So after that last post about my recklessness, I thought I'd share a story with you all: one of the tales of why my friends were often banned from playing with me. :D
Dad used to live on this really lovely little private street. We had lots of woods for wandering, only a few neighbours, and a few of those neighbours had horses. Google maps hasn't caught up to that house yet, or I'd post a photo. I was DEVASTATED when Dad had to move ($$ problems...) in 1998.
I had lots of nearby friends at Dad's house, and spent pretty much every weekend there. There was Jess (1 yr younger, across the street), and then the kids down the street (Jason-3 yrs older; Peggy-1 yr older; and Jackie-2 yrs younger). We all played together a lot, but mostly me, Jess, and Jackie because Jason was a boy and had other boy friends, and Peggy had an attitude and thought she was better than everyone else. But there was this one time when I was like 10 years old when myself, Jess (9), Jackie (8), and Jason (13) were playing in the woods and we decided to go check out the neighbors' horses.
The guy next door to Dad's house had like 8 horses, and he was totally ok with us going to wander in his fields, petting and feeding the horses, and playing with the cat in the barn. But the guy at the end of the street was not so friendly and forbid us kids from going anywhere near his house.
Naturally, I wanted to go check out the horses at the end of the street.
I don't know if this guy's horses were badly behaved escape artists, or if the owner was just paranoid, but he had them in a pretty decent-sized enclosure in the back yard with an electric wire running along the top of the fence.
Now one would think that it being 3 against 1, and Jason being the oldest and the only boy, I would not have had such persuasive powers over the others. But somehow I managed to convince them that we should all touch the electric fence. Not only that, but we should have a contest--let's see who can hold on to the electric wire for the longest amount of time.
Thankfully, the voltage was not that high. At first you didn't feel anything when you grabbed the wire, but then after a second I guess the charge built up. And it was like a ZAP through your whole body that actually made it impossible to hang on to the wire. The electric charge forced us to kind of leap away from it after a few seconds.
I held on the longest.
Jess, however, did not enjoy the game. Idk if she held on too long, or was just more sensitive to the electricity or what, but she like burned the palms of her hands and went running down the street, crying all the way to her house. Jess was an only child with very high-strung parents, and her parents and I had many a run-in regarding my choice of "games."
Me, Jason, and Jackie were like oh crap. Now we're all in trouble. Solution? RUN back to Jason and Jackie's house, hide in the basement and pretend we were playing video games the whole time.
Totally didn't work. Jess's parents called Dad and Stepmom. I think Jess tried to cover for me, but her parents knew me too well by then. Dad picked me up from Jason and Jackie's house, made a show of telling me off in front of them and their parents, and then we got in his car to go home.
As soon as he shut the door and started driving away, he started laughing like a crazy person and asked me how electrocuted we all got from the fence.
Good times. :)
