The ones that come immediately to mind are almost getting hit by a school bus, getting hit by a car while bicycle riding, and climbing up the face of a 500 foot bluff.
The school bus could have been bad. It had just registered that I needed to move (NOW!) and that the ice and snow under me was going to make that impossible. Then I was roughly jerked out of the way by an older kid. Years later the same kid chased me and a friend off his farm (we were riding dirt bikes) and I couldn’t even be mad at him since he had once very likely saved my life.
Getting hit (side swiped really) by a car on my bike wasn’t bad. I still don’t know where the car came from though. I had looked for traffic. Really. It was on a highway. The car was probably doing about 40mph. I saw it at the last instant and swerved. Even with it just being a side swipe, I still tumbled down the road a good ways. It was ok though, this was back when I was racing BMX bikes. I knew how to fall. I barely had a scratch on me from it. I jumped back up and ran to my bike to check for damage. Then it registered that there was a hysterical woman at my side yelling about how she could have killed me. Somehow she got my name out of me before my friends and I left the scene. When I got home that evening I got yelled at. Apparently the cops were called. They in turn tracked down my parents to tell them I had been hit by a car. My parents had spent the afternoon calling hospitals while I enjoyed the afternoon riding around with my friends (after some hasty repairs). How inconsiderate of me?
Climbing the bluff was with the same group of friends. We were exploring a picnic area near the top and followed a trail around the side of the bluff. The trail slowly ended. We found ourselves on the front of the bluff about 50-75 feet from the top, clinging to the face. Going up seemed easier than back for some reason. We climbed. The people at the observation deck (behind the safety fence) sure looked at us funny when we came over the top. This was probably one of the dumber things I’ve done.
I’ve had a few more since officially being considered an adult, but those weren’t asked for.
When I was probably around 12 years-old I was messing with starting a fire in our fireplace with some kidling and newspaper. One sheet of newspaper I rolled into a long narrow tube and lit the end. While it was burning nicely I thought “Hey, it looks like a big cigar, I should suck on the other end and see what happen!”
I sucked in a lungfull and immediately my lungs fell like they had been lit on fire. I must have hacked and coughed for an hour after unsucessfully afixiating myself.
Looking back it was probably a good experience since I never tried or had the urge to try cigarettes.
I was about 7 years old when I started noticing how badly designed most of the things around me were. Take, for instance, bicycle brakes. Two wussy little rubber pads that squeeze the wheel. I could do much better than that.
My solution involved a length of meccano that would poke into the spokes when you pulled on a string. I rigged it up on the front wheels so I could see if it worked or not.
That was also the day I learned to fly, however briefly. Not that I remembered it. Or my name, for a while.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one. Only mine was in the park outside my friend house and I couldn’t even do 180. Landed perfectly horizontally on my back. Onto concrete. My friend and his brother freaked out not because i could be paralysed but because their mum was gonna kill them. I turned out to be absolutely fine.
When I was 2 or 3 years old I was being babysat by my aunt and I walked into our pool area and fell in. I obviously don’t remember it but I’m told I nearly died. My parents had our pool filled in soon afterward. I never found out until I was 6 or so and found remnants of our pool in our front yard while digging.
The rest of them are just stupid things I have done that had the potential of death:
When I was 16 or 17 I jumped off of our 50 foot ariel onto our trampoline. I thought it would have shot me way up in the air but I didn’t take into account the fact that I was about 185lbs. I hit the trampoline then the ground as if the trampoline wasn’t even there.
I’ve stuck a fork into an electrical socket to try and pry out a plug - twice. I was shocked - twice.
I’m sure I could come up with a few dozen things like that. Nothing all that interesting though.
When I was 10 years old, I went riding bareback. I wasn’t a very good rider, and I had never ridden this horse before, but I was confident that a bareback ride would be OK, since I’d seen Annie Oakley do it on TV. The horse went into a panicky gallop for no obvious reason, then sunfished and threw me off. I landed headfirst on a jagged rock, and lost a lot of blood during the 30-mile drive to the nearest medical facility. I ended up with 55 stitches in my scalp, which made me the envy of all my friends.
I have never ridden a horse since. I don’t feel fearful of horses; I rather like them. But I just really don’t want to climb up on one again.
I climbed to the top of a set of monkey bars and with typical childhood bravado (which stemmed from the fact that I was the only one who could make it to the top) I stood up in triumph.
Oops.
As I fell I smashed my face into the bars and my chin got hooked under one of them. When I caught myself my head was all the way back and the only thing keeping my neck from breaking was my grip, which I wouldn’t let go of even when the adults came over to help me.
Crossed railroad tracks everyday to get to the beach. The crossing was just a dirt path that led to the coast. There was no road crossing for over a mile in either direction. You just had to stop at the tracks and lift your bike over them. When going to the beach you were going down a slight incline. There were many tall bushes around the crossing and the tracks curved as they approached.
One day I was coasting down the path toward the tracks and just happened to hit the wooden railroad tie. The instant my bike tire hit the tie, a train rushed by. If I hadn’t hit the tie and the tire had gone all the way to the rail, I’d have been history for sure. Even after hitting the tie, I had to pull back as hard and as fast as I could. Because of the lack of nearby road crossings, the train never blew its whistle. I never heard it coming.
I was not much of a thrill seeker as a kid, indeed I am not as an adult either. I have one particular episode though that can still make me shudder, when I think about how close I came to dying or being seriously injured, and it would have been completely preventable with just the tiniest bit of common sense on my part.
I was riding my bike down our street as I often did back then, I must have been 10-12 years old. Our street was a steepish hill, and the houses weren’t real close together so the driveways were a couple hundred feet apart.
I started at the top of the hill and got going down the hill at a decent clip, about as fast as cars drove down it. When we got to our driveway on the left side of the road I decided not to slow down and gradually turn in but just to do to do a quick sharp turn and let my momentum from going down the hill carry me up our driveway.
The world exploded in a screech of brakes and car tires skidding on the dry pavement. Unbeknownst to me a car had pulled up behind me and was just about to pass me on the left when I, with no warning or looking, turned into its path.
My sister happened to witness the whole incident and told me later the driver sat for several minutes with his head in his hands before driving on.
The punch line is the driver of the car was our pediatrician who lived up our street and was a friend of the family.
I came within a few feet of being killed or injured by my own doctor.
This is a great thread. I love everybody’s stories.
One winter when I was about 12 I was walking to a friend’s house, and decided to take a shortcut across an apparently-frozen pond. This was really stupid: the ice was rotten and I went right in over my head. If you’ve ever seen anyone do this on tv, you know that as you try to get up on the ice, it breaks and in you go again. Fortunately it was a small pond and I floundered into the edge. Shivering with cold I made it to my friend’s house, where, with the unthinking complicity of pre-teen girls, we put my clothes in the drier and never never never told my mom.
My other story is not quite as immediately life-threatening, but just as idiotic. When I was about seven another friend of mine decided to try hitchhiking. I don’t know where we were planning on going; I guess we had watched **The Incredible Hulk ** or something and were seduced by the idea of a life on the road. So there we were out on the shoulder of the highway with our thumbs sticking out. When my dad drives by.
Usually I don’t get to broken up about the news – bad stuff happens and the world sucks. But, about a month ago I saw a story on the front page that really stuck with me: an 18 year old girl in central Jersey was cutting the grass with a lawn tractor when she drove one of the wheels over the edge of some kind of landscaping embankment. The machine flipped over and crushed her. Maybe it sucked more because they showed her graduation photo, but just thinking about such a senseless accident taking such a young life hurts.
So I was maybe seven or eight (nine?) and I’d been taking horseback riding lessons for several years. On this particular lesson, I was given a notoriously skittish horse, the name of which has since been lost to me…although ‘Brown Sugar’ seems like that might have been it…
So I had been warming up riding around the corrall with 10-12 other horses and riders. Suddenly, this other horse comes up and nips mine right on the ass…Brown Sugar bucked once, and I stayed on. Then she bucked again…and I went flying. Thinking back, I must have made a smooth arc around eight feet in the air before I came down squarely on my ass a good ten feet away from the horse…and directly on my right hand.
Surprisingly, I suffered only minor injuries, like not being able to move my fingers for a week because they had swollen to the size of dowel rods and my entire butt being a brilliant shade of purple. Amazingly, my parents never found out about this (I wore gloves for that week); my riding lessons would have been stopped for sure.
Still, I shudder to think what would have happened had I landed on a less padded part of my anatomy, or if I had been stepped on by one of the horses…
Funny, I just posted a thread in GQ wondering if the bonehead move I ALMOST pulled as a 16-year-old would’ve killed me.
I was “dipping the tanks” at the gas station where I worked part-time. I found the stick hard to read in the dark, so I briefly thought of pulling out my lighter and flicking it on so I could see better. :smack: Then some innate sense of self-preservation came to life and made me hesitate, thank Og.
I was about 11 or so. I didn’t get out too much as a kid, so when I made a new friend who loved bike riding and wanted me to come along, I couldn’t resist, despite my parents forbidding me to go out bike riding alone with him. We went out to the river bed (apparently a favorite spot for bikers to train). Happily speeding into the sunset, I glanced up and noticed I was now playing chicken with a massive adult going twice as fast as me.
I lost.
I spun backwards, my head slammed straight into the asphault, it was the nastiest impact I felt in my entire life. My entire body tingled. I didn’t lose consciousness, the bikers (it was a group of them) helped me off the ground and warned me not to go to sleep (Brilliant). Panicky about my new brain injury and what I would tell my parents, I didn’t think much of the biker who knocked me down. I don’t know how name, but I’m going to name him now. Chicklet. Fuck you, Chicklet, you dumbass addidas-wearing hit and run asshole. I’m fine now, but every now and then I flinch when I think what would have happened to me had there been a sharp rock at ground zero instead of asphault. I learned a great lesson though: Some people are prone to zits, some are prone to obesity, and others are prone to attracting really hot mates. I’m prone to accidents, so stay as safe as possible. Remembering that has saved my life more than once.
When I was 4 or 5 my older brother and I were playing with matches and lit the forest next to our house on fire. The fire department was notified by a neighbor. ended up burning a 30 by 50 foot area. I don’t think it was a near death experiance until the firemen left and my parents resumed the lecture.
When I was 10 I spent a good amount of time at the public pool. I used the diving boards quite alot. Once doing an inward dive, you dive off backwards and flip foward, I didn’t spring out enough and came back head first onto the board. I lost consience and continued into the water. A observer pulled me to the side the lifegaurds had to be informed they had an unconcious kid over there. I came to. I didn’t manage to cut my head bad enough to need stitches. They held presure on my head till it stopped bleeding and sent me on my way. I rode my bike home my parents where never informed.
Around twelve my and my freinds found a box of shotgun shells in my grandparents stuff. Not having a a gun to use them in we decided the road flares we had could set them off. Our process was to aim the shell put the flame from the flare onto the shell and run and hide behind a dirt mound. We learned they didn’t fire to well like that. They tended to blow the back end off. So logicaly we just turned them around to aim them. No one sustained any perminant damage so all was good. Parents never found out.
13 or 14 working with my father I was in a basement cleaing up water. Outside they where digging with a backhoe to the foundation find a water line. Inside I saw the copper line pull outwards a bit so started going up the stairs to let them know. as I stepped up the pool of water i’d been cleaning exploded into a hail of sparks.
At seventeen I was driving. I ended up in a head on collision. Small fracture in my skull, pulverized a good chunk of my left femure. a couple brused ribs and a lacerations above my left eye and on my chin. The expectation was I wouldn’t survive due to trama and blood loss. After a life flight and a couple weeks I was out of the hospital. then it was about a year of recovery. A few trips to the plastic surgion later the facial scars are barely visable. My left leg remains an inch and a half shorter.
Of course, it isn’t as interesting as any other person getting hit by a car while on a bicycle, but in 6th grade I was crossing at the intersection of two highways at our towns stoplight (read:county’s only stoplight…wow, I lived out there a bit…damn ohio) and a truck struck my bicycle and me and we fell down. He got out and talked to me - asked if I was ok, such and such - then, he drove off - damn guy, I wouldn’t have called the police or anything, I didn’t even know I was supposed to, but I rode my bike all the way home (a whole 4 blocks…it’s a long way when you’re a kid) and limped inside…I went and hid just so no one knew I was hurt, but my parents got very angry because I did not ever plan on telling them when they found out. The bad part…three years later, I had some knee problems (the same one I got hit in) during a track meet. I guess I’ll never know if it was from the wreck or from countless other idiotic things I had done, but listen here, mister-red-truck-guy! if I ever knew who you were, well, I’d be angry! or not…but yeah…hah
