Slammr (imported) wrote: Tue Dec 04, 2012 8:10 pm Another close call: it is a wonder I'm still alive.

This took place somewhere on the California coast. I was at the beach with a couple of friends and was swimming in the surf. I got caught in my first and only real riptide. You don't ever want to get caught in one, I guarantee you that.

I didn't think I was going to make it back to the beach. If at any time I thought I was going to die, that was it. By the time I dragged myself onto the beach I was literally too tired to move. I lay with my arms out, on my belly, with my face in the sand. I was maybe twenty-nine at the time.

I know you're not supposed to fight it; you're supposed to swim parallel to the beach, but at the time, you don't think about that. You're just trying to get back ashore, and it's not letting you.

Admittedly our S. Calif. surf is much milder then up north.

I use to seek out rip tides and swim against them like an exercise pool of today, then -

swim parallel to the coast and let a flank of the rip tide take me in.

Well some people parachute and I get the willies looking at their live action fall on TV.

Well that covers air and water, is anyone afraid of Earth like buried alive or fire? Elemental fears?

Moi

I was once walking across an open field where there had been some construction work. I stepped onto what seemed like solid ground and found myself falling. I wound up standing in a waist-deep hole filled with a fine powdery dust that couldn't bear human weight. The dust must have been the by-product of some construction process. They just filled a large hole with it and left. It looked like solid earth. I was terrified for about 2 seconds since I had no idea how far I would fall or what was happening. Had the hole been much deeper, I might have "drowned" in dust.

For me it was a few close calls:

First one was when I found an antitank (or anti-personnel) mine. Could not identify it properly, it was in tall grass and really rusty, and I found it about 40 cm from me. Had no desire to identify it, just get away from it. And it was quite a scare. I knew, that the forests were not cleaned totally of war remains. Just had not expected to find something like this.

The other one was when I was SCUBA-diving and started to get water with air. Not much, still enough air for breathing, but the faster I moved, the more water I got. Thankfully I had not panicked then, I signalled distress to partner and went up. We were above 12 meter limit, so no decompression was required. On the examination it was a rupture in regulator membrane. That was still scary, cause, really I do not swim that well. Take swimfins from me and I will swim like an axe. All the way down.

The third was when I was roller-skating and almost flew over turning police car. I was sure, that I had a green light for me, but... Look at the cars, not at the traffic lights, traffic lights haven't hit anyone yet. At that time I first reacted by grabbing the traffic light (and doing two turns around it), only then I felt scared/shaken (surprisingly delayed, that was a good thing, that I reacted first. I had no protection and no helmet).

That is what I can remember of the top of my head.

There probably were others.

Oh, one more, which I remember, it was not mine.

A friend of mine (that was in school, we were 13-14 or so) have somehow got a mortar round, still in oil and clean. Like I say, there are remains from WW2 in local forests. Some are still in good condition. And he was told that it was deactivated (no explosives, safe to carry). So... he packed it in his backpack, and took it home with intent to put it on his table. On an overfilled suburban train. He brought it home, and showed to his father. Father was in military professionally, so he sees the thing, sees that it is live, turns pale and asks something along the line of "you brought THAT on a train in backpack? It is live".

I have heard the story from his parents themselves, so... I have no reason to doubt it.

The truth is stranger than fiction, so the old saying goes.

I'm not even going into some of my scariest moments.

Until the summer I turned fourteen, castration was just a word that young adolescents usually mispronounced, and I had never really though much about nor cared about nor considered the true meaning of the word. “Next time I’ll cas-tar-ate you!” we’d warn a guy after we popped him in the nuts.

Dad was a heavy equipment mechanic and he worked all through the fifties and sixties on the Interstate Highway boom, and I must have attended half a dozen different primary and elementary schools during that time, but he decided to stay put so I could have some continuity during my high school years. To facilitate this he took a steady job in town and rented a house next to a large dairy farm.

The farmer had three sons: Larry and Tom were sixteen and seventeen years old and big and burly and standoffish, but Stevie, their younger brother, was really friendly. He was eleven and he took a lot of crap from his big bothers about being a runt, so he took to me right away and seemed to regard me as a best bud instead of the just an itinerant construction worker’s son. He took me all over the farm and showed me his favorite places, including a large irrigation supply pond where he and his brothers sometimes swam. He could go there anytime he wanted but he wasn’t allowed to swim unless someone was with him. It was hot out and I was with him so he shed all his clothes and waded in just like he did with his brothers. I wasn’t too big on the idea, but he finally convinced me that nobody would see us so I stripped down and joined him.

We splashed around a while and then got out to dry. Stevie was about the same size as me but was still a prepubescent kid. My nuts had been down for almost a year and I was a fully feathered Man. Well, an adolescent, anyway. He had some Man-questions, so I told him what I knew, which wasn’t much of course, but just talking about it gave me a boner, which raised more questions. One of these questions was about masturbation. He knew it had something to do with sex and he’d heard his brothers talking about it and he knew they did it, but he didn’t know what it was and they refused to clue him in, so I gave him a demonstration by beating off into the grass. Stevie, probably never having seen his brothers sporting wood, seemed totally awed by the size and function of my modest meat.

We went to the pond again the next afternoon and were drying off, no woody and no hanky-panky this time, when Stevie casually mentioned that he’d told his smarty brothers that thanks to me he knew all about what they did at night, and that I had them beat all to hell down below. He’d just finished saying that when Tom and Larry walked up. They had the elastrator tool used to castrate calves with them and they held me down to the ground while Stevie, threatened with a beating, put the castration band around my nutsack. They finally let me go after warning me to stay away from Stevie. I couldn’t get the band off with my fingers and by the time I got home and found the toenail clippers my balls were dark red and getting cold and I hurt like a bitch all over down there and I was sure that I’d been castrated.

Later that year, guys in the high school locker room would joke about turning each other into steers, and I’d laugh along with them, not willing to admit that I had nearly been there and that it had scared the shit out of me. It really screwed up my mind, too. Even though I hadn’t touched Stevie, I suspected that I had committed a forbidden sex act; one that might brand me as being queer or warrant my castration. Also, there were other problems. Love was in the air and I was a horny little bastard. Only thing was, I’d get all worked up, and then the instant a girl touched me I’d flashback to Stevie’s soft hand cramming my nuts through the stretched band and I’d go flat. I eventually got over it when I finally realized that what Tom and Larry had done to me was far worse than my showing their brother how to jack off, and then I was pissed off enough to want to do to them just what they had tried to do me.

I eventually graduated and went into the Army, and I came home from boot camp lean and mean and ready to kick some ass, but the older boys were away at college and I really didn’t have anything to say to Steve. Dad went back to work on construction and moved again while I was overseas and I never saw any of the brothers again.