What dumb crap did you do as a kid you realize now should have killed you?

ages 10 to 15
“Mushing” – which involved hiding behind a mailbox at an intersection on a snowy day. When a car would pause at the stop sign, we would crouch down behind the car and hang onto the bumper. Car would drive away towing you behind it — foot surfing along on the snow.

We would also hop onto moving freight cars on the train tracks that ran behind my house – and ride it into the city.

We played in an abandoned brick factory. Rode our bikes on the raised median strip of a four-lane highway. Walked on the partially-frozen river that ran through our city.

It’s amazing I made it to high school.
Where we then got involved in drinking, weed, and taunting hookers.

Take turns running in front of a black powder cannon with the fuze burning.

i knooooooooooowwww….re-tar-ded

Rode garbage lids (no sleds) on a very steep street in the winter. There was no way we could’ve stopped if a car came while we were whizzing by two intersections.
My brother picked up a lit cherry bomb to see why it didn’t detonate. It did. In his hand.
We followed the “bug truck” on our bikes as it let off chemicals to kill who knows what. I have no idea why we all didn’t grow a second head.

@chyna if it makes you feel better, my Father was City Engineer of a good sized town when I was a kid. He told me that those trucks just spray water due to lawsuits, but it makes the locals feel like they were doing something.

We did a lot of things that had Fire as part of the plan.

Thats all Imma gonna say about that.

I didn’t… I don’t think I ever had “I’m going to live forever-itis.” I got juvenile diabetes before I was 5. And the medical technology was not as advanced back then, so I had to lead a much more highly regimented life than I do now.

I used to climb the outside of the silos for fun, including the 90 foot one. They had steel rings around them about 3 inches from the staves. I also drank pipeline cleaner acid. It was pink and looked like it might be good. It wasn’t. When I started driving I was insane. I used to go into a 20 MPH curve, in the rain at 40, mash the throttle and slide all the way through the corner. I pushed it once to 45 MPH and woke up hanging from the seatbelts, looking at the road through the passenger window.

@bookish1 I am sorry. You actually never went through an “I am invulnerable” phase. Now I want to take you somewhere and play with gunpowder.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought : Just means I was confronted with mortality and become responsible and self-aware much sooner than my peers. I don’t think I missed anything.

@bookish1 Well then, you got some serious catching up to do.

Let’s get started.

When we were young kids, my cousin and I made a “parachute” out of a sheet and jumped off a 2nd floor balcony to test it.

It didn’t work.

I crazy carpeted off a big hill (Old Fort Point) in the mountains of Jasper National Park and nearly went off the cliff when I was 18 years old.

I can’t remember doing anything really stupid. My husband told me he and his friends used to drive down a major hill with a bend at the bottom to see who could take it fastest. There was a bank of trees at the bottom of the hill. I remind him of this when criticises young people for being idiots.

@Bellatrix So, what you are saying is you liked bad boys and haven’t learned anything?

Absolutely! He’s still pretty naughty now but he doesn’t try to take corners as fast as possible (or not when I’m with him).

when the cats are away….

I know! What I don’t know….

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room Sheet metal, huh. Thats a good way to lose an ear.

Ask me how I know

We lived near a farm that raised race horses. We would corral one and take turns riding bareback, bridle less across the pastures as fast as they could go. What a rush! And we would have been jailed for risking the horses’ lives had we been caught. When I got my license I had a 20 year old chevy panel truck that was a party on wheels, always drove like a maniac, amazing I survived. But it was like a tank, ran into and broke off a telephone pole once and there was nothing more than a little ding on the bumper. Ice skating on half frozen creeks, the list is endless. Here I am at almost 70 and I still ride my scooter and go bike jouring with the dingo on my bike. Life is still fun!

Coming home from a dance while it was raining and with the station wagon full of teens, I somehow decided it was a good time to see how fast the car would go. Luckily, one of the passengers suggested that I slow down for the expressway off ramp, which was a pretty sharp turn.

Yes, @woodcutter, but at least I proved my mettle.

Driving around in vehicles driven by someone completely off their face, oftentimes on LSD.

Climbing up rock faces without any protection or safety gear whatsoever, I was 12 years old and never for one second considered this dangerous.

Sniffing Harmony shoe colour remover, decades before kids started sniffing glue and petrol, it was a short lived phase but one which I never knew was potentially life-threatening.

I can think of numerous things done when I was young and out to have a good time, I was invincible, of course.

Walking alone in Downtown L.A. waiting to take the bus, at midnight.

Driving way too fast and way too wasted.

Trusting the wrong people.

I could go on…

I was in my thirties (maybe even 40’s) before I realized that I was a victim of several pedophiles.
I snuck out of my moms house once to meet a guy who was just out of prison. I had no intention of sleeping with him but he had other ideas. I cried and told him he raped me. He got really angry. I think about it now and I realize how close I came to being murdered that night.
I found out a few years later that he was shot and killed in the back of a van by a jealous husband.
That’s just one story of the stupid mistakes I made as an adolescent. It’s a miriacle that I survived.

here she comes

As a teen I used to love climbing things. Not trees and garage roofs, but really dangerous shit. I had some friends, we did this together, and even created our own climbing club. We gave ourselves nicknames, I was ’‘Skycrawler’’. Lol. We also had a creed; never climb something if you think you can’t, and never climb something if you think you won’t be able to get down. Inevitably, those were always ignored…now while it was stupid, we WERE pretty good, considering all the dangerous things we climbed.
There were these few bridges, and we’d climb underneath them, with the help of the railing and things. You’d be right over the river, with pigeon nests everywhere. Also in the menu was a communication tower. It’s straight up with a ladder, but it got pretty damn high. Also, a construction crane, where the higher you go, the more oily everything is. A friend and I climbed up there, then to celebrate our victory, we wanted to have a smoke up top. But it was freakin cold and way too windy. We climbed a lot of stuff that could have got us killed. Big buildings, church roofs, billboards.
I think about that now and I’m like, god how lame were we. But you get such a rush doing this shit lol. But no one ever got hurt, and we never got arrested, although I can count a few times where death came kind of close. :/

Also one time we were in this building, riding the elevator. It was reputed for being shoddy and always breaking down, so, since we’re so smart…we started jumping up and down in the elevator, to see if we could break it. And it stalled. So we were stuck in, but we pried the door open. When it got opened, a floor was presented to us, right in our faces. So we had to squeeze through a little hole to get underneath the floor, and get out. Which was completely stupid, because if the elevator decided to drop while getting out, that would have been the end of one of us. Although I suppose if it had dropped while we were in it, that would have been no better.

Used to play in a decaying huge wooden warehouse that was part of a long deceased wooden box factory. They had heavy metal-wheeled carts with a handle on one end, the early equivalent of a forklift, I guess. We’d race in those and crash into one another. With the general decay, it’s an absolute wonder none of us fell through the floor into the dank basement full of old broken-up steam piping.

We played and crabbed a mile from any civilization along the banks of the Elizabeth River, Eastern Branch. One day a crazed crabber landed his boat and threatened to kill us because he claimed some kid had stolen an outboard motor of one of his boats. His solution was to kill every kid on the waterfront till his motor came back. He beat the crap out of us with a boat-hook. Eventually he let us go and told us to tell all the other kids he was going to kill them if his motor didn’t come back. We decided instead to tell the police. They instantly knew who it was, and were waiting for him when he got back to his mooring. He was out on parole for murder, so not unknown to the local police.

Then I got into amateur rocketry and from there into perfecting ever better bombs. I discovered that the right mix of potassium permanganate, aluminum powder and sulfur will burn rapidly enough to detonate all the potassium permanganate, so it explodes rather like dynamite, which we used to pilfer from a sodium nitrate factory on the waterfront. Yeah, it’s a wonder the lot of us lived and without any missing limbs.

My buddy and I used to take apart firecrackers and cherry bombs and barrel bombs, and then make “super firecrackers” by stuffing pipes with the gunpowder and capping the ends. We didn’t know they were pipe bombs! And then we’d tie fuses together, then light it out on the pitcher’s mound of a ball field. One time we blew one up and left a hole about three feet deep and a half dozen across.

We also use to get model rocket engines and tie them onto things like ski poles and see if we could launch them. The nearest place to launch them was down by San Francisco Airport. Before Homeland Securities you could get real close to the runway. Nowadays we’d probably have the FBI out after us.

@zenvelo Haha. Once I had these two mini dynamite things. They were about half an inch high, and probably a little less than half an inch thick. They didn’t say anything on them except for a number or letter, I don’t remember what, so they probably weren’t something harmless like little firecrackers. Dark, red like construction paper outer material. I kept those for years and always wanted to blow one up, but I was always too scared to do it, since I didn’t know how big of a bang it would give. With your experience, have you any idea what those were? I always wondered.

@zenvelo, what year did you graduate. I wonder if you were buddies with my husband.

When I was about 7 years old, I put a real bullet (about 3006 gage) into my toy rifle and tried to shoot it. Lucky for me the bullet didn’t fire. Later I through the bullet into our incinerator and ran away as fast as I could.

@zenvelo Just a note on pipe bombs. My potassium permanganate bombs were all pipe bombs using capped pipes. Some kid in Jr. High (what’s now middle school) asked me how to make a pipe bomb by disassembling a bunch of M-80s and pouring the powder form all of them into the pipe. Foolish me. I explained to him exactly how to safely do it. Unfortunately, he forgot to drill the fuse hole in one pipe cap before assembly. He and his dad, working in their garage shop, decided to just put the assembled bomb in the drill press and add a fuse hole. Fortunately he and his dad escaped serious injury. Aside from some minor shrapnel penetrations, none in vital areas like the eyes, they made it. They must have had only a few M-80s or it would have been much worse.

But that zipped my lips on any more discussion on how to and pyrotechnics. By that time I was the president of the local amateur rocketry club and we were being mentored by NASA Langley. I sure did not want to get grounded for telling some idiot how to do something, and having him botch the instructions and blow his hand off, or blind himself or worse.

When I was about 7 years old, I’d ride my skateboard several miles along the main road through the city to go visit my mom at the furniture store where she worked. Once there, I’d go out back to play on the loading dock. If there was a truck backed up to the dock, I liked to ‘dare’ myself to stand on the back of the truck and wait until it started to drive away before jumping back to the dock. I was always ready for it, and never had to jump more than a foot to get back. One day, the truck started moving just as I stepped onto the back of it, and I wasn’t prepared for it. The truck was already much farther away from the dock than I thought I could handle by the time I could make the big jump back, and I just barely made it. Never played on another truck.

As a teenager, I walked alone all over my city in the middle of the night, all the time. It never even dawned on me that this was a dangerous practice. Not to mention letting drunk people drive me around, driving the twistiest roads at the fastest speeds possible. And having plenty of unprotected sex.

@Symbeline Those were probably M-80s, which were a quarter stick of dynamite. They were legendary in my neighborhood growing up. They were much more powerful than a cherry bomb, and the very few times I was around one, we lit it and ran about 50 yards.

@zenvelo Urp, damn man. Glad I never did light them then lol.

Well here’s how smart I was. I held them (M-80’s) and let my brother light them and then tossed them away from us. If the fuse ever screwed up I’d be known as stumpy.

Oh wow. Those are really close shaves… okay, you guys win. I’ll go back to my corner now.

@Velvetinenut You didn’t share what you tried. Let’s hear it.

Just thought of another one. We would party in places where we could have campfires. After we finished a beer bottle we would put the cap on and tighten it. Then we’d put the bottle in the fire. Incredible explosions. While we set around the fire.

Throwing rocks at a bee hive.

@Blackberry That was always fun. From far enough away they don’t know where it came from. What was worse was stepping on a nest of ground bees while looking for a baseball. They got real pissed real fast.

Final aside. I should warn that after majoring in chemistry, I know quite a bit more than I did in middle school. Let me pass on some of that learning to explain further how dangerous my amateur rocketry and explosive “research” was. The explosive formula I mentioned using potassium permanganate is VERY dangerous and unstable. Potassium permanganate (KMnO4) crystals will detonate on impact. A tiny one will give quite a bang when set on an anvil and struck with a hammer. Also, KMnO4 in the presence of strong sulfuric acid yields manganese heptoxide (Mn2O7), which is an extremely reactive oxidizing agent and explosive. Both potassium permanganate and manganese heptoxide can be induced to break their bonds in a way like the nitrogen bonds in TNT or nitroglycerin disintegrate. This bond decomposition happens far faster than ordinary ignition and burning in black powder and the like. Thus, these substances can explode even when not confined. They are dangerous in the extreme without stabilizers, and should never be experimented with for fun.

Ate random things blindfolded.