I found actual quicksand in North Carolina. This is not a drill.

An entire generation grew up being told that they were surrounded by spots where they might slowly sink to their doom. But is quicksand a real problem? It is in one place, thanks to dredging.

Last weekend, I was out at the coast and saw a sign. A sign that was so troubling, so nightmare-conjuring, so panic-inducing that I got out of my car to take a closer (but not too close) look.

Quicksand! Real, actual quicksand! I have been all over North Carolina, and I can honestly say that I have never seen a warning sign that told me how close I was to certain, sinking doom.

Wait, why do you care so much about quicksand?

Some context here. I am 45 years old. I grew up watching a lot of mediocre television, as did a lot of people who are older than me. And back in the day, the shows I watched portrayed quicksand as a broad threat to humanity. It showed up in movies and sitcoms and cartoons. Hell, we almost lost the Skipper to quicksand on Gilligan’s Island!

I’m not going to go too deep (get it) into popular culture here. But people who have actually analyzed this think that we reached peak quicksand in the 1960s. During that decade, three percent of all movies (or roughly one-in-35) featured quicksand, according to an analysis by Slate. Why did it show up so much? There are theories that it metaphorically represented our involvement in the Vietnam War. Also, images of women sinking into quicksand were a bit of a fetish to some people. In any event, quicksand continued to be A Thing through the 1980s, but slowly died out, partially because it turned into a cheesy cliche. The Slate article, written in 2010, asked a bunch of fourth-graders if they were afraid of quicksand. Their unanimous answer? Nope!

Also, the myth of killer quicksand has largely been debunked, most famously by our most trusted arbiters of truth: MythBusters. That doesn’t mean quicksand doesn’t actually exist, or isn’t dangerous every once in a while. Last year, a woman walking on the beach in Maine sunk to her waist in quicksand. Her husband got her out. Local officials up there think the culprit may have been a river that shifted position, and left some soft areas of sand underneath some normal-looking stretches of beach. Even though quicksand isn’t a constant head-on-a-swivel threat, it’s still the object of some fascination. Google Trends show a consistent interest in that search term since 2004. It peaked with the Maine quicksand incident. But people are also interested in it for another reason: Toyota Tacomas once came in a tan color named quicksand.

The Maine story notwithstanding, our awareness of quicksand comes mostly from works of fiction. That’s why the “Danger: Quicksand” sign I saw was so jarring. This wasn’t just some random sign. It was on state property! It’s a North Carolina-sanctioned warning! This, to me, was like the moment in “Miracle on 34th Street” where the State of New York grudgingly acknowledges the existence of Santa Claus. If you weren’t a believer before, you sort of have to be a believer now.

Where is this quicksand, exactly?

To be specific, this sign was on top of a berm that overlooks the parking lot at the Southport Ferry Terminal. It’s also behind a barbed wire fence, so it’s not like you can run up the hill to take a closer look.

I’ve been using this ferry terminal off and on for 15 years, and this was the first time I’d noticed the sign. It’s apparently been there for a long time. A writer for GQ noticed it during a trip to Southport in 2006! But for a while, there was a line of trees in between the fence and the berm. Those trees were cleared out a few years ago, but before that, they conveniently hid everything that was back there.

From the air, though, you can definitely see a bunch of gray and tan stuff behind that berm. On the Google Maps view below, it’s the big light-colored pond just to the south of the ferry terminal building.

While I was waiting for the ferry to take me back to Fort Fisher, I asked a terminal worker what the sign was about. “Dredge spoils,” he told me. “We take them out of the creek.” Whenever it’s dry, it’s just mostly sand, he said. But if it gets wet, “it really turns to goo.”

The spokesman for the North Carolina Ferry Division, Tim Hass, confirmed that yes, what’s labeled as quicksand is, in fact, “wet, watery sand from a spoil site.”

So, uh, what’s a spoil site?

Spoil alert

For this, I turned to Kemp Burdette, the Cape Fear Riverkeeper and the man who paddled the entire length of the river with me nine years ago. Basically, Kemp says, the lower part of the Cape Fear River is an estuary that’s been turned into shipping channel. In order to allow really big container ships to make it upriver from the Atlantic Ocean to the Port of Wilmington, the Army Corps of Engineers has to dredge the bottom of the river. Boats keep getting bigger, so for more than a hundred years, the Corps has been making the river deeper and deeper. Last month, the port welcomed its largest container ship ever, the ZIM Mount Rainer, which is about 1,200 feet long and can hold 15,000 twenty-foot containers. The ship wasn’t fully loaded when it arrived—if it had been, it wouldn’t have been able to make up the 26-mile-long shipping channel, which is 42 feet deep at low tide. That may seem deep, but there’s 47 feet of water in the channel that leads to Savannah’s port, and Charleston’s has a 52 foot draft. There’s a plan in the works to deepen the Cape Fear channel to 47 feet to make sure the Port of Wilmington can continue to grow and bring in even bigger container ships.

That’ll require the dredging of tens of million of tons of sand and mud. In fact, keeping the channel at its current depth requires a lot of dredging! There’s a lot of sediment coming down the Cape Fear, and it swirls around and makes some parts shallower at times. Storms can really mess things up. So the Corps sends a dredger out—basically a large floating vacuum cleaner—and it sucks all of the stuff on the bottom into a pipe. The more stuff you suck up, the deeper the water gets.

But! All of that mud, rock, sand and other stuff on the bottom has to go somewhere. It used to be that the Corps would just dump it all into another part of the river. Those spots eventually became islands, and there are lots of them in the Cape Fear River. “The common practice was to build a berm on a spoil island and dump the mud into the berm,” Kemp told me. You know who loved those new islands? Birds. Royal and Sandwich Terns continue to fill up two spots—Ferry Slip Island and South Pelican Island—during nesting season, since they love the lack of vegetation and lack of natural predators there. Both of those islands are visible from the Fort Fisher-Southport Ferry, and Audubon and the Corps help take care of them.

More recently, though, dredgers have been a little more conscious of where they deposit the stuff they pull off the bottom, along with what’s in it. “A lot of the spoil that you're dredging up out of the Cape Fear is very contaminated because all of the industry that's been along the river for all of these years,” Kemp says. “There's just all kinds of junk down there, heavy metals, PCBs, and whatever else.” Increasingly, the spoil from the Cape Fear ends up behind a giant 42-foot-tall berm on Eagle Island, which sits across the river from the State Port. Other spoil is piped further out into the Atlantic Ocean, where it’s less likely to drift back into the shipping channel.

But! So far we’ve just been talking about the main shipping channel that runs 26-miles from the State Port to the mouth of the Cape Fear. The State of North Carolina, however, needs to create smaller side channels that connect to its terminals at Fort Fisher and Southport. So it runs its own dredge—named the Manteo—and uses it to keep the ferry channels deep enough. Basically, they’re clearing out the marine equivalent of side streets that connect to a superhighway.

And where does all of that sand, rock, and much go? You guessed it: Into the big slurry pond next to the Southport Ferry Terminal. According to state records, the last big dredging project for the ferry happened in 2022, and satellite images show a new deposit of spoil in the pond there around that time. Over time, the sediment settles and the water runs off or dries. The quicksand turns into … sand. That’s just how spoil works, Kemp says. “If you go years later, spoil islands are relatively hard on top. If you get a hard rain or something, they might get muddy again,” he told me. “But in that initial phase when it's just a slurry of mud, it is very much quicksand.”

So do I have to worry about quicksand elsewhere?

Is this the only place in North Carolina where quicksand is an issue? Well, it might be one of the only places where it’s officially called out by name. Every once in a while, someone stumbles upon a handmade warning sign somewhere in the woods, and it becomes the object of great interest on hunting and fishing message boards. Last year, the Daily Mail made a map of the places where people should “steer clear” of quicksand. The coast of the Carolinas was on it.

Not long after that story came out, Public Radio East decided to investigate the scourge of quicksand in Eastern North Carolina. What they found was more of an annoyance. “Apparently there are some legitimate instances of quicksand,” naturalist Jerry Reynolds told PRE while acknowledging that he himself had never encountered it. “I think it's primarily when there's an underground spring welling up ... and if you get in that situation where the sand soil is more of an oiled mass, it can be quicksand.”

All of this depends on how you define quicksand. A lot of people call it by a more boring name: muck. And there are plenty of stories of people running into boot-sucking mud in tidal marshes, swamps, streams, or creeks. As in: You step in, you sink down, and in an effort to get out, your boot comes off and disappears into the muck. It’s something to be aware of, Reynolds said, but not something to be deathly afraid of.

That rings true to Kemp Burdette, who grew up along the Intracoastal Waterway. He’s had to pull himself out of the muck many times over the years. “I lived at a marina on Whiskey Creek across from one of these spoil islands,” he says. “I actually had a little jon boat when I was a little kid. And I would row it over to the spoil island and camp and just be a kid over there. You would see this kind of big flat muddy area that had a cracked geometric pattern, the kind you see when wet mud dries out and shrinks a little bit. You'd be like, ‘That looks pretty dry. I'll go out there and walk around.’ You would take two steps, and all of a sudden you would be in up above your knee. It wasn't dry at all. I'd have to lay down on my stomach and crawl back out. I'd be totally covered in mud and think: That happened a lot quicker than I thought!”

Hence, it’s almost certain that quicksand exists, but your chances of ending up in a Princess Bride situation in Eastern North Carolina are virtually zero. Still, if you muck around on squishy ground long enough, eventually the muck is gonna get you, along with whatever’s on your feet. “I don't know if it was quite as common as the cartoons made it seem,” Kemp says, “but it definitely happened to me a few times.”