, wet and sandy on the other side. I walked down to the crossing, waded across, and headed back up to join my family.

I have rarely felt so foolish in my life as I did after that. To avoid a creature that was smaller than my little finger, I waded into dangerous waters with my two year old in my arms. Because the spider might possibly have touched me. I wasn't even afraid of it biting me. And I'm not allergic. I just felt like I would rather die than have it touch me. I stopped feeling that way at about the same moment I thought I actually might possibly die in a patch of quicksand.

I think there's probably something profound to be gotten out of this regarding irrational fears and the unknown, but I'm just not feeling philosphical enough to write it. For now I'm just thinking that if I see another big ass spider, I might give some thought to chasing it away before I go charging into the deep waters.