Run around in the woods with a good stick.
Nobody should be preventing you from running around with a good stick!
Man, the older I get, the more I miss being a kid with a good stick.
You can still run around in the woods with good stick regardless of age. I still do it with my nephews.
ran a Tor exit node. chatted on Bluelight. took over a (small) botnet. tripped on research chemicals.
Climbing trees! I’d end up climbing mostly up to the top…
One time as a kid, a friend lent me her glasses (I never needed glasses, but I always liked them) and I went to climb a tree. In the tree, looking down, the glasses made it seem like I was much closer to the ground than I was.
So I jumped.
It was extremely stupid. There was a point during the fall when I felt like I should’ve reached the ground already, but I hadn’t. In the end I was fine, the glasses were fine, and my friend thought it was funny. But wow, that could’ve gone disasterously wrong.
Woah, I imagined this in my head so vividly. I’m glad you’re okay!
Too many to count, but I’ll leave you with one of the least dangerous: woods porn.
One time in the mid 2000s my friend and I were on a hike in the mountains and we found a tree that was like a cave, all branches everywhere except a little entrance. Inside we found porn magazines with the pictures ripped out and placed on branches all over the inside of the “cave”. After that we always joked about the porn cave we found.
Back in the 60s, i was a Free-Range kid. On on a nice non-school day, I would go out after breakfast on my bike, and be gone all day, without any money, a watch, ID, cell phone (didn’t exist back then), anything, and I’d be gone all day. The only rule was to be home by 5 pm.
Nobody knew where I was, who I was speaking to, or anything. If i bumped into friends, I’d hang out for a while, but if I needed to know the time, I’d ask some stranger. If I was thirsty, I’d knock on a random door and ask for a glass of water. Once, I stopped at the end of a driveway to watch some guy doing woodworking in his open garage. He saw me watching and this stranger invited me into garage, and showed me his tools, and what he was building. Turned out he was a decent guy, and I probably reminded him of his grandson, but what if he wasn’t? My primary fear was running into the Robolotto boys, but as long as I didn’t see one of them, I was happy.
This was routine for years, and it was the same for my friends. I started doing this when I was about 7 years old.
Did this upbringing influence your later life?
I think it helped shape me into a an adventurous, curious person, because that was what motivated me as a kid. Other Free Range kids might have gone out to play sports, or to look for trouble, etc., but i was just exploring.
There was another direct influence on my life: Once, i headed to a nearby “woods,” to watch animals, and bumped into some friends. One jumped over a small creek to greet me, and stepped right onto an underground bee hive. They all poured out of that hive like water, and came directly for me. The first stung my lip, then neary eye. They got in my hair, up my t-shirt, stuck in my socks etc.
I jumped on my bike and started racing toward home, hoping to outrun them, but they were the kind of bees that don’t lose their stingers, so the ones stuck in my clothes kept stinging me. By the time i got home i had at least 30 stings.
I’m okay now, but i was really afraid of bees for many years. Gardening helped me learn to lose my fear.
Overall, i think it made me a person who isn’t afraid of the world, and i know i can navigate any situation that comes up.
I see a lot of similar stories here about wandering free and living like feral kids but I want to second making homemade Explosives from hobby shop Rocket engines.
- Walk around town with a pellet gun
- walk home from school alone
- catch fish from the creek and eat them, after cooking on a fire in the field-- started with a magnifying glass.
- build a tree fort in the forest 20-30 feet up
- walk on the barely frozen creek
- read books
Reading books would get you jailed first these days
Got vaccinated.
That’s a joke. The real answer is almost everything. I was practically feral and lived next to a swamp in Louisiana. RFK Jr. is 100% wrong about disease prevention but there’s no vaccine for snapping turtles.
Our school playground didn’t have a rubber ground. Or mulch. Or wood chips. No. We had gravel. Like little rocks gravel. And a swing set. A big one. Recess for us was jumping as far as we could into gravel.
We also had wooden monkey bars that gave you splinters. We tried to skip bars, and if we were lucky, land on the gravel. If we weren’t lucky, we would fall into a hornet’s nest. Hornets loved those old wooden playgrounds.
But perhaps the greatest piece of school yard entertainment was the steel merry go round. We’d have one of us try to hang off of it horizontally with 3 or 4 of us sping it. Lose your grip and fall off? Where would you land? You guessed it. Face first into the gravel.
That thing would get hot enough in the summer to fry an egg, but as much as we enjoyed eating our breakfast that way, we lost it before the end of 8th grade. A kid from a neighboring school crawled under theirs and tried to grab the axel while it was turning. It ripped his hand clean off. But still, those were the days.
Didn’t rip my hand off, but I definitely fell off one of those things, busted the back of my head open. I kind of… Fell backwards with my legs wrapped around the saddle, and hit the bottom edge with my head.
Split open like a mouth.
Rushed to the hospital. 23 stitches and 13 staples to close it up again. I have to have my hair cut a special way to hide the scar. People are always surprised when I show them.
I still rode those things afterwards. Kids were tougher back then lol, had to be 🤷♂️
Similar story. I was in elementary school and fell off the monkeybars and landed flat on my back and knocked myself out, surrounded by kids. I woke up later and everyone was gone, so I got up and went back to class. I got detention for being late. When my parents asked why I “skipped class” I said that I didn’t know and was grounded for not telling the truth.
I did other dumb things, mostly around bodies of water (cliff diving, rip currents). I’m surprised that I’m not dead. As an adult, I’m afraid of everything.
Yikes, kids are dumb lol.
I never grew up around waves, so when my brother and I visited family on the coast and we were playing in the waves, other people wouldn’t join us. We were going further and further out. Finally we convinced the guy to join us, and no lie, he said he jokingly said “ok I guess I’ll die too”. We didn’t know what he meant. All three of us got stuck in a mild rip current. I almost drowned trying to swim directly into it. Nobody told me any different. My brother and the other guy were stronger swimmers, they were ok. It all happened very fast. We gave that guy an earful afterwards, he was like “I thought you knew” 🤦♂️
go to school in America
🙄
Some friends and I used to soak a tennis ball in lighter fluid, light it on fire, and play “hacky sack” with it. I’m completely shocked none of us ended up with any bad burns.
Edit: to be fair I do have plenty of burns but they are all from baking or getting baked, not from playing with fire.
We sprayed hair spray on our hands, lit them, and did flaming high fives.
We did this too. We used hacky sacks, socks and idk what else that would absorb lighter fluid and then play in the dark. Learned what burning hair smells like and melted some shoes but we kept doing it.
I’m a Gen X’er… Not sure if the Lemmy’s word limit on posts would allow me to list it all.
So here are a few:
Drank from the garden hose? Check
Rode in a car without seat belts? As a toddler? As a baby? Check
Rode my bike all over town with no helmet? Had an accident that put me in a coma for 48hrs because of not wearing a helmet? Check
Harvested tobacco on my grandparents farm? Check (Anyone who has done this by hand, working with those stakes knows the risks.)
I started skydiving in the early 90’s. My mother was absolutely appalled and constantly berated me about how “dangerous” it is to jump out of an airplane.
The truth of the matter was I was far safer in free fall than I was during most of my adolescence.
Is drinking from the garden hose actually considered dangerous nowadays? I thought that was just a Boomer meme.
I’m still here.
I keep reading it, so added for comedic effect…
Bike helmets didn’t get common until 6th grade or so. Same with face guards and mouth guards in anything but football.
We also had a diving board with a full size car spring. A gymnast pal could do double flips off it.
That diving board sounds fucking wild
My brother and I are rebuilding it this summer. The pool at my moms house is also being re-plastered so we’re going to drill and epoxy new bolts in the deck and sand and fiberglass the old wood, which hopefully isn’t too rotten.
Gotta get my 7 y/o diving off it this summer.
Looks exactly like this model but with on thicker spring instead of the 2. My 6’3 230lb dad could just about bottom it out.
We stille don’t use bike helmets here in the Netherlands
We were riding off skate ramps at the time though. If I lived in a place with separate bike lanes I might consider going helmet-less. But I’ve also been hit by a car and likely saved a lot of brain damage by having a helmet on. Same with skiing (helmets and accidents, not hit by a car!).
Walking to school alone.
Holy shit man, so much. So so so much. Honestly I’m surprised I survived childhood.
We used to free climb cliffs. One of my step brothers took a pretty bad fall, about 60 feet down. He cartwheeled and banged against the cliff face, then landed in a sitting position. His right arm was torn open from armpit to elbow, and the bones were sticking out. Compound break. We had to walk him though about 2 miles of desert to get back to civilization and get help. He survived with no other major injuries, but that was a close one.
I used to go camping out in the desert by myself as a kid. From like 10 to 14 years old. I’d take a bow and arrows with me and just stay out there for a few days with my parents thinking I was spending a few days at a friends house. So much shit could’ve gone wrong, and sometimes it almost did.
Then there’s the normal kid shit like playing with fire and chemicals, almost blowing ourselves up or burning everything else down.
People wonder why I never had kids and all I can do is think about all the shit I got up to as a kid. I don’t need that kind of stress.
