June 30, 2009
Danger!
Dear clusterflock, what kind of danger, real or wildly overestimated, were you exposed to as a kid? Was it worth the risk?
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comments:
- Joel Bernstein: For the record, if you pay to see this, you are no longer my friend.
- Deron Bauman: Meow.
- Joel Bernstein: This must be why I fuck so many cats.
- Michael Smith: Seems to me the experiment almost does itself.
- Casey Cichowicz: No. It is not possible. I can assure you.
- Joel Bernstein: Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes?
- LaurenH: I’m with those who say get that girl out of that household. The father has now very effectively...
- Rick Neece: Holee sh..!
- Rick Neece: Asian calligraphy, ‘cept instead of a brush, hot glass. The image of her controlling the glass and...
- Rick Neece: For the gull-wing, I’m sure it would knock me in the chin every time I opened it.
- Marco: Oh god yes.
- Rick Neece: Chuck, testes, testes, One-Two-Three. I can hear you breathing. (TAP,TAP,TAP) “Is this thing...
- Joel Bernstein: Chuck Testa
- Rick Neece: I know the Jag has gone through changes since Ford owns the company. It makes me a little sad for the...
- Michael Smith: WRONG, I’m anime FREAK.
Yeah, I definitely did all of those things as a child, except the DMCA (which I have probably done hundreds of times since it has been enacted).
I was actually just talking to my mom about fireworks, wondering why exactly I shouldn’t be allowed to light off a few bottle rockets on private property. I’m not talking about high explosives here.
Bicycle.
I think we weren’t supposed to ride more than two blocks away by ourselves, or something like that, and we rode on the sidewalk (which is illegal now), but still, we were on our bikes all day, every day, for what seemed like every summer. Without helmets or any other kind of safety gear. When we went for family rides, through the streets of Manhattan, we still didn’t have helmets. Still, the only time I got really banged up on a bike, in my life, was when we were visiting friends in Connecticut and I took a wrong turn, and I ended up (a) getting extremely lost and (b) wiping out on a gravelly hill. Ah, the country!
Keys.
I was a latchkey kid. I have a brother who’s three years older, and who was two years ahead of me in school most of the time, so he walked me to school for the first few years of elementary school. After that, though, and especially on the way home, I was on my own. We lived a couple of blocks from where Etan Patz disappeared. He was two and a half years younger than I was, and my brother was in junior high by then, so I’d have been walking to and from school by myself for at least that entire year. I lost my keys all the damn time, so I spent a lot of afternoons sitting outside, waiting for someone to come home. As a consequence, I got talked to by a lot of strangers. Occasionally I’d go hang out at a neighbor’s house, if the weather was shitty. Neighbors we knew? Well, not exactly, unless you count “the lady with the two black scotty dogs” as a proper name. I got mugged once on my way to school, because I was wearing a dress; I lost my wristwatch and had a sob but then forgot about it for the rest of the day.
Bus fare.
This, in retrospect, was not a good idea. Not because kids shouldn’t ride the bus, necessarily, but because I shouldn’t have been riding the bus, in second grade or whenever it was. The NYC bus system is cryptic, at best, and my mental map of Manhattan could have been represented on a sugar packet with a fat marker. If the bus came and I got on it, sure I was fine. One day my bus to swim class didn’t come, though, so I walked up the block and got on a different one, instead. This, if you’ve ever taken a bus anywhere, will strike you immediately as a bad call. Still, nothing terrible happened, except that I had a deeply miserable afternoon, and my parents freaked the fuck out for a couple of hours.
Knife.
I don’t remember ever not having a Swiss Army knife. It was the little teeny one, with one little blade, but I must have gotten it when I was five or six. Never had any mishaps with it, aside from losing the goddamn toothpick.
Kitchen.
I started learning to cook at some unknown very young age, and I don’t remember there ever being any restrictions on what I was or wasn’t allowed to use in the kitchen. The only dumbass thing I remember doing in the kitchen was being intrigued by the way if you hold a spoon over a candle, it turns black; so then I, Miss Supergenius, wanted to see what happened if you did that with a piece of paper. A half-second after I’d done it, I realized that I’d already known the answer to that one, so I can’t say I learned anything from the experience except that sometimes my brain doesn’t tell me stuff when I need to know it. I guess that’s important . . .
Bunk bed.
My brother had one. When I was a baby, he dropped me off the top of it and reported, “She fell.” To his ongoing disappointment, I got a shiner but survived.
Dirty pictures and bad words.
My mom’s an artist. Yes, we had tons of pictures of naked people in our house, if you knew where to look. We also had these books, which took all the fun out of the rest. And we had a book that was entirely about bathroom graffiti, mostly from bars, helpfully organized by topic. And several slang dictionaries.
Cleaning products, plastic bags, electrical sockets, ladders, rope, bungee cables, tall furniture, unbarred windows, fire escape, steam pipes, radiators, and god knows what all else.
The most dangerous object in my house was always, always, my brother.
Woodworking and electrical gear.
How could I forget this? Dad had two workshops in the apartment–one, an alcove between my what I guess would be the den to normal people (living room by day; my parents’ bedroom, thanks to a Murphy bed, by night) and the living room, covered with electrical stuff and soldering irons; the other, a small room off the far corner of the living room, filled with hand- and power-tools, chunks of wood, paint, solvents, tetanus-coated metal things, etc. I didn’t like going in the latter much, because just looking through the doorway gave me splinters, but we walked past the former fifty times a day and spent a lot of time playing with the oscilloscope and such. We could easily have sawed our legs off and then electrocuted ourselves to stop the pain, any day of the week.
I like this guy a lot. I can’t stand this culture of excessively protecting kids from the risks and possibilities of living.
Dave: they set off fireworks in the fucking streets in Barcelona on midsummer night. Small children, as young as 6 or 7, setting off rockets. Same thing in Denmark on new year’s eve. To be honest, it’s generally thrilling but also unnerving. But private setting off of fireworks is illegal in Ireland.
My childhood scrapes were very close to the bone, but mostly about deep water and great heights and ridiculous feats of sweaty unsupervised strength. We ran free and explored whatever the hell we could find to explore. Mostly I wanted to be a private investigator and was constantly looking to find a body or evidence of a crime I could investigate in disguise.
¡Comunistas!
I don’t recall engaging in fire-jumping as a kid, but we sure did set off fireworks. The grown-ups I knew allowed the small ones to do little more than caper about with sparklers, but I’m pretty sure that by the time we kids were ten or eleven, a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was in effect with respect to our unsupervised revels with bottle rockets, sky rockets, fountains, and I forget what-all else. I do remember using smoke bombs to inscribe graffiti on the sidewalk.
Generally casual supervision is what permitted me and Melanie to indulge in lighting what we called ‘pot fires’. What you do is you mound enough toilet paper in the toilet bowl so you can set the paper ablaze, and then you wait till the very last dangerous instant before you flush the column of flame down into the watery depths.
I can’t wait till Daryl responds to this post, India.
swimming rain-swollen rivers, traversing volcanoes, crawling unmapped underground caves, riding bikes from one end of town to another, returning a forgotten item to a family friend — by myself — after dark — on foot — blocks away — in Yemen.
Of course it wasn’t until I was a teenager that anybody realised that half the country appeared to be a paedophile and there was really no sense amongst adults of having to protect their children from weirdy men or priests at all.
It’s really swung the other way in the past ten or fifteen years though. A lot of over the top rules and uptight parents. So they don’t want their kids to be raped by the swimming coach anymore, that’s fair enough, but we haven’t swung back into a kind of middle ground yet here, culturally.
My brother made rockets and shit like that, and I’m sure he and his friends fucked round with fireworks at some point; I don’t think I ever did. He also made model airplanes and maybe models of all kinds (there was definitely a Millennium Falcon). Lots of poisonous epoxy and solvents and paint and dope. They don’t call that shit “dope” for nothing.
Throwing stars. My brother was really into throwing stars for a while. He mighta had nunchuks, too. And he—bless him—got us kicked out of summer camp by smuggling in a BB gun.
This is delicious, y’all. I’ve tinkered with most of the shit mentioned at one time or another. (India, your rememberies are most edible.) Fourth of July coming up, I’m remembering my youth at such times and visits to Arkansas around this same time of year. We would beg Dad for Black Cats. Our relatives, my brother’s and mine, would get bags full, then starting off as instructed–laying a cracker on the ground, lighting it then running away–would progress until we were daring each other to hold them in our hands until the last moment before it went off. (The secret was holding it until the fuse sputtered to the last eigth of an inch visible, then releasing it.) It would explode inches away from our fingers, deafening us with its retort. I once held one the required time and was ready to release it, but the last fraction of the fuse went faster than expected and blew with the rest of the cracker. My index finger and thumb were numb, and blackened, for a day and a half after.
Okay–I’m back from the workshop–and this is my kind of post, India. I love reading what everybody has said here.
Here’s a list, all of it occuring before age 9:
Went out to “play”–and struck out for a pond I remembered visiting, crossing a six lane highway in the process.
Removed the powder from a 1000 pack of Black Cat firecrackers and…. All I can say is that you can live without eyebrows.
Running along the peak of a friend’s garage (about 12 feet up) and jumping off and over a picket fence into a sand pile.
Shooting a broadhead arrow up in the air–then all the kids run around with metal trash can lids over their heads.
Trick shots with a pellet rifle, involving candy cigarettes.
Getting the jar of battery acid out of Grandpa’s garage and burning various items in the vegetable garden with it.
Lying down in the street at dusk until a car stopped–then running like hell.
Riding a bicycle behind the city truck spraying the DDT fog.
Well that’s enough for now. I got a million of’em.
Daryl
It’s a goddamned anomaly you’re still with us to tell the tale. Have I told you lately that I love you?
I love you too, Rick–and I’m glad that Black Cat you held too long wasn’t an M-80!
I didn’t truck with the really hard stuff. I’m a babyfoot you know.
Yeah, and the Dude drank White Russians.
oh! I almost forgot! jumping a go cart over the lip of a dried-out cow tank at the down-hill-end of a hundred yard road twenty yards from a barbed wire fence.
Oh, yeah, there was the time Becky walked me down the block and over by the storm sewer in the middle of the boulevard and taught me how to hitchhike. She was four. I was three.
fire jumping in the streets in Tehran.
Yeah, we definitely fire jumped. Damming up the creek with all manner of rusty detritus was an annual past-time. The only time you could really call that dangerous though would be in March before we’ve properly thawed. Still, kids survive hypothermia.
I remember one chilly early-fall evening stuck on the roof of our detached garage. Just off the southeast corner there is a mulberry tree. I had climbed it and sort of leapt to the roof. Unfortunately it was not a reversible kind of manoeuvre and I was stuck there until my mother returned home some time briefly before sunset. I probably could have jumped; it was probably only twelve feet or so to the ground.
Most of my injuries came from pretty mundane things. I had my arm dislocated when I was jumping on the couch and, to prevent me from landing on the floor on my head, my mother caught me by the arm. I broke my thumb catching a wicked line drive in a 4th grade game of kickball. I was on crutches for a few weeks in undergrad because a muscle spasm (of undetermined origin) pulled a muscle in my groin. Maybe I learned young how to fall well, but I didn’t get any real injuries in the usual ways.
Learned about the magic of strike anywhere matches on the side of my house.
Climbed everything. Trees that used to be hiding spots for hide and go seek now make me nervous.
My mom’s house has a detatched garage and we’d climb up there and spend the afternoon. The trick was using the nails of the roofing to guide you to the support beams that were safe to step on.
It’s amazing none of us came falling from the attic, through the sheetrock and into the kitchen.
I helped with a lot of projects around the house. From electrical work to carpentry. The biggest injury I ever had was a small shock from a phone line. Those experiences have paid off in adulthood. I’m not real good at any of that stuff, but I can usually figure out how to fix something.
India (and all y’all): Your conclusion that your brother was by far the most dangerous thing in your household reminds me of Act One (“My, What Big Teeth You Have”) of an old This American Life episode devoted to Babysitting.
Sheila, my favourite story so far is the one of Becky showing you how to hitchhike by the storm sewer, aged 3. Reminds me of my own attempt at running away from home, aged 2, with a rubber swimming ring around my middle, in case there might be swimming where I was running off to.
Becky was a big girl. I wanted to be like Becky. Becky went to Sunday School, so I tried that. Becky took dance lessons, so I tried those. Sunday School lasted six months. Dance classes lasted eight years.
I still enroll in dance classes every now and again. No church, though.
Lucy, I like your running-away priorities (and have made a mental note about packing up the Element tomorrow). After all, there might be swimming wherever it is I’m running off to.
with a rubber swimming ring around my middle, in case there might be swimming where I was running off to.
Very practical.
My little sister ran away once, to the little ‘house’ at the top of our climbing structure/swing set. We all knew where she was but made a big deal of being unable to find her.
Now that I think about it, she ran away several times. Once I had to wrap my arms around her waist and lift her off the ground to carry her back down the block. Her legs kept moving as if she was running and she screamed the entire way back.
Sheila, you may find that those swimming rings aren’t made for adults. For reasons difficult to explain I stepped into one last week and discovered there was no way I’d be able to get the thing around my middle.
What comes through in so many of our reminiscences is the theme of time spent on our own or with other kids. No Grown-ups Allowed. I think it is incredibly important for kids to have access to a world, primarily a mental space, that is theirs alone and about which the grown-ups know nada.
Ten years ago, a couple I knew, Chicago friends, decided to have kids, and they moved way the hell north of the city, beyond the tony suburbs, to a community about as far as you could get from the city and still ride a commuter train to work. They did this not through fear of urban evil but because they’d observed the consequences of other Chicago parents’ fears of urban evil: no kids on the streets! Every damn thing was arranged and supervised by adults, and my friends just thought that was a lousy way to grow up, so they moved to a place where other parents let their kids play unsupervised.
Easy for me to spout off, I suppose, as I don’t have kids. But I was a kid, and I’m grateful for having had time to learn stuff not only from adults but from other kids and all by myself.
I’m sure it is scary to let your kid first begin to wander beyond view of your watchful eye, but I am not sure that parents felt that so acutely as many seem to do now.
Michael, my parents still take ‘wings’ with them (rubber rings for arms) when they go on holidays. For the pool. Some lovely ladies in their seventies made a big fuss of Dad on one of their last holidays, and showed him how to swim. He’s been learning fast ever since.
It’s okay, Michael. I did learn to swim as a kid, so a rubber ring is not required in order for me to enjoy being in the water!
(I was sort of daydreaming about floating lazily downstream for hours, though.)
All my stories are dwarfed by my husband’s. For instance, his mother would put him out back “to play” at 18 months. The neighbor called once to say “your boy is walking down the middle of the street, toward town.” The neighbor didn’t bother to go out and get the toddler, he just called about it.
Small town Iowa. Survival of the fittest. I do love Midwesterners.
Michael, I really liked your lifeguard reminiscence in response to Phil’s post about life-saving.
Cece, I like that. Weeds out the weak ones.
Sheila, you remind me of how we owned the neighborhood when we were young.
My mom had very specific boundaries, certain streets we could not cross. In the summer we’d gather-up the neighborhood kids and play a massive game of hide and seek, our parents inside making dinner. I could travese the length of our block behind houses without ever putting my feet on the ground.
Looking back, I realize it was controlled freedom, but we’d stay out until after dusk when the first parent would appear on the porch, “Dinner!!” If we’d wanted we could have stayed in our hiding spot, tucked away, hidden from the world and our parents would never find us, but we were hungry and the game would end as, one by one, each of us headed home.
Sheila, my brother was not as creative as the babysitter in the NPR story; he mostly just went for crushing and smothering.
This issue of parental supervision is on my mind a lot lately as My Therapist (I feel that I always have to capitalize it, like it’s the title of a Hal Sirowitz poem) has been unsubtly trying to suggest to me that my parents were neglectful, and that this is why I am such a pain in the ass to myself all the time. She is, pretty clearly, appalled that I was allowed to walk around Manhattan by myself, and that my parents trusted us not to do anything too stupid. It’s been mildly amusing me for the last couple of weeks, but this morning I woke up thinking, “I have got to fire that chick.” Like, how about you help me with the problems I have, not with the problems you think I should have? Ditz.
Now therapists — they can be dangerous. Who needs to shell out money for bad advice and head-fucks? I can give that to myself for free.
Exactly.
One bit of trouble I didn’t get into that I’ve always wondered about was the guy who stopped me on Bleecker Street when I was on my way home from junior high school. He wanted me to be in a movie, he said. “What is that, a musical instrument?” he asked, pointing to my flute case. “You can play that in the movie.” I said no thanks, but ever since, I’ve wondered, What kind of lame-ass porn movie has an eleven-year-old playing a flute in it?
One filmed with a camcorder propped up on a stack of magazines.
phew. michael smith. you know too much.
See? His parents neglected him.
Let’s see…knives, guns, bicycles, hiking in woods that didn’t have a traffic light for 200 miles (read lost = dead) led by twenty year olds who didn’t know their asses from their elbows, absolutely no curfew in Princeton which spelled trouble (the rich kid kind, not that we were rich), and my own car at the age of seventeen.
[...] India: One bit of trouble I didn’t get into that I’ve always wondered about was the guy who stopped me on Bleecker Street when I was on my way home from junior high school. He wanted me to be in a movie, he said. “What is that, a musical instrument?” he asked, pointing to my flute case. “You can play that in the movie.” I said no thanks, but ever since, I’ve wondered, What kind of lame-ass porn movie has an eleven-year-old playing a flute in it? [...]
As a kid I used to train spot at the main railway station in Bristol. There was a particular book every kid wanted that had ALL the numbers in it – anyway, I was about 9 I guess and was at the station alone. This guy approached me and asked me if I’d like a copy of this book – they were innocent times, I said sure. He told me I’d have to do something for it – pee into a cup!
I asked if that was it. He said yes, so I went to the toilet, peed in the cup provided and he handed me the book.
RESULT!
I have given it no thought until I was an adult – he didn’t touch me, not even watch me pee. He just wanted the pee – perhaps he thought it had youth giving powers!
Phil, you reckon a labeled vial of your pee might rest today in a collection along with similar ones from any number of Bristol boys?
Did they have drug tests back then? Perhaps he thought your pee had employment-giving powers.
Yeah, I was thinking something along those lines. But it’s still rare to have to have drug tests for a job over here. Maybe it was some kind of parole situation?
Ok so I also took an overdose when I was 2. Had the whole scene at the hospital, pumping my stomach and everything.
Compared to the rest of you, my childhood was quite safe! My parents spent most of my childhood growing up themselves, so they were very busy, and this permitted my sister and me a tremendous amount of freedom. I didn’t completely understand what it meant, but according to everyone, I was a tomboy, so I tried to behave accordingly. We lived on about 15 acres that my mother named Indalane Farm. It was my universe, complete with woods, creeks, secret places, horses, pet goats, lots of cats, dogs, and random other pets like chickens, and a duck I named Daffodil. I was plopped on a horse before I could walk and learned to ride not too long after, so it was nothing to grab a horse and take off for the day. When we were old enough to venture off the farm, I think around 7 or 8 years old, we’d leave early in the morning and ride to a nature preserve about 4 miles away then come home in the early evening. When we were really little, Mom would come with us, but after 7 or 8, we lit off without her. The area is hardly rural these days, so even riding a bike on that old route would be a challenge now. Back then, there were no pedophiles, kidnappers, dangerous drivers, and nothing bad could possibly happen, so it was very safe. Hate to say it, but I’d never let my kid do that now.
Fireworks? My grandfather was a hopeless alcoholic whose birthday was July 4th. Mom’s birthday is July 2nd, and my cousin’s, July 3rd. Grandpa really dug the 4th of July holiday, and anything he could get his hands on to blow up, he did. My most dangerous fireworks memory is scary Grandpa and his lighter.
I didn’t try to run away from home until adulthood.
I didn’t answer this question originally because I couldn’t think of anything dangerous (aside from climbing and falling out of trees) in my childhood. And now, days later, I still can’t. The truth is, I never felt that my parents prohibited danger. Just like how I never learned to ride a bike, my parents were overbearing with my eldest sister, less so for my middle sister, and completely overlooked me.
I was much more of a self- and sibling-raised child, so if my sisters did something, so did I. Be that cooking in the kitchen, lighting candles and wax seals, carving figurines out of sticks with my Swiss Army knife, or taking our significantly larger-than-myself dog for a walk — only to be dragged three blocks before a passing car noticed and stopped. I guess there was danger, but I never felt the fear of pushing limits.
yeah, that’s interesting Kelsey, there was no fear in any of the things I mentioned either — although looking back at some of them, the rain swollen river especially — my father handing us kids over to some other adult across the deepest, swiftest current to where we could finally stand in the less swiftly flowing current — still blows my mind.
the go-cart pond jumping really was the most exhilarating, the only fear I felt was the time we got the longest head start and really got going down that hill and when we landed had to swerve to avoid the barbed wire, or maybe I’m wondering now that I think about it that we might have ended up in it, in the barbed wire, and had to extricate ourselves from it — but there was so much adrenaline, and so much joy, it hardly would have mattered either way.
India, give the therapist this bit of neglect context: My best friend’s sister drove a pickup truck to Auburn University to pick up my best friend for the summer. The sister was 14. The drive was 4 plus hours, country roads, cities, interstates. The parents were busy. Plus, father gave the 14-year-old strict instructions not to let my friend, 19, drive back home.
I didn’t think I would hover when my son was born. But I did. It is terrifying to be in charge of a young life, one you would sacrifice your own for without needing to weigh pros and cons. I’m glad my Alabama relatives ignored my edicts, behind my back gave my son freedoms — pulling up tree roots with tractors, riding fast on three wheelers, shooting off fireworks, there may have been some gun play. I realized what I was doing as well and my son won a lottery for an excellent school for 6th through 12th that is like college. Academic choices, they can go off campus, ditch if they wish. Son is breathing, thriving.
Phil: Strange re train station. There are odd alt-type practices re urine drinking but I’m guessing that was not the case with this particular, ahem, gent!
I went to the farm to shoot with my great-grandfather. he had a couple .22 caliber pistols, a twenty and a twelve gauge shot gun. I remember lining one of the pistols up to shoot a can we had set in the distance. for some reason, when I pulled the trigger, nothing happened, it must have jammed.
instinctively, my finger still pressed against the trigger, I tilted the barrel back so I could get a look . . . the gun went off as it approached a 45 degree angle, the sound of the bullet whizzing into the air.
shit fire.
save on matches.
Yeah, I don’t remember being scared of any of the stuff I mentioned, either.
You know what I was afraid of? At Halloween one year we’d gotten these cardboard skeleton decorations, and there was one in my bedroom, next to the window. It creeped me out, so I hit it, and it fell behind the radiator. I was embarrassed for being afraid of it, so I didn’t tell anyone, but I also didn’t fish it out. For years, I was aware of the skeleton behind the radiator—it’s unclear to me now whether after a while I was more afraid of the thing itself or of the dust bunnies I was sure had accumulated around it. It was there for enough years that I started to doubt whether the thing had ever happened. Then, finally, giving my room a thorough cleaning one day—possibly when my parents were moving to a new apartment, when I was nineteen?—I poked around behind the radiator and pulled out . . . a very dusty cardboard skeleton.
No shit. That’s what was scary to me when I was a kid.
None of the real stuff scared me either, India. I was much more afraid of the severed head I just knew I would find some night when I took garbage out to the can in the alley behind the house.
And now you get severed heads (or severed bodies) on your doorstep every day. See! Your fear was totally justified!
putting the ice cream away in the freezer outside at night in the garage behind the house. terrifying.
the faces of the young Iranian boys who had been circumcised without anesthesia. terrifying.
Classic quote from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
“Let’s go play machete fight. Ain’t no terrible tradgedy’s gonna happen today!”
Our garbage cans were about halfway up our long driveway, tucked up next to the house. When it was dark I always moved quickly, sure that any nefarious characters would be hiding in our dark driveway near the garbage (it never bothered me when my mom let us open the tent trailer and ‘camp’ out there). One night I barreled down the front steps and around the corner to find a man urinating in our flower bed. I froze. This was it. He was the kidnapper I’d new I’d find out here one day.
He packed it up, turned, gave a slight jump when he saw me, ‘oh…uh hey…I was just…’ He laughed, ‘have a good evening.’ He walked past me and down the block.
I just came across this lovely article by author Michael Chabon, on the difficulties of teaching his children to be adventurers: