What crazy stuff did you do as a kid and survived? I remember climbing up one of the

[applegrove]

Last edited Tue Feb 7, 2012, 11:15 PM - Edit history (1)

blue spruces in our side yard when I was 4. I was about 20 feet up when I realized I was in danger. I think I began to cry. My mother came out and coaxed me down.

I also apparently gave my twin brother mothballs to eat when I was 4. Told him they were mini marshmallows. They had to pump out his stomach.

When I was around 6 or 7 we used to play on the 'tippy raft' in the lake. The whole family and friends of the family would stand on this woden raft. It would start to sink. Once it got 5 feet down underwater the kids' feet couldn't touch it any more and it became unstable. That was my cue to duck dive down and slip my hands through the cracks and hold on tight. Then the raft would become boyant and start to shoot up to the surface. You'd get kicked around alot while you were underfoot but it was fun to shoot to the surface and be the only one remaining on the raft.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

1. We used to fire off 22 cal bullets that my friend stole from his dad

By hitting them with a hammer on a rock.
Seemed like a good idea at the time but we could never figure out why they didn't hit the 2x4 we put in front of them.

I think I was 9.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

2. I jumped off the garage several times.

Maybe that's why my knees are in such bad shape today.

Of course the bigger question is Why did mom always let us play on top of the house?

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. retroactive birth control?

[Gidney N Cloyd]

9. That or proactive wine spritzers.

[baldguy]

3. My brother & I used to jump off the roof of our 2 story house.

I was about 10-11, he was 12-13. Always hit the ground rolling. Never broke anything.

Also, during the summer in the evenings the kids in the neighborhood together for truly EPIC games of hide-and-seek. We waited until it was full dark out, dressed in dark clothes and we set the boundaries around our house and the neighbors on either side. And we could hide ANYWHERE! Under cars, up in trees, on the roofs of the houses or a tool shed, inside garbage cans, under bushes, under the deck. One of the best places was when someone did some yard work & left a pile brush & tree branches. A little kid could climb in there and almost disappear.

It's a wonder no body was ever killed.

[alphafemale]

33. Did both of those.

We called the night time hide and seek "Bloddy Murder" Charming ehh? The idea was not so much to remain hidden as to allow a "seeker" to get close enough for you to grab them. The seeker had to elude your grasp and get back to base before you caught them. If they didn't make it back to base they had to continue seeking for other people. If the Hidee didn't catch the seeker he/she became the Seeker.

That game could really get your adrenalin pumping lol! We also climbed trees got them swinging and would sling shot to another tree.

Good times.

[pokerfan]

4. we used to have dirt clod fights

in freshly plowed fields. Like snowball fights only with dirt. We'd have forts and everything.



And if I had nickel for every tree I ever fell out of...

[OriginalGeek]

18. Oh man we had some epic battles

The apartments we lived in were adding a new section and for months before they started full-on construction we would play in the trenches that had been dug for the sewer lines and stuff. Best Summer Ever.

[Chan790]

5. I had a few that now I wonder how/why I'm not dead.

The biggest were:

*Diving head-first down the haychute, an 11' vertical drop.

*Running-jump off Hank's barn-roof into my parent's swimming pool. More than once, even though I almost missed the pool a few times. 45' down and 8' out. 3.5' deep above-ground pool.

*Riding my bike down Taine Mountain with no helmet or brakes. 2.5mi of curvy road 20-deg grade.

*The snowball. No actual risk of danger but reasonably my parents could have killed me. My brother and I circa ages 11 and 9 started in one corner of the yard after a great snowball snowfall and rolled-up the entire upper back 1/2acre into a snowball about 6' round. For some reason, one of us got the idea that we should roll it down the hill and roll-up the front yard too...then we lost control of it halfway down the hill and we're both lying facedown in the snow. I looked up just in time to see it roll the rest of the way down the hill until it reached the top of the stone wall at which point it went airborne and flew over Route 4, just cleared the far guardrail and bounded into the neighbor's pond. Ten minutes later when the state police showed up, we're both bawling hysterically because we figure either we're going to jail for the rest of our lives or our father is going to kill us when he gets home from work. Neither happened, but to this day, I still hear stories of the 8' snow boulder that jumped the highway.

[applegrove]

8. Oh you were a wild one - lol!

[LNM]

30. OMG!

I have tears running down my face.

[alphafemale]

34. omg! You made my tummy hurt!

[Generic Brad]

6. Pump tackle

The game was a variation of tag played in an empty parking lot. There would be as many kids assembled as you could find and one would be "it". He would yell "Pump" and then everyone ran to the other end of the parking lot. Whoever he tagged joined his team. So as it progressed it went from one person trying to tag any one of 30 kids to 30 kids trying to tag the last man standing.

Once we it got cold and we had a light coating of snow or ice, "Pump" turned into "Pump Tackle"! The theory was that the ice protected you from getting asphalt ground into your abrasions. It sure caused a lot of ripped clothes, broken teeth, and a few shoulder dislocations.

As we got older we switched to playing tackle football in the road without pads.

[csziggy]

10. We played in the swamp next to our house

Part of the play was not stepping on water moccasins or running into the alligators. My dog was bitten by a water moccasin and died, so we knew how dangerous those things were. A few years later, the wildlife officers took a six foot and a four foot alligator out of the swamp when one of the neighbor's dogs was eaten by one of them. I guess we were lucky the place was so murky - if the water had been cleaner, we would have gone swimming with the alligators!

Later, the city dredged the swamp and it is now a picturesque but boring lake. I never see children playing there the way we did - there are no bushes to hide in, nothing interesting to do. The city keeps it completely manicured. Our swamp was a lot more fun!

[applegrove]

11. Oh man. I'm glad I didn't grow up there. The only dangerous critters we had in woodsy Quebec

were bees nests.

[csziggy]

15. In Florida, you gotta learn to live with critters

And that was before all the introduced species were running wild!

We just thought it was normal.

[applegrove]

16. .

[mysuzuki2]

12. Drugs

definitely drugs

[Joe Shlabotnik]

13. Yikes, in hindsight I think I must have been a demon child.

lets see here's a few...

Set off a chemistry set bomb in the basement.
Shot at point blank range with bb gun pellets many times.
Used to run alongside trains, and hop on to catch a ride to the mall.
Tobogganing down a steep, densely wooded and busy cross country ski trail (always thought those skiers were elitist snobs)
Explored all the storm sewers in the extended neighborhood
Jumped out of many 2 story windows, (I remember trying to use a garbage bag as a parachute!)
Tried to dig an underground bunker beneath a friends tool shed.

Thats a few that come to mind, the real dangerous stuff didn't happen until teenage years and adulthood!

[blueamy66]

22. Sounds like a blast!!!!!

Except for the scar on my head from when my bro shot me with a bb gun....no hair will grow there EVER again

[madamesilverspurs]

14. Discovered that all those old 78s

made really good frisbees. Until they hit and shattered.

That was about 57 years ago, and Mom is still pissed.

[WCGreen]

17. Climbed up the side of a cliff when I was about 11....

Anyone from Cleveland would know about the cliffs down in the Rocky River reservations.

It's only about 75-100 feet high and they weren't sheer but they were steep and once you lost your grip it was all the way down.

we come up in the back yard of this guys rose garden and he was threatening to call the cops on us.

My friend Rickie and I just laughed hysterically at him glad we made it and ran...

[Initech]

19. I crashed head first into a rod-iron fence on a bike.

I was ten years old and my brother and I were racing bikes down a steep hill and I couldn't stop mine in time. I literally had a Wiley-Coyote style lump on my forehead for like four months after that. It was a hell of a conversation starter, I will tell you that.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

20. Jumping off the top of the jungle gym on the playground at school

There was a pile of sand underneath and around it.

[Nikia]

26. Some of us did that too except it was concrete

We didn't understand why a teacher told us not to do it anymore.

[blueamy66]

21. Where to begin?

riding our bikes off of the roof into the pool

holding our breath and swimming thru the irrigation tunnel under the street to the other side

"surfing" the irrigation ditches

playing hide and seek in the huge ass hay bales at the dairy

sliding down the cotton on cardboard boxes at the gin

riding the horses to the local bar to pick up the drunk dairy hands...which meant crossing a few major streets and then trying to keep the guys on back

playing hide and seek in the AZ summers, with no shoes on and with the home free base surrounded by a big ass cactus

jumping fences and doing laps in various neighbors' pools at midnight

hiding in the ditches and chucking mud clods at cars....stringing tin cans with fishing line across the street and having cars catch them and carry them down the block!

we did the "raft" thing as well, in Java NY.....in the swimming hole....filled with all kinds of scary animals and foliage and strange grasses.......who the heck knows what was under that water....but we didn't care

Damn we had great childhoods. You could not have paid me to sit in front of a computer.......Wish that I could take the little ones in my family to experience some of these things....

[Populist_Prole]

23. Yeah I get to reflecting on that too. Great posts so far.

Lets see:

Having contests on who could hold a firecracker longer before chucking it before it blew up.

Sleigh riding down such long really steep slopes it's a wonder I didn't get mangled when hitting any number of objects that were on the bottom...and we DID hit stuff: We were going so fast you couldn't steer clear of an object worth a damn,

Playing on iced over lakes where the ice was iffy at best. I remember it creaking and groaning, even semi collapsing at times under our weight. We laughed then. I'm horrified now.

Walking along, crossing, fishing along a busy 4 track railroad main line with electric 3rd rails.

Going downhill on bikes so fast the lack of wheel balances shook the bike so violently we wrecked and got really badly busted up. I'm sure I was in shock a few times. I Never heard of that condition then. We were more worried about our bikes.

Noting as a young child ( and budding machinist I was to become ) for some reason the curious similarity in the diameter of my bedroom curtain rod decorative end-cap with that of the unused ceiling light fixture socket. Let's see, let's take the curtain rod off the window, stand on the bed and stick it in there and find out what happens: POW! POP! The rod literally flicked from my grasp. Sparks and ozone, as well as all the lights upstairs going out, soon followed by the frantic tramp of my parent's footsteps up the stairs. They were so glad I wasn't hurt I got off with just a scolding.

[blueamy66]

24. My fiance used to play hockey on the river across the street

he took a puck to the head once....went home and went to bed....when his brothers came home a few hours later and asked about him, his Mother freaked out and woke him up and kept him up all night. Had a huge knot for days.....

He told me about sledding fun as well....trees, garbage cans, other sledders....

We walked the RRs in Buffalo as well. Probably not a good thing to do......

[HopeHoops]

25. Lets just say that skateboarding down a metal slide isn't as fun as it sounds.

[Nikia]

27. "Sledding" down the stairs in a clothes basket when we were little

At the same house, I flipped over the second story railing and landed on my back. I remember that it really hurt, but I wasn't seriously injured.

[applegrove]

36. Oh yeah. I remember sliding down the stairs on some contraption too.

[hifiguy]

28. Sledding down a crazy-steep hill

near the house where I lived when I was about 10-11. The grade must have been 30% and there were woods at the bottom, so you had to pull up pretty fast or smack a tree. Jumping off a "cliff" about 15 feet high into a huge (2-3 feet deep) pile of sand again and again. Ah, boyhood.

[gratuitous]

29. Not all of us survived

Many comrades fell by the wayside, others sustained permanent injuries that disable them to this day.

Jumping off high roofs? Check.

Grabbing electric fence wires? Check.

Grabbing electric overhead lines? Check.

Jumping moving railroad trains? Check.

Hitchhiking? Check.

Bicycling at breakneck speeds without brakes? Checkaroonie!

Swimming too far out in the ocean? Check.

Cross-country skiing and getting lost? Okay, I wasn't a kid when that one happened, but check.

If I was a cat, I'd be on my last life.

[LiberalEsto]

31. swamp ice skating

going fast in and out among the trees, grabbing a sapling and spinning around it a few times, then off

[bikebloke]

32. See how high into trees we could climb.

Until the limbs weren't strong enough to support our weight. No one ever fell.

Then though warned multiple times not to, we'd crawl up storm drains. Hopefully, to the next curb drain where there was light. A couple times we used candles. It was forbidden in case of flash floods.

[Canis Mala]

35. As a 3 year old

My cousins put me on the back of one of their bikes and told me to hang on. We got about a quarter mile down the country road when my foot got tangled up in the chain and spokes. My ankle was bleeding a lot and they got scared. The got me loose, laid me down in the road and went to get my parents. I laid there until my parents drove up. I clearly remember the horrified face on my mother as they drove up. I'm lucky someone didn't come racing along and not see me.

All of the other incidents happened in college and involved alcohol.