Ahhh, shucks. Didn’t even know it was a contest.
::blushes&bows::
Thank you, Thank you one and all. And thanks to all my …
[slips on roses scattered on stage, knocks over podium, trips on microphone cord falls flat on face and falls off stage, much to the delight of the audience …]
When I was 19 I went travelling in Africa with a friend who’d grown up there.
We were hiking in the hills above Harare, Zimbabwe, and we saw what we took to be an abandoned anti-aircraft gun.
It was the kind that has a seat for the gunner, and swivels around and stuff - pretty cool to a couple of 19 y/olds!
We have a WW2 museum near my home, and I guess we figured we’d stumbled on something similar… so my friend hops into the gunner’s seat and starts spinning around in this thing.
It was only on closer inspection that we noticed the gun looked suspiciously well looked-after, with fresh grease on the bearings, and new paintwork.
As I was about to mention this we heard a shout, and a couple of pissed-off soldiers came running over the clearing, waving their rifles about.
Turns out they’d sneaked off for a cheeky cup of chai, assuming no-one would be around. They asked us for passports etc, and asked if we usually sat in anti-aircraft guns when we found them… to which we replied that, yes, actually we did, as it looked like a museum piece.
They weren’t happy, but I think they were more worried about being bollocked for leaving the gun unattended, so they told us to scarper and be more careful next time.
I guess looking back we can be grateful we didn’t end up on the wrong side of a beating or a rifle bullet, or at least arrest and some tricky questions! And that we didn’t accidently lob a few shells into downtown Harare. 
Well, aside from the infamous ‘waking up in the back of a truck’ story, there was the time I was in 3rd grade, when me and my parents were at an arborium. I was outside by a bird bath. It was winter, and the bird bath had a 2" thick sheet of ice over the top of it. Fresh from having watched too much TMNT, I decided I could break this sheet of ice over my head. I proceeded to lift the ice up, and crash it down over the top of my head. The ice broke cleanly in two, with no damage to my head. KIYAH! The turtles triumph yet again.
Everyone around me at the time was dumbfounded. I think my mom almost fainted, and one of the store clerks commented that he had never seen anything so dangerous done while he worked there.
Reference tree jumping I always remember one of instructors from the forces airborne school(No.1PTS Brize Norton)giving us a prejump brief.
Remember gentlemen that there a good many trees on the D.Z. ,so if your going into trees protect the face,protect the face…
But for most of you its too fucking late!
Played chicken on the main drag with my friends. Now, I look at the traffic whizing by and just shake my head at how we managed NOT to get killed.
Okay.
This is just adorable. pinches your cheeks
The infamous what?? 
Where to start…
well as a 4 year old, me and my friend were attaching action figures to plastic bags, ya know, throwing them out a window to watch them parachute to the concrete steps below from the second story.
And, well, if it worked for the action figures, it’d certainly works for me right? I managed to make it to the window sill when fortuitously, my young accomplice’s mother saw me from the street and shouted at me to get down.
Well, we knew this was dangerous, but my friend and I decided it’d be a good idea to fence, with fencing sabers at first, on railroad tracks, at night, in the rain. Then we decided it’d be a good idea to switch to machetes. I ended up falling, which resulted in a machete hitting me dead center between my eyes. I look at my friend and go “Is it bleeding?” his entire response was “OH FUCK!”. According to the parents, I slipped and hit my head on his desk. Also, I had a great Harry Potter scar for ages.
And stories of playing with fireworks and explosives too numerous to mention.
Growing up, I was the terror of anything that scampered, crept, or crawled in and around my yard. I caught em all. One day, about the age of 9 or 10, after walking home from the bus stop, I spied a small snake on the patio. Now, my mom hates snakes with a passion, so I thought that catching the little snake and bottling it up to show her could be some good fun. So I played with the little guy a while, then stuck him in an empty gallon size container. Mom came home, and freaked appropriately, though not just because it was a generic snake- I had caught and played with a young pygmy rattler. :eek:
I have a couple.
First, when I was about 8, I was riding my bike home from the park (or school, they were near each other) and I was crossing the “main road” - funny how it seemed so busy then. I went down two blocks to a stop light and waited. I knew to always go in front of traffic, but the truck in the road was pulled forward pretty far. Now that I’m older, I know that it’s called a box truck. Apparently, this driver felt he was pretty far forward as well, because as I got behind his truck, he slowly backed up. The bumper cracked into my leg and the bike got stuck under the truck, but he had stopped. I tried pulling it out and couldn’t, so I went and knocked on the door. He helped me pull it out and was going to call the police and make an accident report, but I just got on my bike and left. I didn’t want anyone to know because then my parents would find out, so I told them I hurt my leg at the park. A week later, they heard I had been hit by a car…
When I was 15, I joined the ski/snowboard club at my school. We went to several places around Ohio: snowtrails and mad river and such. Then, my teacher mentioned a big trip to some place, maybe snowshoe, I’m not sure. I went, and my friend Ryan was new to snowboarding. We got off the lift and he tried to turn, but he kind of sucked, and went on over the end of the turn around area and down into some trees. I quickly turned and head over that direction. Without thinking, I headed down that side of the slope after him. We were not too far down when we stopped, but I thought the other trail turned back around to a place not far from there, so we went that way. Hitting tree after tree, we ventured further away from the path and got completely lost. Finally, he just took off his board and started walking back uphill. A few hours later, we ended up back in a place we could get to the lodge, and we never told anyone what happened for a long time. I haven’t seen him in probably 4 years or so. It never occurred to us that becoming lost in the winter on a mountain where people would not be anywhere near us was probably not a good idea.
There are probably countless others, but none I can think of right now.
Brendon Small
Reckless hitchiking, sometimes solo, during my late teens/early 20s; travelling in restricted zones without a permit in several war-torn countries.
I once recall a friend and I playing with matches in the woods-in the middle of a dry spell.
…in college, I biked home once.
At night.
In the pouring rain.
And ran over a pedestrian.
:smack:
Yeah. Not the smartest thing to do, in retrospect. But I reasoned to myself that it was 9 pm, it was raining hard enough to take a shower in, and what was the odds that somebody else was traveling the exact route that I was?
Lucky for both of us neither was harmed, and we ended up with a funny story to tell our friends.
When I was around eight years old and growing up in Texas, my friends and I had lots of cool places to explore. We found some caves in the 100 foot limestone cliffs by the river. I had been reading those Danny Dunn books (they’re like Hardy Boys Mysteries) and one was about his caving adventure. I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to go spelunking, but one of us went home to get a flashlight, then we all started into the deepest cave we could find.
So there we were, six kids crawling single-file through a tunnel about the width of a garbage can. Picture Andy Dufrense crawling through the sewer pipe at the end of *Shawshank Redemption *. We got about 70 yards in when it opened into a space where we could all stand up. We couldn’t see much 'cause the flashlight was almost dead - perfect. There was no light from the entrance, so we decided to go back. It was halfway back down the tunnel that I decided this wasn’t fun anymore. There was no choice but to keep crawling though, as no one had told anyone outside the group that we were exploring the caves, or that the caves were even there. I remember hoping that no one in front of me would freak out, cause there was no way to get around them and we’d be stuck like a cork in a bottle.
We made it out OK. No one said it but we all realized what a stupid, stupid thing it was that we had just done. Any number of things could have gone wrong - cave-in, a snake, panic attack. We never did that again. Screw Danny Dunn and his cave adventure.
It was kinda fun, until it wasn’t.
Most of mine involve snow and ice or fire:
Playing on the ice on Lake Michigan.
Skeetching behind the school bus.
Sledding (actually a saucer as I recall) down the two hills in the front yard that ended with an embankment about 4 feet from the ground. At the end of the run, you’d go airborne off the embankment and land in the middle of the street. We did at least have a kid at the bottom serving as lookout for cars.
I think it was kindergarten or first grade when they’d called off school at about 10 am due to blizzard. My brothers both ditched me so I had to walk home alone. I got turned around but luckily wound up at a store that was still open. They called the cops and cops sent a snow plow to drive me home. That was fun. 
There was the near miss when I lit the bbq grill with the lid closed after I’d left the gas running long enough to go inside and get a lighter. Luckily I was standing beside it and not in front of it when it went KABOOM and blew the glass out of the front - elsewise Ida been full of glass and fire.
Lost my eyebrows to another near miss having to do with trying to start a fairly wet brush pile afire with some kerosene.
I did that once, only the foreign country was Miami and after leaving my friends at the club I let the guy drive my car, which he drove very fast and recklessly to the marina. Where he blew past the old guy at the gate shack. By this time I m thinking where did I leave my brains as this odd dude is muttering dark thoughts about his whore mama.
We walk up to where his boat is tethered, he goes down the hatch and I am asked to start removing the lines. I hear him banging away on something and finally my brains and sobriety catch up to me and I run outta there back to my car and get in and blow past the guard shack again and never look back. Honestly it was bad news I might not have made it back from that little midnight cruise on the Miami river.
I have nothing to offer that compare to some of the stories told by my father (who was a self-proclaimed charter member in the “damn fools’ club” - so named by my grandmother back in the 1930’s) . Here are a couple of those adventures from his youth that could have potentially led to me not ever having come into existence.
Niagara Falls in the winter
Apparently, my father went to Niagara Falls when it was below freezing and went on the tour behind the falls. For those of you who have done that tour, you might recall there is a window opening where you can look out and see the falls. Well, apparently in the freezing weather, it appeared more like a hallway than a window and he walked out to get a picture. The ranger came by and suggested he quickly step back into the room since he was standing on a 6’ deep ice ledge outside of the room, supported apparently by nothing.
Dynamite Caps
In another adventure, my father went to visit an uncle in Oregon. While there, they were blowing stumps from the property and my father offered to help. In lieu of dynamite, they were filling oil cans with powder, adding a charge, crimping said charge to igniter cord, and then lighting the fuse. My great uncle caught my father using his teeth to crimp the charge and asked why he would do such a thing when there was a tool for the job. Apparently, my father was only imitating said uncle’s practice.
Like I said, good thing neither of these (nor any of the other adventures of the damn fools’ club) turned ugly, else I would not be here to tell the tales.
Once, stranded in the Bay area with no gas money after a Grateful Dead concert, I was trying to sell some Rastafarian beaded jewelry on the streets of Oakland. I was lucky to get off with confiscation of the jewelry and a stern lecture on what was appropriate for the melanin challenged in that neighborhood. Wound up in the scruffiest, dirtiest plasma donation clinic that I’ve ever seen.
Egads, Lucy! I’m glad you’re here to tell us of that.
When I was in college in Southern Illinois, a friend of mine and I would free climb rocks and cliffs. Some of them were damn high, some of them were mossy and wet, and a lot of them were virtually straight vertical walls.
No prior experience climbing. No ropes.
Then we’d sit on the top, get high and climb down.
I dunno, it was fun.
My boyfriend and I got into an unlicensed taxi in Peru. I didn’t notice that it didn’t have a sticker until half way through the ride, when we started going through was appeared to be a very, very bad neighborhood. Then the driver reached over to the passenger door and locked it (this was a two-door car and we were in the backseat). We made it to our destination, but I was so frightened and relieved to not be dead that I gave the driver a VERY generous tip.
This is a story from my Grandmother. The house they lived in when my mom, aunts and uncles were young fronted onto a very busy road, so when doing dishes, she could look out the window and see the traffic. One morning, she noticed that there was a box in the road, just about where the middle line is. It was a big enough box that vehicles had to slow and move around it. She didn’t think much of it and was really just waiting for a car to hit it and move it out of the way. A few big trucks went by and just barely missed running it over. After about 30 minutes, she decides she should go out and move it from the road. She walks up to the box and tries to lift it, but it’s too heavy for her. She tries to push it and it’s fairly weighty, so she decides to open the flaps and see what’s inside.
It was my 5 year old uncle, asleep in the bottom of the box.