When I think of all the stupid things I did as a child -- including but not limited to the things I did even though adults warned me not to -- I wonder how I managed to get through it with relatively little harm. I never even broke a bone til I was a teenager, and that was my nose, during soccer practice. (Nose, meet teammate's head. Ow!)

Those were the days before you had to wear a helmet to ride your bicycle, before chaperoned play dates. There was only one TV in the house, and it got only four stations, and we pretty much made our own fun.  

We played baseball (not softball! that was for girls!) on vacant lots. We played war in a woodsy ravine (pictured below). We rode bicycles everywhere. And sometimes we even participated in organized activities, but the more regulated these were by adults, the more boring they were, I'd have to say.

Of all the stuff I did, I'd say these were the stupidest:

5. Riding my bike out of town in no particular direction one Saturday in 1967, age 11. I really had no idea where I was going, and since I was following my nose, I went generally downhill. As our town was constructed on river bluffs, this meant I had long hills to climb in order to get back home. Fortunately or unfortunately, I got a flat tire around the time I had to turn around, and I had to phone my dad to come get me. He couldn't believe I had biked ten miles on country roads. Never do that again!

4. Almost derailing a freight train, age 10. Freight trains ran in a cut at the end of our street, and we kids were always down there walking on the tracks, taking short cuts to other parts of town, and playing in the woods nearby. (I'm not even counting one day when we rode a makeshift raft across a horrible polluted pond near the tracks.) One summer evening, expecting the usual 6:15 train and bored with squashing pennies on the rails, I put a stick on the tracks about as thick as my wrist. The train passed over this as if it didn't even exist, so the next evening I put a decent-sized log about as big as my thigh. When the engine passed over this, it exploded with a crash, and the engineer looked out his window in alarm. I was convinced I had almost derailed the train. Maybe; stranger things have happened, I guess, and in fact a train derailed there the next year, no fault of mine. 

3. Destroying my first bike in a construction pit, age 10. In our subdivision in the Midwest, each new house came with a basement, and the first thing construction workers did when a new house was started was to dig out the basement. The dirt would be piled on the side, making a temporary mountain about twenty feet high next to a newly dug basement about fifteen feet deep. One day when I was hanging around on the construction site of one of the new houses in our subdivision, someone said it would be fun to ride from the top of the dirt pile into the bottom of the pit.  I had gotten a new bike the Christmas before, so I volunteered my old bike for this daring-do. Each of us took turns riding the bike down the dirtpile into the pit and crashing into the opposite wall. It was fun for a while, and then the bike was wrecked. I got in trouble for that too, but no bones were broken. 

2. Climbing over a chain-link fence, age 5. I was with my older sister and her friend. They got over the fence OK, but when it was my turn, my foot slipped as I was going over, and I impaled my arm on the top of the chain-link twisty on top of the fence. I got a bad scare and I still have the scar, almost fifty years later.

1. And the stupidest thing I ever did was to play around the flooded gravel pit outside town, the one with sheer fifty-foot cliffs around what we supposed was a bottomless pit of dark blue water. The cliffs were one thing; the makeshift caves dug into their sides were another. The caves, which stretched at least ten or fifteen feet back into the cliffs, were hand-dug, perhaps by bootleggers, or hoboes, or by workmen who wanted a place to goof off. Who knows. But they were not new and they were incredibly dangerous, and if I had a kid and that kid went in there, I'd have a freaking heart attack. Thankfully, I know of no cave-ins at the site. 

I visited my small town last winter, by the way, and all those railroads that ringed the town have all been turned into bicycle trails. Safer for everyone, I'm sure. The flooded gravel pit, on the other hand, is still there (Google satellite view).