When I was 7 years old I convinced my 5 year old brother and a friend of mine from grade 2 to run away. I had read some Huckleberry Finn and was sold on the life of the river.
After supper one night I armed us with 3 apples and a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. I think my plan was for us to hop a train and make it to Chicago.
We made it about half way to the railroad tracks that night. In an old cardboard box, in a field, behind the beer store, we stopped for the night.
I had no inclination as to what my parents might have thought. No. This was about me and my freedom, and I was going to live like Huck Finn.
Sometime around midnight my little brother was getting scared; what a wuss. I was determined to stick it out in the cardboard box overnight, and then continue on to the railroad tracks the next morning. We finally gave ourselves up to a family friend who was searching the field.
When we got home there were multiple cop cars and every neighbor we knew camped out at our house. My mum was balling her eyes out. She gave us a warm bath, and some extra cuddles.
The next day at school I remember being pulled aside by the teacher. She asked me if everything was OK at home and if I wanted to talk to anyone. No. I told her that we were playing and had lost track of time.
In reality I was very upset at being given the “belt” for riding my bike on a busy road. I hadn’t been warned about this beforehand, and had never been informed of the consequences. So after being smacked with “the belt” I made my plans for Chicago.
Nope, never ran away. I did spend a lot of daylight hours away from home when I was little. When I was in high school I often wasn’t home at all on Saturdays, but I usually called home the night before (that would be Friday night).
I always got along fairly well with my family. Now my father and I brew beer together and I enjoy spending time with my (younger) brother when I get the chance. It probably has something to do not spending too much time together.
One time when my dad was beating the living shit out of my sister, I took off running into the night. I was in maybe the first grade and in my pajamas. I remember not having any shoes on and there was a little bit of snow on the ground. My oldest sister and my brother found me in the neighborhood and hung out until it was late enough to go home. Good times.
I never ran away, but a friend and I had the same thoughts about jumping a train and riding it a few hundred miles. Not because our home life sucked, but just as an adventure. Probably more fun to think about than actually doing it, but even now in my 40’s, I can still see the allure of it.
Yeah, I did when I was 16, for less than 24 hours. I called my parents from another state, and they came and got me and the boy I’d run away with. My parents agreed to let me live with my grandparents, and agreed that I could have a little more freedom (my mother was one of the original helicopter moms, and I was basically permanently grounded despite the fact that I’d never been a bad kid).
I do not think this word means what you think it means.
I didn’t have the determination that you did - I “ran away” when I was five, which meant that I went and hung out in the parking lot near my apartment building for a couple of hours. I don’t think anyone even came looking for me before I got bored and went home.
Not me , but a friend of mine when she and I were both 14 or so. My friend, Eve, had gotten in trouble at home for taking and wearing clothes from her moms shop. She ran away, spent the night in a ditch in the field, and by noon the next day, she showed up at our house. My mom called her mom and her dad came to get her.
Like other posters said, I remember that neither her nor I thought very much about her parents feelings. I was just curious and she was just mad.
When I was about four, I got mad at my mom and told her I was running away. She immediately opened the door for me and I stomped out. Then she closed the door, and I suddenly realized my mistake. I sat on the front steps for a while and cried until I was invited back inside. Mom told me later she’d watched from the window just in case I decided to take off.
My brother and I both left Mom’s house after she married a bad guy. My brother spent most of his teen years sleeping on the couches of different friends.
I went to live with my grandmother.
I “ran away” from Grandma once, too. We had an argument one night because she wouldn’t let me go somewhere with a friend. I was so mad I felt I couldn’t stay in the house with her, so I went outside. There wasn’t much place to go after that, since we lived out in the woods, on the bank of a river, so I went out on the end of our dock and determined to sleep out there on the bare planks. Coldest, windiest spot in Florida, on the end of my grandma’s dock after midnight! I only lasted about an hour.
I went AWOL from elementary school one time, but that’s about it. As the class troublemaker in 2nd grade I was often punished by having to sit in the hall outside the classroom. One time, towards the end of the day I got tired of sitting on the floor, so I decided to go out and sit in the school bus instead. After all, that’s where I was going to end up in an hour of so anyway. So, while the teachers freaked out trying to find a missing kid, I was having a nice conversation with the bus driver.
Yes, when I was 14. I had been punished for going across the street (without permission) to talk with a neighbor. Alas, I hadn’t thought through the practical aspects, cold rain set in, and I lasted less than 24 hours in the wild before being convinced to return home.
The first time was when I was 8 or 9. I was going to walk down to Azelea Gardens (a park in Norfolk, Virginia) and live in the wilds. My dad picked me up before I was halfway there.
After a number of other practice shots (including a hitch-hiking trip from Catania to Messina at age 12), I wound up spending much of my teens on the road.
My home life was horrible and I actually planned it out, around age 14-15. However, I talked myself out of it because, in thinking it through, I realized A) They’d find me, B) I really wouldn’t be able to get very far, C) Any where I could think of to go, they would send me back, D) I’d be even more miserable once I got caught, and E) I had no way to support myself or even get very far.
So I thought about calling Child Protective Services on myself, knowing I’d either be handed over to my grandparents or put in a foster home. There was a girl in my math class who was living in a group home because she’d done this very thing: her stepdad was abusing her, she reported it, and got pulled from the house. I told her what I was thinking. She started crying and talked me out of it. She told me how awful the foster and group homes can be – they sounded more abusive than the environment I was already in, ironically. You think there’s a safe place for kids who aren’t safe at home/with their family of origin, but my impression is that’s more likely not the case. I’ve known some pretty sketchy, creepy foster parents (who collect foster kids for the money) and group homes are notorious for violence. There’s a lot of really fucked up kids in the System and they act out by beating each other up, stealing each other’s stuff, and generally being miscreants.
So I sucked it up, pretended to be what my parents wanted me to be, and left home the minute I was able. I had a great teacher who told me my best ticket out of that life was college. I explained that my parents thought college was a waste of time and money, so she advised me to rack up debt up to my neck, just get that degree so I could take care of myself later. I only had to rack up student loans up to my knees, but that turned out to be the best advice I could have gotten.
At a family reunion a couple years ago, my husband’s 90-year-old aunt told us about the time my husband’s father (her brother Sam) ran away from home. It was in the 1930’s, and Sam and three friends (another guy and two girls) left Iowa and either hitched rides or hopped trains and ended up in California. It was a few months before they were found and brought back to Iowa.
This was the first anyone had heard of it. Sam’s been dead for years, aunt didn’t know the names of the others, and everyone was disappointed that there’d be no way to get more info – why they ran, how they got to California, what they did there. The only thing the aunt remembered was that when Sam got home, his mom burned the clothes he was wearing and made him take a bath. “You’ve probably got fleas!”
I think it might be in the nature of certain people to want to roam. And not necessarily just running from trouble, but to seek adventure.
The first time I ran from home, was on my tricycle, and I remember crossing a busy street.
This, of course, was deathly dangerous, and luckily, my Aunt noticed, and found me before I got far.
As I was growing up, my interest was in stories about people who ran away, so Mark Twain, John Steinbeck,
Ernest Hemingway,…among others, became my inspiration.
Then, in my teen years, I discovered Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road”. What a revelation!
Many in my family have never left the old neighborhood, and I am the most traveled person in my family, except for my daughter, who is more of a tourist style traveler.
I like to get to a new place, and live there for a while, before eventually coming home; not just for a tour and site seeing visit.
And, as usual, I am far from home, in the place that I am in now.
I was a serial runner. My first aborted trip was age 5, with my toboggan loaded with important friends: stuffed dogs; giraffe; etc. I had been told to never go on the road (in my rural area) so I trucked down a big ravine in nightgown and socks . . . I don’t think I was gone more than an hour.
Many times I ran to the homes of friends - in my small town my family was seen as leaders of the community, so I was always returned. Returned to the parental
story of me being an incorrigible and willful child, no one learned the truth of the tyrannical and violent father with whom I lived.
When I grew breasts my father stopped beating me and began trying to sleep with me. I ran away at 14 and was gone for the summer. I got a p/t job at a store 30 miles from home and sold ice cream from a big freezer on the sidewalk in front of the store. I rented a room in a rooming house, where in retrospect, many of my fellow roomers were uh, rather strange. When fall came I went home and was promptly bundled off to boarding school.
I went for good at 17. From my violent but sheltered home I actively sought out the soft underbelly of society. I criss-crossed the country a couple of times and learned much about the world.
It took a long time, but I am now precisely where I should be in life.
I ran away from nursery school at about age five. The miserable old bitch that ran the place forced me to sit at the lunch table until I ate a disgusting piece of pork fat that was in the soup we had for lunch. It made me gag and I vomited before I could reach the toilet, so was punished for that.
The next day, when we had outdoor time, some of us were standing on the corner playing the “I’m going to run away from here” game, wherein someone would put their foot off of the curb (verboten), and then quickly pull it back, and everybody would titter nervously.
I said “Well, I’m leaving”, and walked away. I arrived home (Juneau is a small town) and my parents were having lunch. They were surprised to see me, but weren’t all that upset after I told them why I was there. I haven’t been able to eat fat since then. The thought of it makes me gaggy, and I assiduously trim any meat that goes into a dish I prepare.
I was allowed to ride the bus/subway into D.C. alone from the time I was nine (from the close in Virginia suburbs). I spent many long summer days wandering the halls and trying to figure out where I would sleep.
There was nothing wrong at home I would have been running away from and I chickened out, but I wonder how many times it happened after that book came out.
