When I was 12, I attended church camp in the Carolina mountains. We went on a group hike to see the waterfalls. There were paths along the river. Somehow me and a couple of other kids drifted off from the rest of the group. As we walked, the paths got too steep and inverted to walk, so we had to continue by hanging on to tree branches so we didn’t fall into the river. Then we ended up stepping out onto some rocks in the middle of the river. Only to discover we were at the top of the waterfall looking down into the chasm below.
I’m not really a high risk taker in general and I can honestly say I had no idea how dangerous this was until I was staring down that waterfall. The camp counselors would have lost their shit if they knew where we’d been.
I also did Class IV white water rafting without a helmet, again with no concept of how dangerous it was. We weren’t encouraged to wear one so I figured it was fine. And we didn’t know it was going to be class IV when we did it. It was my first time and it was supposed to be Class III but some weather phenomenon had changed the course to make it more challenging. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had.
Oh yeah! And when I was seven years old, I missed the schoolbus one blustery winter day and decided I was going to ride my bike to school. Problem is, I had no idea where I was going, and it was snowing pretty heavily, and I lived right off of a freeway. So there’s seven year old me cruising down the freeway on my bike in the snow. I ended up extremely lost in a suburb and freezing cold, so I finally got the courage to knock on someone’s door. A complete stranger answered and I asked him if I could use his phone to call my Mom. He lets me in. No luck getting ahold of my Mom. So the guy is like, “Why don’t I just take you to school?”
So a complete fucking stranger loads my bicycle into the back of his car and… takes me to school.
The school for some reason didn’t call my Mom, so when I explained to her what happened at the end of the day she damned near had an aneurysm.
It’s January 2000, and my friendly acquaintance Alice and I are due to be at an America Reads 3 day conference in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, an hour and a half away from where I live, and I’m picking Alice up on the way there. I should probably mention we’re both 22.
Anyway, there’s a raging snowstorm. I call my leader, who is a major dipshit and not required to go, and she says we’ll be in trouble if we skip it. Alice and I are good girls, so we go.
It takes a long time to get to Alice, about an hour. And then it takes another 4 hours from her house to get there. After 5 hours in the freaking car (well 4 hours for Alice), inching our way south through the snow, we finally, finally get to the hotel. And learn that fully 1/2 of the people who were supposed to attend said f this, and didn’t go. Well, those who were in driving distance who skipped said that, the rest had their flights cancelled.
It turned out to be a nice conference, and wouldn’t you know it, it took less than a third of the time to get home.
But Alice and I were dumb. Hopefully she’d agree that if in the same circumstances now, we would’ve turned back rather than spend 5 hours risking getting into an accident when other people skipped and didn’t get in trouble.
The waterfall story reminds me of our adventures at the lake where we had a country cottage. The lake was fed from one side by a stream and had a long dam on the opposite side. The dam had a thing that I guess would be called a spillway, a section that was lower than the rest of it and over which water flowed to maintain a constant level. It fell as a waterfall down to rocks maybe 20 feet below.
A bunch of us kids liked to dive off the dam near the spillway, into the deepest part of the lake. The way we got back on the dam for another dive was by using the spillway as a step to get back up to the top of the dam. All I can think about in my conservative old age is how easily any one of us could have lost their foothold and plummeted down onto the rocks. None of us ever did, but it’s amazing that we survived our reckless childhoods.
When I was 18, my sister (who was 16) bought a VW Karmenn Ghia. I helped her get the car home in exchange for using the car to take my friends to see Laserium.
I had a Karmenn Ghia full of friends. Driving to Pittsburgh the brakes failed. I downshifted to slow down and pumped the parking brake, managing to get stopped at a red light.
Instead of getting the car towed, I continued on to Laserium. We saw the show and I drove home without brakes. Crazy. Yes, beer was involved, as was marijuana.
Before retirement I worked for a fire alarm company. On a service call in an old school then being used as a day care I found a smoke detector that was in alarm and would not reset. It was on the ceiling in the gym. I studied the problem and went back to the shop. I loaded up a very rickety fourteen foot wooded stepladder, some plastic buckets and a new detector. Back in the gym I set the ladder up on four five gallon buckets. I put the detector in my pocket and hauled a fifth bucket up with me. I carefully balanced the fifth bucket on the tip of the ladder, then climbed onto that bucket. I could just barely reach the faulty detector but I was able to change it out for the new one. I got safely down.
The only thing missing from this for a Darwin awards submission was someone to whom I could say: “Hold my beer and watch this!”
Kids, don’t try making explosives during school chemistry class. It brings… unwanted attention from the teacher.
During the previous week’s practical class, we learnt about ethyne (acetylene) gas, and testing for it with ammoniacal silver nitrate. The teacher told us that the resulting grey sludge that was precipitated onto a filter paper should be flushed down the fume cupboard drain, but prevaricated when I asked whether this was due to it being toxic or not.
I decided to ignore his instructions and set my filter paper to dry out on a radiator at the back of the class instead.
Fast forward one week, and I eagerly returned to the laboratory, hoping to find a decent amount of ‘mysterious substance’ for further investigation. Imagine my disappointment when I saw that the filter paper was almost empty - just two tiny grains still on it. In disgust, I flicked them into a Bunsen burner flame…
Now, dear reader, I invite you to imagine that you’re the class teacher at the front of the class. Everything is calm and quiet as the thirty or so students are performing their tasks as directed. Suddenly, there’s an enormous Bang!, as loud as a gunshot, followed quickly by a girl’s scream and the sound of breaking glass (which you’ll soon discover was just an empty beaker dropped by a surprised lab partner). You rush over to find Ferris looking rather pale - and not without good reason - as he was mentally calculating the probable devastation he would have wrought if that filter paper had held the decent heap of ‘mysterious substance’ that he’d originally hoped for.
I had to come clean to him. I somehow avoided any punishment. I think when he explained what silver acetylide was and saw my reaction, he probably knew I wouldn’t be doing any more ‘independent research’ for a while.
1979, Center of Buffalo NY brakes on the mustang died totally, drove it home to Henrietta Ny [southern Rochester] using engine braking and manipulating the manual transmission. Thank Ghu there was no traffic!
1992, was at an SCA event in central NJ, drove my International Harvester Scout. Accelerator linkage broke, so to pull to accellerate/add gas, I dismounted one of the door speakers, took the wire and braided it, then used it to actuate the accelerator pedal and drove home to eastern CT [from IIRC Toms River] Once I did the jackleg repair, drive home went smoothly.
That was pre-teen me, experimenting with making M-80s and flash powders in my basement “lab”. I can still see the pillars of red flames* hitting the ceiling with such force that it fanned out.
FIfty years later, my mom still says “I don’t know why we ever let you get that fireworks catalog (Caseco), let alone order dangerous chemicals from it!”
.
*two grams of Strontium for red… see, mom, it was educational!
The amount of stupid shit I’ve done that should have killed me is incredible. Binary explosives vaporizing gingerbread houses…A pound of Pyrodex to take out a mole… College…
My crowning achievement is The Trestle in West Jefferson, Ohio. This ancient span traverses the Little Darby River just west of our state capital.
It is just over 76 feet tall.
How do you know this, Ogre? Well, when I was in physics in HS, and learning about acceleration and all that, my friends and I decided to conduct a trip out to see how high it was.
So help me, I’ll find a pic from the top to post, here. It’s an insane jump. You have to jump over a bolt that sticks out of the side of the bridge. That points you in between the four old wood pilings still in the river from the old bridge. That’s next to a submerged boxcar from a century-old derailment.
And you TOUCH the bottom.
I came away with the worst poison ivy I ever had. Thank dog that was all…
I paid for my laziness one evening. I was walking my dog, and when we returned home, he somehow pulled the rabies tag off his collar as we entered the carport. This was at night. I let him inside, then turned on the carport light. It had burned out. I couldn’t find a flashlight either. So, I came up with the brilliant idea of using the lights on my Pathfinder.
I had it in park, so I turned on the lights. The brake lights are red, and don’t make for good illumination. So, I start the engine and put it in reverse, because then the white lights in back would light. Only I forgot, the engine is fuel-injected, and it took off. I jumped out, and the open driver’s side door collided with the carport post and it flipped the door inside out. Furthermore, the vehicle zoomed out of my carport and down the driveway. I live on an incline. The driveway drops down to a ditch, then crosses over to the street. The Pathfinder proceeded directly to the ditch.
I had a wench and pulley, and tried tying it to a tree. I hooked to the towing hitch and pulled the lever back and forth. However,I found out the wench wasn’t sturdy enough to pull out a Pathfinder when the steel-spun cable suddenly snapped. The Pathfinder plunged directly back into the ditch.
I had to pay for towing (I have since signed up with AAA) and to have the driver’s side door replaced. The color doesn’t quite match, but at least it serves as a reminder to never do stupid shit like that again.
1988 I was doing a round-the-USA motorcycle trip. We stayed in San Francisco for a few days to see a couple girls we were interested in. I took one of them for a ride on the GPZ750 north on highway 1 to Muir Woods, since it’s fun, but the traffic is very slow for obvious reasons. We were behind a van and I thought I could see the next couple of bends that things were clear. I told her “I’m going to pass the van in the next corner.” There are NO passing zones on that part of 1. I pulled out and pinned it and there was a minivan… Luckily I had been riding for a month straight and my reflexes were good–squeezed between the 2 vehicles with inches to spare. Pulled over to shake, almost puke, and apologize. She just said, “We lived…”
I’m not sure if this is a success per se but since I didn’t end up blind or brain damaged I suppose this wasn’t a failure at least.
I grew up in the country and like every good country kid I had a BB gun. On afternoons and weekends I’d wander around the property looking for various things to shoot at: sticks, twigs, flowers, dirt clumps, pinecones. One day when I was maybe 12 or 13 I was out wandering around looking for good targets and I spied, maybe 50 feet away, a basketball. It sure looked ripe for popping with a BB! I pumped up that BB gun with however many pumps it would take, took aim, and pulled the trigger. A split second later my left cheek erupted in searing pain. Of course the BB, traveling with as much force as that BB gun could muster, had ricocheted off the basketball and right back into my face.
[Melinda Dillon] You’ll shoot your eye out![/Melinda Dillon]
I’m blind in my right eye from birth so had that BB hit my eye and somehow not caused brain damage/death, I’d be totally blind today.
I never had much use for guns of any kind after that.
In early 2011 I drove through downtown Atlanta just after a terrible ice storm shut the whole city down. My pregnant wife was in the passenger seat with me, and I was driving my rear-wheel drive manual transmission truck. The highways were deserted but I still lost control and spun out three times. Each time I managed to regain control and keep moving without smashing headlong into or off of anything. It remains one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever done in my life and I did it because I was on military leave and had to get back to the SC lowcountry in time to report for duty.
Jebus. My brother and I did something similar, shooting at little clay figures which we would stick to the posts of the dock. Obviously the BBs went right through the soft clay and ricocheted off the wood. We stopped when one chipped my brother’s tooth.
My brother, cousin, and uncle also used to run around in the woods shooting each other with the BB guns…I’m dumb, but I was smart enough to stay in the house during that game.
Heheh, I wasn’t! When I was little, about 10 or so, my friends and I started shooting at each other with BB and pellet guns around the creek/drainage ditch that ran through our neighborhood. Around 6 kids at the start, but eventually, other kids heard about it and wanted to start doing it. Not everyone had air guns, though, so some kids brought bows and arrows, and a few kids made their own bows and used them to shoot arrows they borrowed from other kids.
At its peak over that summer, there were probably about 45 kids involved, the creek seemed unworkable for that number, so we set up “rules” (I dunno, I guess we thought they would make it safer) and moved to the baseball field and surrounding woods at the Knights of Columbus hall nearby. Fortunately, most of us were such bad shots that no one was hit by a pellet or BB at the ranges we were willing to get within an armed foe. However, after griping someone out for a “rules” violation and walking off, I got shot in the back with an arrow that drew a pretty good amount of blood without actually sticking into me. At that point everyone seemed to realize the idiocy of what we were doing, and that was the last time we did that.
ETA: I suppose the “success” in this case was the neighborhood kids learned the folly of our ways and peace within our time without any of us being maimed (I don’t even think I have a scar) and without our parents finding out.
