what didn't kill you...

I remember swimming in a local creek once as a kid. I was in the water starting to climb up the side ladder onto the pier, one of those big water spiders crawled across my arm. that was the last time I went swimming in the creek. :oops:🕷
 

There was a time when we would go sledding down a hill on an old Philco refrigerator door. That porcelain death boat could build up a huge head of steam. :D At the bottom of the hill, if you managed to miss the trees, you landed in the creek.
This got me to thinking, I've got to see if my sister still has the home movies of us goobers riding a travis (a six person sled) down a Vermont mountain road while my uncle sat in the trunk of the car and filmed us fools. 😮😮 Mom said the car got to going around 45 mph. and my uncle gave up filming and just hung on for dear life as they tried to out race us to the bottom.
By the way... out of many tries, we never could go all the way down that hill without crashing, :cool: and somehow we all survived.
 
Drag racing in high school. My boyfriend had a Chevy 409 that would do 0 to 60 in 7 seconds. We'd meet up with the other kids on a back road in South Lawrence, MA to race. I was actually a better driver than him and won my fair share of races.
 
Autumn said:
Drag racing in high school. My boyfriend had a Chevy 409 that would do 0 to 60 in 7 seconds. We'd meet up with the other kids on a back road in South Lawrence, MA to race. I was actually a better driver than him and won my fair share of races.
Click to expand...
Oh, I love that….we went to the drags...in New Jersey....boyfriend, now hubby, had a 54 or 55 Ford....I won the girls race...
God a trophy....The Good Old Days.....!
 
wcwbf said:
i would suspect boys did more of this than girls. what activities did you get into that was truly dangerous... but you were oblivious to that. what did you do that didn't kill you?
Click to expand...

One of the things us neighborhood kids loved to do was play king of the trees.
Douglas fir trees are plentiful in NW Oregon, and huge. They can reach 300 ft in height, and these were not the exception.
Three or four of us would pick our tree and race each other to the top.
Whoever would first get to the point of being able to bend the top over and touch the tip was king.
The best part, however, was not being king, but just camping there in the limbs, letting the wind blow us back and forth.
Folks woulda crapped their pants if they’d known what we were doin’.
Well, little Brady, a new foster kid of the neighborhood, (my personal Timmy of Lassie) wanted to climb.
I became a bit evil right there, and cautioned him that climbing those trees were not the same as yer everyday apple tree…but in the tone of lure and enticement.
The little guy was doin’ quite well, as doug fir limbs are rather close together…hell you could almost walk up them.
Then he musta made a misstep.
I heard some yelling, and some thumping sounds.
Then I caught sight of him flopping from one bough to the next.
Kathumping all the way to the bottom.
Seemed like he took forever.

Thing is, there’s about 20 feet of no limbs at the bottom,
and he was in no way gonna grab wunna those boards we used to start our climbs.
So he landed in a little Timmy heap, on his shoulder, in the bed of fir needles.

For another evil moment I sat at my treetop, kinda hoping he’d not move, at all, ever.

But the little bastard just got a dislocated shoulder and some bruises….and a new guardian.

Things sometimes just have a way of workin’ themselves out.
 
Just like mlh I, too, experimented with many drugs when extremely young, they were very available and peer pressure was there, too. I once overdosed on some amphetamines and there went my nervous system. I am lucky to be alive.

I also hung with the wrong crowd of older people who almost got me into very bad trouble. I look back and wonder why didn't I know that wasn't a good idea. My parents didn't give me many talks about worldly things either.
 
squatting dog said:
There was a time when we would go sledding down a hill on an old Philco refrigerator door. That porcelain death boat could build up a huge head of steam. :D At the bottom of the hill, if you managed to miss the trees, you landed in the creek.
This got me to thinking, I've got to see if my sister still has the home movies of us goobers riding a travis (a six person sled) down a Vermont mountain road while my uncle sat in the trunk of the car and filmed us fools. 😮😮 Mom said the car got to going around 45 mph. and my uncle gave up filming and just hung on for dear life as they tried to out race us to the bottom.
By the way... out of many tries, we never could go all the way down that hill without crashing, :cool: and somehow we all survived.
Click to expand...
years ago, we had a big wooden toboggan... easily held 6 adults at once. we had gotten snow and dad said... let's go to Clayton Park... a nine-hole golf course. ended up we had to take turns being the "wedge" that held the sled on the hill while riders got on. once you got 5 people on... it just wouldn't budge with the weight. as we were getting ready to call it a day, dad said... let's go straight int that pond at bottom of hill! i quickly became that wedge. about 2 seconds after sled started sliding, dad kicked himself off the sled... he strategically became the last one on the sled.
 
When I was 4 or 5, my mother was driving me somewhere. She was always speeding. She hit the curb & the car flipped - maybe 3 or 4 times (I don't remember exactly.
There were no seat belts in a '55 Chevrolet & lots of hard metal surfaces. I remember being violently thrown around & ending up curled up in a ball on the floor crying.
A paramedic looked in the car & asked me "Hey, are you OK?" (I guess the door was jammed shut)
I said, "Yes."
He said, "Then why are you crying?"
I said, "I can't find my candy bar."
He laughed.
 
macgeek said:
I remember swimming in a local creek once as a kid. I was in the water starting to climb up the side ladder onto the pier, one of those big water spiders crawled across my arm. that was the last time I went swimming in the creek. :oops:🕷
Click to expand...
Are these spiders some type of ‘killer’ spider or are you just joking? 😔
 
Maybe these two adventures weren't deadly.......just yukky.
When I was 10, my brother & I were playing handball against the side of the house. I was barefoot. As I ran up to hit the ball, I heard a scraping sound. I looked down at my foot & saw that a nail went through the side of my big toe & out the other side. I started to pull it out but it was so rusted, it broke off. When I pulled on the other side, it also broke off, leaving a piece stuck inside the toe. I went into the garage & found a brand new nail & used it to push out the broken piece. I poured peroxide into the hole & put a Band-Aid over each hole. It healed perfectly. "Tetanus?" What's that?

No more serious incidents....until I was 16. I was swimming at the beach, maybe 50 yards from shore when I felt a tug on my foot - like someone grabbed it as a joke. I reached down & felt something thrashing. I didn't know what it was until it swam away & I saw the fin sticking out of the water - a small shark, (luckily) maybe 3-4 feet. The water was cold & I didn't feel any pain, so I thought it was minor, but when I got to shore, people started gasping & pointing at my foot. There was a big, deep triangle-shaped flap on the top of my foot & every time I took a step, it gushed blood; that's what was freaking people out. I wrapped it in a towel & drove home with my other foot. When I got home, I couldn't find bandages that were big enough, so I stuck the flap back on & covered it with masking tape. It healed fine - maybe the salt water prevented infection.
 
Gaer said:
ha,ha,ha, playing near and in quicksand to see how far I could go without being swallowed up, crossing the Tongue River on a deserted bridge with hardly any rotten boards left. I killed a HUGE rattle snake that i stepped on while out hiking barefoot. I used to climb the hills along the Yellowstone, barefoot, and go in the caves ,unless i heard Rattlers. Climbed the water tower partway. Tried to get a Bobcat out of a tree. Always alone. Always exploring.
Click to expand...
Hmmmm..........................I think that the rattlers hid when they saw you coming. 😊
 
Eating wild blackberries without washing them....................and d'ya know what, just talking about them, I can taste them...................and going home with a big red stained mouth and telling my Mam fibs by saying, "No, Mam, I 'aven't been blackberrying."
 
There were a lot of stories that I forgot and they come back to me now. Talking about railroads and the dangers there.
There was a railroad that used to pass over a bridge . Some of the guys would jump into an empty boxcar and wrap themselves in the paper that was used to line the boxcar because it carried grain.
Then when the boxcar passed over the bridge, they would jump out into the river and fight themselves out of the paper Houdini style. One of them later became a professional hockey player in the N.H.L.
as did quite a few of the kids I grew up with.
I tell this kind of stuff to people and they don't believe me. I just can't make this stuff up. Those boys simply had no fear and just kept daring each other.
 
I can't think of anything I did as a kid that was particularly dangerous. I wasn't really drawn to doing dangerous things. However once I was an adult I've enjoyed rock climbing, parachuting and scuba diving all done relatively safely.

However my beach based check out dive for scuba diving almost ended negatively. Coming in after the dive the surf had gotten stronger and on my way in first my mask was ripped off by one wave and then my regulator was ripped out of my mouth by a second wave. I held my breath and dug my fingers into the coarse gravel sand while the second wave flowed out to sea and I was able to barely crawl further towards the beach on my hands and knees far enough so that the next wave didn't inundate me. I had almost been ready to drop my weight belt so that I could start floating even though it would have been more difficult to get to shore.
 
Getting my hands on a keg of beer. Don't ask how we got it. To this day, if I close my eyes, I can see it sitting in a big tub of ice. I think there was a $10 deposit, so we had to get that back. And we were NOT going return a partially full keg. At first, there were six of us trying to kill the keg, Then five. They just couldn't swallow another drop. Then four. They were dropping like flies. Till it was just me and another guy. We needed the cash more than our pride, and we returned a half killed keg. For a while, we couldn't stand the smell of beer.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top