I grew up in flat as a pancake NW Ohio. The only place in my tiny hometown to sled was the hill in the bank parking lot. For some reason “uptown” sat about 30 feet higher up a one block grade than the part of town I lived in.
I had one of those rollable sheets of plastic with two rectangular holes cut in one end for handholds that some unscrupulous company decided to sell as a “sled”.
I trudged up the bank hill after a particularly snowy storm, unfurled my “sled,” lay down and took off. There was good crust of ice just under the powder. I zipped down the hill, past the supermarket and right toward Edgerton St.
I then sipped INTO and ACROSS Edgerton St. I was gripping the “handholds” so hard I did the magician tablecloth trick, yanked it completely out from under myself and tumbled ass over teakettle into side of the dumpster next to the laundrymat, ending up upside down.
I lay there for a few seconds waiting for the pain to start. It never did. I rolled over, stood up, brushed myself off, rolled up my “sled” and went home. Not so much as a bruise or a scrape.
I was at the very top of a ladder operating a power drill. I was installing an alarm system in a former bank that was being converted into a computer store, and placing a siren & strobe at the very top corner of the building, up near the ceiling. This was a two storey building, but the second floor only covered half, so I was effectively two storeys up, above a polished granite floor.
Suddenly, the base of the ladder shot out from under me, and I instinctively wrapped my arms around the ladder, trying to grab onto whatever was solid. Luckily, the top of the ladder caught on a substantial baseboard molding, leaving me breathing hard, staring at the floor that was a few inches away. If not for that baseboard, I think I would have broken both my arms. (At least I would have had the power drill to cushion my fall.)
Running to catch my vanpool, slipped and skidded down most of a flight of carpet-covered stairs, more-or-less on my feet and flailing. Then I hit the ground floor and the momentum made me overbalance so that I staggered into the exterior glass door a few feet directly ahead and body-slammed it open with my weight on the catch-bar (is that what it’s called?). Nothing broke – not me, not the glass door. :eek:
Being IN a slapstick skit wasn’t something I’d ever intended to do.
I had my arm slammed in a car door (or possibly trunk lid) when I was a tot. According to my mom, I gave no indication that I was in any pain at all, and waited patiently for the keys to be gotten so the door (trunk lid) could be unlocked.
Fencers only shock not kill so you were safe. Every farm kid learned about the fencer at some point, and then tricked new kids into getting shocked. We got good at going between the electric wires or over them without touching them. it was something like playing limbo or stand on your toes and pull up your pants so you don’t shock your privates.
Anywhere near Bryan? Or as we former Bryanites like to call it, The Big BO.
As for me, I dumped my motorcycle once. I was speeding around a curve and could see the car ahead of me turning left. I could also see far enough ahead to see noone was coming. But she wasn’t turning and then she still isn’t turning and then OH SHIT SHE’S NOT TURNING.
I went around her on the right, only the right was wrong. It was pea gravel on the side of the road. The back slid out from beneath me. I hit the ground with my forehead (yeah I know, no helmet).
The little old lady, I think she was about ten years older than God, wouldn’t get out of her car. She kept saying, “I didn’t do anything, I didn’t do anything” over and over.
My next door neghbors just happened to be going by and stopped and asked if I was ok. Surprisingly I was. Just a bump on the forehead and a minor headache. Well, that and the part in my eyebrows just ain’t right still.
Of course explaining to my wife that I actually saved $150 by not ruining a helmet did not help my case.
I really haven’t had an accident, acts of stupidity are not accidents.
I was stopped at an intersection of two rural highways, turning left. My passenger had a big head and I couldn’t see around him, so I asked him if it was clear on the right. He looked, and I thought he said it was. The road sloped down towards the right, enough that a car could take you by surprise. Yeah, I should have wished for a car.
So I made my left turn and was slowly picking up speed when this big long metallic blur passed my little car in the shoulder. I swear, he must have been halfway into the ditch.
Yeah, somehow the 18-wheeler going full speed escaped my attention. To this day I am amazed that we didn’t become pancakes that day.
That reminds me of a similar experience.
My fiance’ (at the time) and I were driving back to south Florida on Thanksgiving night going down I-75. It’s a pitch dark interstate that’s fairly empty and cars typically travel 85-90mph. It was around midnight and we came over a slight hill to see traffic backed up to a standstill (some semi had overturned) somewhere near Punta Gorda.
So we take our place at the end of the sitting line. It then occurs to me “shit, if someone comes over that hill behind me and isn’t paying attention this may not be good.” No sooner than I thought that and looked in my rear view mirror did a car crest the hill doing the full 85-90mph. I was tapping the brake lights like mad and it must have quickly got the guys attention. He hit his brakes but too abruptly and locked them up. So now I hear this god-awful screeching of tires as I’m still watching in my rear-view mirror a car fish tailing down the interstate coming right at us probably at 60-70mph. All I could tell my fiance’ who couldn’t see what was happening was “fuck, fuck, fuck, hold on, hold on, hold on” and thought “if this doesn’t kill us we’re still going to get really messed up.”
I gripped the wheel as tightly as I could bracing for impact when the car suddenly shot by me on the left (in a blur) and slid off the road through the grass into a shallow ditch and eventually came to a stop a hundred yards away.
The guy was fine, drove out of the ditch, back down the road side and took his place in line behind me.
I was riding my horse, working on flying lead changes; we were doing a cantering serpentine in the arena. He was feeling his opats and gave an unexpected buck, and when he came down, he had his front legs crosses, and he did a summersault.
I swear it was like it happened in slow motion. I hot the ground first, on my back, looking up as some 1200 lbs of horse came down on top of me. I remember thinking ‘this is really gonna hurt’ and I just closed my eyes and waited for the pain. Instead, he twisted his body to land BESIDE me, hard enough that he actually broke the hylon breast collar strap.
My only injury was a large bruise on my inner thighs, from hitting the pommel of the saddle. My horse, however, bit the side of his tongue off and couldn’t be ridden with a bit for a couple months.
I was 17 or 18 years old, working at the city pool and cleaning up after it was sandblasted and painted. I was standing with my back to the (empty) diving well, walking parallel to the edge while sweeping up sand off the deck. Unfortunately, I wasn’t walking parallel to the edge. I stepped over the edge and fell 13 feet and landed on my side. And bounced. I do remember that.
Funny thing is, ladders in a diving area don’t go all the way to the bottom. Usually, when you are using them, there is water in the pool and you are floating on the surface. So here I am, standing at the bottom of the pool, looking up at ladders that are out of my reach. Fortunately, this particular pool has the diving well attached to the main pool. I had to walk up the steep slope to get to the 6 foot area, then walk down the 50 meter straight to the shallow end and climb out. I did bruise a couple of ribs, but, considering I could have been killed, I wasn’t complaining.
When I was playing little league baseball one of my teammates was in the on deck circle swinging bat with a batting weight (donut) on it. I walked up behind him, for some reason convinced that he knew I was there. He didn’t, and he swang and hit me in the face.
The edge of the weight hit me in the upper jaw next to my nose. It was still afairly serious injury (concussion, stitches), but I’m fairly sure it would have been WAY worse had he hit me a variety of other nearby places.
I will add my stupidest story. When I was about 10 yrs old, small for my age, a large subdivision was being built in a hilly area next to where I lived. The contractor had installed the streets, and some of the houses were built, but no one had yet moved in. So, one Saturday morning I was out wandering the neighborhood and discovered the storm drain at the bottom of the hill. I decided to explore. Somehow I got inside the catchment and started crawling uphill inside the buried drainpipe. The pipe was just big enough to hold (small) me. No one knew where I was or what I was doing. Turns out there is a loong way between catchments on a hill like that. I got really tired but don’t remember being frightened. I did grow concerned because it was cloudy when I got into the pipe.
I have no idea how long it would have taken someone to find me, but I suspect it would have been a very long time…
I used to work at a place that was anchored out in the middle of a large lake. One of the maintenance tasks at this place was to periodically replace the main anchor cables. This job involved winching the anchor cable from a barge until the shank of the 10K lb Danforth anchor was up out of the mud and then attaching the new cable to the old one at the surface with a very large shackle and then letting it slide down to the anchor. After that was done, my partner and I descended to the anchor (about 160’). The next thing to do was to detach the the new cable from the old and attach it to the shank of the anchor. So I’m supporting this giant shackle while my partner unscrews the pin and when the pin is out I try to pull it back from the cable but it is wedged against the old cable clamps. When I said earlier that the shank of the anchor was winched up out of the mud, I should also have mentioned that the shank is about 9 feet long and standing straight up. My only attachment and source of leverage is by having my legs wrapped around this shank. So when I lifted the shackle and pulled back to clear the clamp, I pulled back hard enough to unbalance myself and I fell backwards off the shank and into the mud with a 80# shackle on my chest. At this point I guess I could mention that at this depth in the lake it is pitch black, very cold, I’m wearing only a single 80 cuft scuba tank and only have a few minutes before I have a decompression problem beyond which I had planned for. The mud at the bottom of this lake is a gooey sticky ooze that is several feet thick and now I am completely submerged in it. My buddy also has no idea where I have gone. As soon as I slipped out of his view (taking the new anchor cable with me) he had no way to find me. After taking a moment to assess the situation, I managed to slide the shackle off my chest and use the cable to pull myself to a kneeling position. Luckily, when I stretched out an arm, I bumped into an anchor fluke and then was able to climb back up the shank. When I got back to my partner he gave me a look that, in diver language means, “Where the fuck did you go?” and then we hauled up the shackle and finished attaching it to the shank. As we started back up, I noticed that I wasn’t making much progress. It was then that I became aware that the mud had sucked my fins off of my feet. They are still there as far as I know.
Once I was riding my bike along a gravel road in Wyoming (Grassy Lake Road, which runs between Grand Teton and Yellowstone parks) I was heading down a long, steep downhill at an incredible speed. Up ahead I saw a pothole so large that it would be more accurately described as a pit. Because of my speed I had only about a second to react, which wasn’t enough time to turn aside, and was just enough time to picture the bike getting knocked and myself lying in the road with several broken bones.
The bike bounced into the pit and then bounced out and kept moving forward as if nothing had happened. Yay for angular momentum.
I’ll share my bike story too. When I was about 11, I was riding my cool bike with the banana seat, sissy bar, and cards in the spokes. I pulled a wheelie and was riding along when my front wheel fell off. I watched it roll along as I slowly passed it thinking that I can’t hold this wheelie forever. As the front fork dug into the asphalt I managed to push my legs through the ape hangers and land on my feet.
When I was a kid I was looking at something behind me and ran my bicycle into some kind of thorny bush - one pointy stick broke through the lens of my glasses but stopped short of my eye.
My first job was at Burger King where I cleaned out the fryer every night. You drain out about five gallons of hotoil through a filter, wipe down the inside and pour the same oil back in. Once the bucket of oil tipped and dumped all over my frock, but I didn’t even get burned.
THis one reminds me of one that happened to one of my uncles.
He was participating in a fund-raising snowmobile ride on Shediac Bay, and he was at the head of the group, Riding a Ski-Doo Formula MXLT, when he saw that there was a patch of water up ahead (hole in ice)he knew he didn’t have enough room to stop or turn, so he just raised his arm to warn the riders behind him, then gunned it, and skimmed straight across. Had he panicked, it could have turned out alot worse.