This was me, for sure. Riding alone, bareback, without a helmet, through huge old orange groves in Southern California with who-knows-who that might be camping in them. Never had a problem. I think I was potentially in more danger from the farriers who came around to shoe the horses. They seemed to really like the fact that stables are routinely full of young girls and very, very few adults. :eek:
As for getting stepped on in flip-flops: my father insisted that I wear cowboy boots to the barn. If he ever caught me without them, he said, he’d sell my horse. Since that would have been worse than death, I always wore my boots. Even now, in my own barn, the rule is NO OPEN-TOED SHOES.
When I was five years old in a Los Angeles suburb, I would walk to the store, three blocks away, all by myself. I would walk almost a mile to a friend’s house. My parents almost never knew where I was and I liked it that way, since I was a seriously abused child.
When we moved to Minnesota, I would regularly be miles from home with my parents having no idea where I was and never asking.
Climbed trees, sledded big hills, rode my bike everywhere, played in the nearby gravel pit, went swimming by myself, etc.
We had douglas firs where I lived. Once you get into the branches they are very much like ladders so you can quickly go straight up pretty easily. There was one in our front yard that was (still there, actually) that was easily over 100ft tall, from near the top you could see across Lake Washington & Mercer Island, and catch the skyscraper tops of downtown. I don’t think I could make myself climb that high today, even if I thought the branches would hold me.
I came in to post something different, but yes, we did this too, which was really very stupid.
What I came to post was, in my teen years a friend and I used to go out at midnight or later in the summer and wander around the suburbs, and after a while this thing we did was climb onto roofs. We climbed on the local library roof, the local fire station roof, and lots of house roofs (pretty much all the houses had wooden fences with toprails, so all it took was a fence that ran up against a low part of the roof and up you go). I have no idea why that was a thing for us over a couple of summers, and it was probably more legally dangerous than physically, but I certainly enjoyed it.
Based on the scars, I’d say that it was seventh grade woodshop. Of course, that was also around when we got into model rocketry. I don’t think that we ever actually launched a rocket. Instead, we would scrape out the gunpowder fuel, pack it in plastic models, a friend’s mom’s makeup containers or other small containers, light the hobby wick fuse and chuck them into neighbors’ yards late at night. Luckily we never had one blow up while we were making it.
[bolding added] My great-uncle owned and lived at a gravel and sand pit, and all his brothers worked there. The many grandkids used it as a playground after hours and weekends. A thirty-foot high pile of sand makes for an epic game of King of the Mountain. A similar pile of gravel is unending slingshot ammo. On an especially cold day, we were wandering around in the brush along the creek when the ground started shooting out long cracks under our feet.
Every year we would go to my aunt’s house for 4th if July. Everyone in that neighborhood was crazy. Every kid through adult had several hundred dollars of fireworks. 1970s dollars. At night it was a war zone. There was so much ordinance around that no one had time to break down mats of firecrackers. Instead they just poured gasoline over them and lit it on fire. And this was under adult supervision. During the day it was the bottle rocket war. I almost lost an eye.
My mother was shocked just a few years ago when I told her we would ride our bikes 15 miles on highways just to get to the mall and play in the arcade.
We rode horses and shot guns on a regular basis and the parents not only approved, they would get mad if the horses and the guns were not properly cleaned and fed prior to them being placed away for the evening…
Ah, so YOU’RE the one! That’s the reason we can’t have fun things!
:eek: :eek:
You can’t just stop there! What happened? And why didn’t you run?
We had “Monkey Bars” that were grounded in asphalt. Because asphalt is softer than concrete, apparently. :dubious:
Gosh, where to begin with the crazy stories? I was a little lunatic. Well, I’m glad to hear I wasn’t the only kid with a storm sewer highway running through their neighborhood. This is the first time I’ve heard anyone else talk about that.
There was a local community college in Annandale with a largish pond out front. Now and then it would freeze over, and we’d all want to go ice skating. Which was, of course, forbidden.
There were huge storm drains just above the usual grade of the pond, which filled up fast if the pond level rose at all. There were iron bars vertically through the opening of the drains, presumably to keep large tree branches from floating in to clog up the system.
When the freeze would come, we’d all sneak over with our skates and have a grand old time until the police would come to chase us off. We’d run into the drains and just head home. A kid could squeeze between the bars but a cop couldn’t.
I remember once the policeman yelling that we might as well come out because he could wait all day. I wonder how long he stood out there in the cold, waiting for us to come out. Poor guy! What must have gone through his mind?
We hated those cops but looking back they were right - I’d been under the ice on that pond twice, but I kept going back without a thought. When it happened my biggest concern was making sure my parents didn’t find out.
We’d sneak around the back of the house, go in the basement door and sit in the sauna until we were dry. That was pretty much the only thing it was ever used for. But dear Og we loved it then, sitting there in the heat with steam rising off our hair and thawing out. It was heaven!
