My August 17'th Adventure, Part 4 (Click Here For The Beginning With More Pix)!When I got back to my sinking spot, I had to remove all the sticks from around the bog, some of which had fallen over, possibly because the ground became too soft to hold them up when the waters rose after fall rains and spring snowmelt/runoff. There were numerous frogs in/around my bog, which started to scatter as I moved around. I then took a series of photos of the patch of hungry quagmire from different sides:
2018 08 17 1M Crescent.jpg
2018 08 17 1N Crescent.jpg
2018 08 17 1O Crescent.jpg
2018 08 17 1P Crescent.jpg
2018 08 17 1Q Crescent.jpg
I decided to make a quick video from my perspective of me walking over the floating sedge grass around the perimeter of my bog, to capture it moving and sagging under my feet and bubbling swamp gas. It will be linked to in my
Dramatic Sink Videos thread once it is uploaded to Youtube and ready.
It was after 1 pm, and my stomach was growling, so I finally sat down on a rock and ate a couple of Deluxe Pizza Pops, before getting set up for my first dramatic sinking video of the season!
I selected a stick, and poked it into the ground in a selected spot near the southwestern part of the bog. I mounted the camera onto my Gorillapod, and wrapped its knobby tentacles around the upper part of the stick. But, since I had cataract surgery in my good right eye (my left eye has poor grainy vision), I had lost my nearsightedness (have to wait half a year before I can get prescription glasses with bifocals), and couldn't see the camera display from close up, and that, combined with the glare from the sun on the screen, resulted in me having a bit of trouble getting the camera's movie's 16:9 view properly centered on my targeted sinking point. I had to try and look at a small screen from further away while trying to shade it with my hand. But, after a lot of fiddling around, I did manage to get my spot (hopefully) properly framed, hit record (actually I hit the button a few times because I wasn't certain if it was recording, inadvertently creating a couple of short videos of just the bog), and stepped away, hoping the springiness of the ground didn't cause the stick the camera was mounted on to shift when my weight was removed from the floating sedge grass there. For the scene, I wore a swimming cap to keep my hair and ears dry and clean to make cleanup easier, and wore swim goggles to keep my eyes clean as well (cataract surgery was back in early May, so no risk of infection now).
Hoping for the best, I proceeded with the scene, having to do my mentally selected improvisational opening lines a second time after getting things mixed up the first time. When I finally took the fateful
plunge, trying not to step on any frogs, I was surprised to find that the mud wasn't loose after all, but rather thick, with only a softer surface!
The water on top was probably from the rain we had a week earlier, rain which I had thought would finally clear away the smoke, but instead had even worse smoke move in behind it!
There was also a layer of stiff mud under the looser top mud, which was likely the stuff that had dried on top the previous year before I added more mud on top. Perhaps without my addition of mud, that hard surface might have loosened up when the water rose in fall/winter/spring.
But then, the mud would have not been as thick as it was now. I was very happy to see that the mud was bubbling and farting lots of swamp gas, which really added to the situation!
I just hoped the camera mic picked it up. I was concerned about the occasional wind interfering with the sound. Even though I was concerned about making my neck pain worse, I decided to take my chances and do a submergence in the thick mud anyways. I felt that carefully moving my head in the mud without extending it one way or another would be like pressing and moving my head against my pillow in bed at night.
Although I felt some brief crunches, I think my neck did come out okay after that. I tried limiting how high I lifted my head up to reduce the stress. I was also a bit concerned about whether moving in the mud would aggravate my hip pain or inner thigh pain, as well, but things didn't seem too bad so far.
After I finished the scene and worked my way out of the mud, I cleaned my hands and pressed the record button to stop the recording. But, once again, due to my lack of nearsightedness, I couldn't tell if the recording stopped or not, so I hit it again a couple times, resulting in another brief extra video of just the bog. A couple days later, I discarded the three short videos, since they contained nothing but a few seconds of shaky views of the bog. My videos have been uploaded to YouTube and are linked to in my
Dramatic Sink Videos thread .
To Be Continued...