[Redliner]

We did more stupid things as kids than I can count.

Growing up in Lethbridge, we would ride our bikes down to the river bottom and climb the big train bridge. It would shake like crazy when a train went over so we started hanging from the steel pieces near the bottom to feel the vibrations. It turned into a game to see who could hold on the longest and we would turn our arms to rubber trying to win. Of course, we were only about 10 feet off the ground so eventually that wasn't exciting enough anymore and we started seeing how high up the bridge towers we could get. We were small enough to lie down inside the steel girders so we would just climb up and lie there, 200 feet off the ground, hanging on and getting rattled silly as the train went over.

There used to be this TV show called "The Master" about an old dude who was really a retired ninja or something, reluctantly training his young protege. Of course we thought it was the coolest thing ever, and simply by the virtue of watching it once a week we all became ad-hoc ninja students as well. Our "training" consisted of jumping off the roofs of our houses and out of trees, trying to karate chop pieces of plywood, (of course none of us had any real instruction - one of my friends actually broke his hand trying to punch through a cinder block) and running full speed along the tops of people's fences to "improve our balance". We would have races to see who could do it fastest. These were your typical wood fences, probably about 6 feet high and not always in the greatest condition. We had some gnarly falls off those things.

Another friend (not the broken hand kid) had parents who owned an acreage just south of the city and we would spend every spare minute out there. It had a couple old houses on it and half a dozen farm buildings in varying states of repair. Since we were ninjas, we would run around on the roofs and even jump from building to building. One of the barns was so rotten that if you were on the roof and you stepped in between the rafters, your foot would punch right through. We thought that was perfect so again we would race each other down the length of the building, timing our steps to (hopefully) hit the solid spots. I fell through once and cut my leg pretty badly on a rusty nail. My mom took me to the doctor for a tetanus shot and told me to be more careful, and that was the end of it. Of course, she had no idea what we were actually doing out there and it was a miracle nobody got killed.

We did have one close call that kind of woke us up a bit. One of the old barns had a hay loft that had trap doors to get up in to it, which made it the ideal location for our ninja headquarters. We dragged a ton of old wood up there and built a bunch of pretty cool forts, but then we decided that security was an issue (with us being an elite secret ninja society, we figured everyone would be trying to hunt us down and kill us) and that the best way to protect our fortress was to booby trap the trap doors into the hay loft. We found a whole bunch of old rusty farm implements and rigged up dead drops so they would fall on anyone who opened the trap doors without disarming them first. It seemed like a great idea until one kid forgot about it a couple weeks later and almost got a plough blade in the face. Somehow he managed to dodge it but it did cut his shoulder pretty bad and gave us all a good scare. That thing probably weighed 30 lbs and we're lucky it didn't take his head right off his shoulders.