Title and subtitle of an article in Smithsonian Magazine. It's an interesting story, even though I don't think the dune "swallowed" the boy. According to his friend, the only other person who saw what happened, the boy saw a hole in the sand and climbed down into it.
When the fathers turned around, there was no sign of Nathan—just a round, 12-inch-diameter hole in the sand. Keith, tall and beanpole thin, lay across the sand and reached into the hole.
“I’m scared,” came the boy’s voice from somewhere in the darkness....
The men dug furiously, confident they’d soon feel Nathan’s hand or head. But within minutes, sand was sloughing into the hole from every direction.
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I remember that story. A happy ending to a waking nightmare.
Initial Reaction:
http://youtu.be/FrLba1rE4sY
I'm always worried about this sort of thing up on beaches around the North Atlantic. (Have ended up thigh deep in sand / mud a couple times. Ended up breaking my ankle at one point.)
There're Martians down there.
I spent many hours at that park when I was in high school. I don't remember "Baldy" though.
That kid must be a chosen one.
The Indiana dunes shoreline is like another planet. The retreating Ice Age glaciers dumped moraine after moraine along the southern shore of Lake Michigan as it retreated; and then for 15,000 years lake storm winds blew sand south and ashore there.
The Indian Tribe that lived around there among the sandy beaches had to be called the Miami.
Ken Kesey's novel "Sometime a Great Notion" includes an incident involving a "tree hole" on an Oregon beach. I'd think there would be more incidents to study to find similarities and patterns.
Interesting story; boring article.
I don't remember "Baldy" though.
Has a wiki page.
Photo shows it massiveness.
There's that horrifying scene in "Lawrence of Arabia" where one of Lawrence's young proteges is swallowed by a sand dune. I think it has something to do with the way the wind blows the sand and the density of different layers of sand, which allows weak spots and cavities to form that collapse under weight.
In a broad sense, fashion is still more important than this sciency stuff.
The science of all this is fascinating.
The parents's dining at Applebee's during the rescue is bizarre.
WHat kind of shirt was he wearing? That may have been a factor.
m stone said...
The parents's dining at Applebee's during the rescue is bizarre.
It wasn't the parents who dined a Applebees during the rescue-- at was the naysaying female STEM worker.
Correction noted. Thank you chickelit.
"When you study something for so long and your knowledge leads you to the wrong conclusion, it's very disconcerting."
Everything she knew about geology—all the courses she’d taken, all the papers she’d read over years of study—told her this couldn’t happen. But her science had led her astray.
Silly, science NEVER leads anyone astray.
My friend and I were on a driving tour of Michigan and Wisconsin and were there about a week before it happened. We parked in the parking lot right behind the dune but that side was blocked off with a fence because they said it was unstable and had been eroding over the years. It was blocked to protect the dune, not the people.
To get to the front side where the path to the top is we had to walk around on another circuitous trail through the woods probably half a mile. So by the time we got there we were pretty tired, it was really hot, and we were short of time because we had a long way to drive still that day. So we skipped climbing up there. Then we read about that boy just a week later. Maybe we dodged a bullet.
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