Oh there’s so many to choose from, but this is a story that could have potentially cost me my life. When I was in high school a good friend of mine lived in a neighborhood that was only about 10 minutes from me. The quickest way in was of course a road that would flood very quickly in about a 10 yard stretch and was known to wash cars off the road. I was of course instructed by my parents that if I was driving over to his house during the rain I should take any one of the millions of alternate routes there. Being 17 I didn’t want to listen and the alternate routes while safer also took twice as long.
At that point I put my knowledge of basic physics to use and came up with a plan. This was back in 1993 and was driving an 88 Honda Civic. I hypothesized that since I was driving a light car if I hit the body of water covering the road fast enough I would be able to hydroplane across it safely. I also knew no one else was trying to cross at this point so I didn’t have to worry about hydroplaning into the oncoming traffic lane. So I hit the large and deep puddle going about 30 mph, which is what I figured was fast enough, and lo and behold hydroplaned across successfully. Then proceeded to my buddies house safely.
I remember doing this at least 10-15 times and not once did I have even the scare of being washed away. However on the news we would see footage of cars that had been washed off the road at this crossing and my parents would always say “see that’s why we tell you to go around.” To which I always responded “of course I go around, do I look stupid.” Everytime I see people getting killed trying to cross deep water in their cars I think back to that time wondering how close I actually came to being hurt or dying. At that point I was young and invincible, but who knows.
So that was about the dumbest thing I ever did as a kid. At least it was the dumbest thing I ever did as a kid that could have realistically lead to my death. These are the stories I always find the most amusing so start sharing. That way we can all laugh at how dumb we used to be.
So far I’m 1-1 as far as placing threads in the appropraite category. Here’s hoping for 2-1.
This isn’t really life-threatening, but as a little kid I had some weird eating habits. For breakfast, I would eat two bowls of cereal at once, alternating between them, and of course never finishing either of them.
I used to ride my brothers’ skateboard down the street by my house. This was a very steep hill the ended in a relativly busy road, but it was okay because I had a plan. If I got to the bottom of the hill and couldn’t stop, I would just leap of the board into the patch of blackberry bushes at the bottom. Of coarse it wasn’t until after instigating this plan that I realized the major flaw.
Then there was the time my sisters and our neighbors and I decide to spend the afternoon daring eachother to run to the middle of the same busy street and back. That game stop when I accidentally did it in front of a Sheriff.
I found an unused .22 bullet on the sidewalk one day. Being a curious 12-year-old guy, or thereabouts, I picked it up and took it home with me. After getting bored with just looking at it, I thought I’d try to do something with it. So, I took it down to my father’s workshop and clamped in his vice horizontally, so the striker end was facing out, picked up a hammer and smacked the bottom of the cartridge. BANG The cartridge flew out of the vice at high velocity, striking my hand and cutting it, and the bullet flew off God-knows-where, never to be seen again.
We used to ride our bikes (stingrays) as fast as we could down the alley (a gravel alley) and then put on the brakes really hard so that we would skid. And if you turned the wheel and put your foot down, you could skid in a circle, at a slant–real cool stuff. But the stupid part came when I did it barefoot and in shorts. Gravel embedded in my foot, my ankle, my shin and my knee. Where there wasn’t gravel, there wasn’t any skin, either.
Ah yes Shera, fun with skateboards! Didja ever fix up a sail out of mom’s best sheets and go and sailing?
Among other things, I played in the irrigation canals, jumped into the shallow end of the pool from our second story window, and lay down on the highway near our house to see how close cars would get before putting on their brakes. When I was six I managed to pull over an ancient grain silo while playing Rapunzel that takes the prize for sheer destructiveness since it took out part of the garden as well. I was a horse theif and goat rustler at the tender age of seven. On the weird side of stupid, I liked to play in my closet, spending hours in there reading the Narnia books and taking an occassional nap. My poor parents; I was considered the ‘good one’ in our family.
when my best friend and i were young… almost to middle school, we used to play hockey at the local tennis courts. this time it happened to be night… across the football field were two baseball fields filled to capacity with 2 games going on… during our hockey we noticed a spark out of the corner of our eyes… so eventually we saw it was the cover of one of the massively tall lights that was lighting up the tennis court… so of course we go over and look at it closer. the inspection cover had been removed and bare wires would randomly ground out against the pole itself…
so what did we do?
HIT IT with our hockey sticks of course!!
each successive hit produced more and more sparks, when finally my last as hard as i can hit sparked massively and popped loudly… and ALL OF THE LIGHTS AT THE TWO BASEBALL FIELDS WENT OUT. there was this unanimous “WTF!?” it was afterall something like ~9pm so it was pitch black without the lights until everyones eyes adjusted to the moonlight… a lady walked across the field and told us we should be on our way as someone called the cops on us… hehe
My little friends and I found a way into our small town’s storm sewers. We crawled all over town and to the outfall at the river. The outfall had a grate over it so we had to all come back. God knows what we were exposed to down there. If Mike Yoder and Jim Croft and Doug Fortney and Jimmy McAlexander are out there anywhere, they know will what this is all about.
I attempted to scuff my barefeet on an old wooden deck. I got a big 3-inch splinter embedded in my foot and a hole in my sole (har) for a good month and a half.
I also once attempted to ride my bike down a steep incline in the woods behind a friend’s house. My tire hit a large root, I got bucked over the handlebars, and flew headlong into a young sapling.
After assessing the damage done to my bike, I did what was only natural: tried it again. The second time was a little more successful, I guess. I got to stay on my bike as I sailed into the sapling. Poor thing.
This is just the stuff I wanted here. Thanks a lot and these stories have made some memories come back when I could stop laughing.
I remember once we were convinced that a person could not consciously make themselves breath through their nose when they were underwater. (We were about 8 at the time and god only knows why we thought this.) So at the community pool we all took turns submerging ourselves under the water and trying to breath.
To disprove our hypothesis about half of us did this successfully and coughed up water for the next hour. You will be happy to know I was not able to make myself breath through my nose underwater, but boy were we impressed by the guys who could.
Sometimes you have to wonder how anyone survived being a kid.
Something clever- That’s one of the problems with growing up today. I’ll bet back then it was just written off as something a stupid kid would do and no harm done. Nowadays I bet you guys would have been put in the juvenile system and had domestic terorism charges brought against you. Glad I grew up when I did. You just can’t have as much innocent fun today as we used to.
The family would sometimes visit my Mom’s parents on Sundays after church. For whatever reason, we could not do so on a day that I really wanted to see them, such that I elected to make the trip myself. I got Mom’s set of car keys, went into the garage, got the Dodge station wagon started, had flipped up the park lever and was pushing the R button (pushbutton automatic trans-that dates the story) when Dad yanked me out of the front seat not unlike a SWAT officer taking down a suspect. Ten seconds later and I’d have probably backed through the closed garage door. :eek:
A friend and I found several boxes of shot gun and rifle ammunition in his basement. We proceeded to open a number of the cartages and deposited the contents into a glass jar, about a pint as I recall. We then punched a hole in the lid with a nail and inserted a rather crude homemade fuse, screwed the lid on the jar and placed it in the driveway. After setting up a suitable shelter, consisting of a sheet of plywood leaning against a saw horse we lit the fuse and retreated to our place of safety. No sooner had we reached cover when there was a blast of much greater proportions than we had anticipated. The sheet of plywood was completely covered with imbedded pieces of glass, shot and gravel, some to a depth of about ½ inch. This was not our only brush with potentially terminal stupidity but certainly our most spectacular. We were old enough to have known better, about 15.
LOL*
My best friend Melanie and I would go out to the country and while she drove her icky car at like 50 mph,I would try to ‘urban surf’ by planting my feet under the roof rack and not fall off while she drove.
Good thing for me I never fell off. I never wore a helmet.
IDBB
When I was 8 or so, an older brother gave me a clock motor, which was connected to a power cord with wire nuts. I plugged it in, and the motor turned. Wondering how it would work if connected a different way, I connected all the wires together under one wire nut and plugged it in. POW!
Now for something stupid that we all did - play with mercury. Remember rolling globs of the stuff around in your hands and squishing it into tiny droplets and pushing the droplets around into each other to form bigger blobs? Wonder how many brain cells we bent doing that?
We used to make “bugs”, go-carts fashioned from a board, an old pair of rollerskates and a couple of 2x4’s. On these rolling deathtraps we’d zip down the back alley between 11th and 12, just in from Sixth Street. Damn near straight up and down. Needless to say, those things had very rudimentry brakes. (our heels!). It’s just a wonder no-one ever gor creamed when we flew out onto 11th.
I also just about gave my mom a fit one day with my bike. From our upstairs window you could see Massey Stadium on the New Westminster Secondary grounds. It’s a BIG stadium. I’d hauled my bike all the way to the top row of seats. Now, I knew it was just so no one could nip in the gate and swipe it while I hung out under the announcers shack. Mom, however, was convinced that I planned to ride it all the way down the stairs. (Who, me? :D)
Next thing I see is my dad, flying in the gate yelling “Get that thing down here, now!”. Humph! Can’t imagine why they thought I’d do such a thing. :rolleyes:
Just because I once rode a trike down my backyard slide…
Got hold of a can of black spray paint and sprayed the walls inside a storage shed on a USAF Base. It would have gone unnoticed except I had black specks on my hands and face and “Didn’t know how I got them like that”.
During a seaside holiday when I was 8 years old, myself and two other boys scaled a sheer cliff with no safety equipment, nothing. If we fell, it meant death or at least very serious injury on jagged rocks far below. The grown-ups were sunbathing on the beach round the corner, and we were typical boys and ended up daring each other to climb the cliff.
The climb wasn’t so bad, not that I remember too much of it. But at the top, before one could reach the safety of the grassy flatland, erosion had flattened the cliff edge into a few feet of sandy scree inclined at about 40 degrees off vertical. The other two boys scrambled safely over this, but I somehow got stuck on it. Unlike the rock face, here there was nothing to grip onto but sand earth and pebbles. As I tried to inch forwards up the slope, I felt the gravel slide beneath my weight. Jesus! I was slipping off the edge of the cliff!
I was suddenly frozen with fear, and was sliding still further backwards - oh God now my feet were over the edge! Fortunately one of the other boys was just able to scramble partway down and reach my outstretched hand in time, and he pulled me to safety. Christ, the things we do as kids!
Funny… I owe that kid my life and I can’t even remember his name. Although it was over 20 years ago now, it still chills my blood to think of that awful moment of the pebbles sliding under me, tipping me towards death. Brrrrrrrrr.
