Tales From Your Childhood: Disappearing In To The Woods For Days With a Rocket Launcher

I was talking with some friends about tales from when we were growing up and just how ridiculous some of these stories were. Many of these involved us disappearing for days at a time, often into the woods, things that would instantly land you on the news these days. Maybe it was just where I grew up, or maybe it was just a different era (in the Canadian countryside about 20 years ago). I had an absolute blast hearing stories from my friends and I'd love to hear some from you guys! I'll start with a story myself and maybe this will turn into a bit of a series if the interest demands it.

Photo credit: https://flic.kr/p/RtNQfL

Today's topic: Growing up in the woods

I spent a great deal of my childhood in the woods, constructing forts, paintballing, camping and strangely blowing things up... safely... of course. My friends and I would spend the entire summer (2 months but back then it felt like a year) constructing things. We built a pretty impressive fort along a stream, if you could call it that, that included a bed, multiple floors, rain proofing, walkie-talkies, a fire pit and a shower. The shower was our pride and joy though, it was constructed with a hose, an actual shower head and a container that we would fill up from the stream. I'm pretty sure our intent back then was to live in there, and we pretty much did.

We gathered all of our supplies from all over, things randomly found in the woods, our parent's sheds, even going door to door to houses and businesses and asking for things. These days you'd never catch me doing that, who knows where the shyness grew from later in life. I have no idea who's property we built on by the way...

Now what I really don't understand is how my mother handled all of this. If my son disappeared into the woods for a ridiculous amount of time I'd have a fit! We would raid the pantries of our houses, pack bags full of supplies, and sharp tools and leave with saying as little as "We'll be back". I must add here that most of us belonged to Scouts, a weekly meeting where kids could learn how to handle knives, saws and fire safety as well as building shelter and surviving off virtually nothing. 

Now one thing Scouts didn't teach us was how to build one of the largest potato cannons I've ever seen. This turned out to be a death trap, but I'll get into that shortly. This thing was as tall as we were and built out of PVC piping. It had the perfect barrel size that would fit one large potato, the seal had to be perfect. So you'd shove your potato down the barrel with a golf club (naturally) and open up the latch to the combustion chamber. This is where you'd spray in a dangerous amount of flammable aerosol (hairspray turned out to be our favorite) and close the lid quickly before it escaped. It was go time. You jammed in a long BBQ lighter through a drilled out hole and pulled the trigger. Shooting them into the sky you'd never see the spud reach the earth.

The day we laid our home-made rocket launcher to rest was when my friend did the usual routine, but this time our shoddy construction finally decided to let go. After recovering from the shock of the huge bang and bright flash of fire, I found my friend trying to put out his smoldering hair. He walked away better than you'd expect. Just no hair on his one arm, missing most of his eyebrows and a few days of slightly fricasseed, tender skin.

The canon was left in two pieces and for some reason we never tried to repair it. I think we were too scared that we'd kill ourselves with it (probably not far off). Now that doesn't mean we stopped doing stupid things or almost killing ourselves. It was simply the end of one of our many toys.

I have a thousand other stories, but I'm going to leave this one here for today and I can't wait to hear ridiculous tales from your own childhoods. A time where a combination of immaturity, lack of fear and absolutely no understanding of consequences created some of the best memories I have today. Post your own stories below in the comments, or write your own post and leave me a link below!