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This is going to sound absolutely retarded but the memories this thread brought back to me just now give me so much joy and I must share. I will try not to draw this out with too much detail.
From the time I was about 12 or so me and my friends would often go disappear in the woods and hang around down the at the train tracks, sometimes wandering for the whole day, dodging authorities and exploring all the interesting ruins and infrastructure along the way. Very Stand By Me.
The tracks largely follow a local river, and mostly through the middle of nowhere, and we always loved the river bubbling along like it has for thousands of years.
Eventually one summer day we went so far from home and spent so much time /out/ that the sun went down and we had to make it all the way back in the dark, totally unprepared for night. That opened a whole new era of going out into the woods and tracks in the afternoons and evenings, which, as we got older, turned into drinking beers along the tracks sometimes all night long.
Now, back to the river. One of my friends loves getting into water once he's drunk, and he started having these episodes where late at night, after a number of beers, he couldn't resist getting into the river in the dark, to enjoy the flow of cold water in complete safe isolation from the rest of the world. This eventually evolved into a "test of manhood" in which we would dare each other to disrobe in the middle of night in the middle of frozen New England winter, and dunk ourselves into the river and whoever could tolerate it the longest would win. We ended up doing this spontaneously many times over the years, and I literally always enjoyed it. The trick was to have no clothes on at all so you could put your dry clothes on afterward and not freeze to death. Once I froze so bad I lost my voice entirely, but it was still fun as fuck.
I've done the test'o manhood in both summer and winter, but I've never done it sober.
Pickerel.
