Did anyone ever run away from home?
Did anyone ever run away from home?
I did once, but it was for a very short time, and actually I ran away from my grandfathers store where I was staying at the time. It was downtown and quite far from my home. Im sure some of you have done this but much more seriously, and perhaps even permanently. But these can be stories to tell, about why you did it, and what happened because of it.
My story is rather simple. I was only about 6 or 7 years old at the time, but I lived in a city of about 150,000 and knew my way around that part of it fairly well, although it was a long before I ever travelled the distance on my own other than this one occasion. I was in my grandfathers dry goods store: L. Lees Cap Company. (That business may have been why my mother was a milliner.) The store used to look similar to this:
They lived above the store which sold work clothing. For some reason I dont remember, I got angry with my grandfather, and when he was busy at the back of the store I left, walked along the street about 6 blocks to Dundurn Castle, which was originally the home of the leading citizen of the city at least a century previous and had become a museum and public park.
Behind it was a hillside and below it the was a train marshalling yard close to the railway station, and I used to love sitting up on the hill looking down at the trains. Many years later I took a photo of the tracks and trains:
After sitting there for a while I continued a long ways through a kind of dangerous area where the people we called the sewer rats lived, and eventually passed a cathedral which you see here, that was at the beginning of the long McKittrick bridge.
Crossing the bridge I got to the neighbourhood where my home was. For some reason my parents had locked the doors, which was fairly unusual in those days, so I went to a neighbours home, the Hulses which was on the corner from which I could watch my house. They were an elderly couple and always very nice to me, but they were unaware that I had run away. Of course they fed me cookies and milk while I watched.
Then a police car pulled up in front of my home, and my parents followed behind in their car. I think I panicked then and was actually afraid to go home, but Mrs. Hulse walked me there, where I faced the music. My parents were beside themselves and thought I might have been kidnapped or badly hurt, but I guess they were so relieved to see me I never even got punished.
Anyone else got a good story to tell?
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Here we go again with another article looking for your input.
Now that I think of it, my story is about running away TO home.
does taken out into the woods and left alone count? then I was taken in by a family of wolves who kept me around for a while, I think out of pity or for their amusement. then one day, tired of howling at the moon for all hours of the night I was walking through the woods when I came upon the neat smelling house. I went up to it and believe it or not the house was made of gingerbread,.....wait this story has already been used.....my bad
No Buzz never ran away from home, like Dorothy said "There's no place like home". But the real reason was: that when I asked myself that, I always answered it with, "and go where!" Never could figure out where to go.
My parents moved away before I was born so I never knew where we lived; consequently I was unable to run away from home.
People need to know that having children is hereditary; if your parents never had any, you probably won't either.
Is your real name Romulus or Remus?
You would be okay wherever you went if you had the ruby slippers.
I can't think of anything to respond to that one, A.Mac.
Between the time I was about 16 to 18, I ran away from home many times. I got tired of the beatings, and having someone who was SUPPOSED to care for me telling me how sorry I was. At some point, I got tired enough of it to stay away, and that was the best decision I ever made.
Nope. Besides, I would have been found and sent back, and gee what a mess THAT would have been.
Sometimes, we have to stay away, to survive. I understand that concept, too!
Brave action Leotie . Sometimes the hard decision is the right one even if it doesn't seem that way at the time ...
Neither can I, and I wrote it!
(I'm gonna try this again... the ether ate most of my prior attempt.)
The sun was well on its way across the sky that brilliant late spring afternoon. Between the eastern and western mountains that form the skyline, there was a valley where my mother's family lived in the hamlet of Holcombville. My cousin and I had gotten out of school and were walking home to his trailer at the end of one of the two streets. I had my walkie-talkies that I had gotten for christmas, and they were in my backpack along with my books.
Kenny said, "Let's run away," kind of matter of factly.
I have always been prone to flowing with wims, so I said, "Sure."
I wasn't really sure why Kenny would want to run away, but I didn't ponder on that while we were making somewhat hasty preparations for leaving, which consisted of two peanut Butter and jelly sandwiches and some granola bars. As I think about it, it must have been the spring of Fifth grade, because I remember thinking that the preparations were somewhat less than those of the main character in the book "My Side of the Mountain" that my teacher had read to us earlier in the year had made. But, whatever, it was Kenny's idea. I was just along for the ride and my contributions had been made: A pair of walkie-talkies and a Barlow jackknife.
After we packed our food in backpacks and filled two canteens with water, We walked across the the road and into the cultivated woods of the pine farm. Not long after that we entered the "wild" forest. (Wild is in quotes because everything around here had been logged at least once, so there is no old growth timber around anymore, but it had all been allowed to grow for at least sixty years.) We travelled pell-mell for some amount of time until we stopped for a drink and some of the granola bars that we had brought.
We figured that we had made pretty good time thus far, judging by the sun, which we had stopped periodically to examine the relative location of, but at my suggestion that we start rationing the food, Kenny looked a little dubious. We both ate like horses and were skinny as fence poles, so the prospect of going without food was disconcerting. We played around with the walkie-talkies for a bit, wandering through the underbrush and getting all twiggy and scratched, which for us meant that we were having a grand time.
We had a fairly good idea of where we were at and of the course that we had taken to get there, so after we got bored with behaving like fifth graders we had some serious discussion on just what the plan was. We decided that our stomachs would rule and decided to head back home.Maybe nobody had noticed our absence and we could just complete the second half of the large loop that we had been travelling along so far and make better preparations for some future date. So we started back, trailing through the woods at some distance from each other playing at the games that children who grew up in close proximity to the woods did.
When we stopped for water, we turned on the walkie-talkies to listen to any truckers who would be near and were disappointingly surprised to hear our names being called out over the airwaves. At this, we knew that the game was up, so, after replying to whomever was on the other end of the radio and telling them that we were just a little ways out, we made haste to return. Soon we were in the cultivated trees, then exiting from the woods right where we had entered about three hours previously.
The scene to which we emerged was quite a different one than we had left. Firetrucks were pulled up along one side of the road and a veritable fleet of personal auto's were parked around the lawn of the trailer. Upon seeing me, my mother came running up to me and gave me a very tight and lengthy hug, wiping tears back and saying how happy she was that I was ok.
Meanwhile, Kenny's mother had emerged from the trailer and had run to him also. But his homecoming was quite different than mine: When she reached Kenny, his mother grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shook the daylights out of him. I thought that was all until, grabbing his arm and yanking him towards the trailer, she beat him with her shoe all the way till they got inside. from the time she exited the trailer until she returned to its confines, she was screaming at him at the top of her lungs about how could you do this to me with a liberal amount of blue words thrown in.
I just want to say that I really appreciate my parents, not just for this one instance, but for being of the temperament that they were, letting me make my own choices while at he same time letting me know what was expected of me and setting clear and achievable boundaries. I realized on this day that not all parents were like that. I guess that I was just lucky.
I guess it was fairly clear why Kenny made the proposal to run away ...
Yes, Abundantly, but after the fact.
Having now seen the treatment he got from his mother, I'm curious about how Kenny ended up in his adult life.
Such is life ...
Kenny joined the army and moved to California, which is just about as far away from upstate NY as you can get and remain in the US. He does not attempt to maintain contact in any meaningful way. His mother was, soon after this episode, divorced by my uncle, but I think that living in the formative years with such a beast really got to him.
I can think of about 4 times I ran away from home.
The first time was more of a wondered away, than ran away and I was so young the story is not from my own memory but rather from family lore.
Back in the early to mid 50s, when young families were still amazed by and eager to enjoy the new and ever growing highway system, my parents decided to jump in the car with their toddler, (me), and drive down to Galveston to camp out on the beach. Sometime during the night they woke to find that, though I could barely walk, I had somehow gotten out of the tent and wandered away. Id gotten far enough that they were unable to find me on their own. They had to flag down a beach patrol car to help them look. They found me about a mile down the beach walking out onto a pier.
The second time my brothers and I, (roughly ages 7, 5 & 3), got mad at our parents and decided to run away to our grandparents house, several miles away. The trip was much like yours Buzz except that there were three of us and the youngest was being pulled in a little red wagon because we didnt think he could walk the whole way. The police found us about half way through our journey and took us back home.
The third time I was 17 and the family situation was not of the most loving kind. I looked around and decided to run away from home with just the close on my back. Joined the Marines & never went back again.
The final time I ran away I was a bit over 50. Ran away from Dallas to hide out in the woods.
Still loving the last one.
You ran away from your parents' home to go to your grandparents' home. I did the exact opposite.
this is the reason why when I ran away (I was about 7) I only "ran away" for a minute. When I considered where I was going the answer was making a U-turn and going back home
I ran all the way to Canada...of course I was 40...does that count?
True enough Buzz, we journeyed in opposite directions but what struck me was how similar the landmarks were that we used as children, to navigate our way along those chosen paths.
I too used a stone church with a high steeple to mark the passing from our neighborhood into the broader world. Not the brick church my family went to or the smaller wooded ones scattered around, since they were in the wrong direction but that big stone one which was along our chosen destination.
We also had a bridge to cross that got us over a busy street and into our Grandparents area.
No trains along our path but that bridge was a favorite spot for we kids to bicycle to and spend hours watching the trucks and cars whizzing under our feet while we tried to see how many we could hit with our spit.
Makes me wonder if all 6 to 10 year olds build up similar internal maps of their world?
Very interesting, AH. Landmarks. Dogs use smells to find their way, and we use familiar landmarks. I have all my life been very observant of my surroundings.
Well, if you're asking me (and I know most members here won't agree with me) I would say you had escaped to a safer cleaner better place.
Huckleberry Finn would have lasted longer.
well, I do agree with you...!
I wish I had been able to remain longer than the year I was there.
If I had my d'ruthers....I'd still be there...
A. Mac, have you been into magic brownies?
Petey, you are so right. But those "right" decisions can break your heart at times.
NewsTalker #1 I tell the kids the same thing, just in different words. I tell them to NEVER, EVER let anyone tell them that they are less than they are. I had someone tell me I was garbage for many years, and I want these kids today to understand that they are NOT garbage.
I can't count the number of times that I ''ran away''. But one stands out, and it didn't start as a runaway episode. Chance took over.
That old country 'I can't believe you embarrassed me' thought process. Lucky you, not so lucky cuz. How is his life now?
I never ran away-I was a bad kid-no one else would take me, but my parents had to (at least in my mind). I know I caused them untold gray hairs during my youth-as a toddler, I was a Ninja-no one could hear me as I wandered away during family outings, got up in the night (and during nap time) and snuck outside. I'm surprised my mom is still alive with all I put her though.
On a side note, she is having surgery today-replacing the replacement Hip. Any happy thoughts and prayers directed towards her are welcome.
''any happy thoughts and prayers directed towards her are welcome''. Done Six.
So directed and wishing her the best.
And to you as well.
Yea, but I got back home before they knew I was gone.