Getting swallowed by a swamp on the side of the turnpike would have been a uniquely Jersey way to go.

Authorities say state troopers rescued a man stranded and freezing waist-deep in the marsh along the highway's shoulder in Elizabeth last weekend.

It's nothing unusual for an officer on patrol to find someone standing on the shoulder with their hazard lights flashing, but when Trooper Victor Rios pulled over at 4:43 a.m on St. Patrick's Day, he could hardly believe his ears.

"My cousin's stuck in the swamp," the man told him, according to dashboard video released by the State Police on Friday.

What?

"My cousin is stuck inside the swamp."

How?

The victim had unwittingly waded into the muck near mile marker 102.3 in Elizabeth while trying to walk toward a friend's disabled vehicle on the other side of the marsh, according one of the troopers at the scene.

It was a crisis right out of Bruce Springsteen's "Rosalita" -- "out stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of Jersey" -- made all the more dangerous by the frigid March night.

The man, whom police did not identify, did not realize how deep the mud was until his feet "became entrenched" halfway through his ill-fated shortcut, according to the State Police.

Trooper Reinaldo Cruz said that when he arrived to assist Rios, the scene was so dark he had to point his troop car toward the swamp and turn on a spotlight in order to see the victim trapped in the muck.

"It's as if it was quicksand or cement," Cruz told NJ Advance Media in an interview Friday. "He was already above waist-high."

The troopers spent half an hour making increasingly elaborate attempts to pull the man to safety. Rios and Cruz first took a large tree branch and extended it toward him, but the man was already in the throes of hypothermia and was too weak to grab on, police said.

More troopers arrived and attempted to make a human chain, but were unable to reach the man. Eventually another trooper, Renato Antunese, grabbed a lifeguard buoy and rope from his car and threw it toward the victim, who wrapped it around himself.

The video shows at least seven troopers pulling the yellow rope from the marsh back onto the highway's shoulder and draping the man in an emergency blanket. He was taken to Trinitas Emergency Medical Center, where he was treated and later released, police said.

Cruz said he's seen a lot in his five years patrolling the turnpike, but the incident was his first roadside swamp rescue.

"You're never going to think with freezing temperatures that you're going to have someone that will even entertain the idea of entering the water," he said.

S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.