"riverman" wrote in message
...

...tell us your 'times I almost died' tale...

A bunch of us were at Wyalusing state park, at the confluence of the
Wisconsin and the Mississippi rivers for a weekend of camping......sometime
around 1979, I guess. Wyalusing is a beautiful place featuring, among other
attractions, a series of trails along the tops of the bluffs overlooking the
rivers. One of the campgrounds is near enough to the bluffs that the
distant lights of Prairie du Chien are visible across the river at
night......a gorgeous sight.

For some of us these were days of hard drinking and frequent herbal
indulgence. Scott was something of an exemplar of the lifestyle and I did
my best to keep up. One night, for reasons that were never examined (and
which would doubtless remain a complete mystery anyway), we wandered off
from the group at the campground and, between tokes and sips, managed to
stumble down a bunch of trails in the dark for an hour or more. The beer
and other liquid refreshments taking their inevitable toll, we stopped at
one point to take a leak standing side by side straddling the narrow trail.
Having finished, Scott stepped boldly forward......and I reached out,
grabbed him by the collar and jerked him off his feet as I shrieked "STOP!"
"What the ****?!," he queried from where he had fallen. I didn't answer. I
was thinking. Something was wrong.......but I couldn't quite put my finger
on it.

Drunk as I was, there was a wee bit of my brain.......somewhere down in the
old reptilian part......that had been monitoring the situation, and didn't
like what it saw....or heard......or DIDN'T hear, to be more precise. When
**** hits the ground it makes a splashing noise. Neither of us had paid any
attention at the time, but there was no splashing noise. I flicked on my
lighter and, after several tries, managed to light a piece of paper or bark
or something.......just enough to show that I was standing within a foot of
a 75 foot drop-off ending at the proverbial "jagged rocks below".

Wolfgang
just one of many "scott and wolfgang get really stupid" stories.