Simple Decision. What Would You Do?

[Harusame]

Here's another law-abiding timid kid; I'd have stayed out. And probably cooked up reasons for the sign. A murder site? Toxic waste? Sure, you guys go on ahead and suffer a gruesome death, I'll be smug and alive out here.

 

[Juliana]

When I was a kid, there was a patch of woods where the "Bubbleheads" lived.

Love this story Abigail! Reminds me of @Jo Zebedee's challenge entry with the shrinkies and the frizzled brains.

I was a city kid so no handy woods. But we used to jump the walls into vacant lots all the time, despite 'keep out' signs and dire warnings from my mum about rats and rabies. There was one vacant lot right behind my house; it was full of trees and we made a rope swing and a sort-of-clubhouse and were most affronted when it was sold and built on and we could no longer climb over the wall.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I don't remember any No Trespassing signs on any of the vacant lots in the area where I lived as a child. (No woods either, alas.) Looking back, they sound pretty boring: just big patches of dirt and weeds. But my friends and I trampled paths through the tall weeds, dug holes to make forts. From our point of view they were exciting. I can't even imagine how exciting it would have been had there been trees.

 

[Avid Scifi Fan]

I think entering the woods depends on the purpose.

assuming they are familiar with the area and these woods didn't just apear (how far could they be from familiar territory if they walked...) Maybe it shaves off quite a bit of walking to head down the overgrown path in the woods,
or maybe they want to explore the abandoned military base lurking in the middle, or pester the cranky old psychotic man in the run down shack.

I think the answer is they would probably ignore the sign...

 

[hopewrites]

Part one) I wouldn't go in on the side with the sign, so I could say I didn't see it. More likely with friends where were like-minded than by myself or with friends who wouldn't go in at all.

Part two) More likely to go in, again on a side of the forest where there was no signage. My thinking would be that if I had be in there before I already knew whatever dangers I was being "protected" from (thus more likely to run into the new ones) and therefor the sign didnt apply to me.

I've always been more apt to obey rules I understand and agree with the reasoning for. Arbitrary rules and decrees dont hold much weight with me, I'll probably respect them long enough to find out if they are valid, but the moment they are shown to be power plays with nothing to back them, I'd toss them out the window.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

But the person who owns the property has every right to ask people not to trespass. How can it be a power play? I don't want people wandering into my backyard just because it looks intriguing, and I want to be just as respectful of other people's property rights.

I realize that most children don't think that way, and that even I, as a child, would have stayed out more from fear of the consequences than on principle. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I began to think about property rights. Before that I would have just thought the person who put up the sign was being mean. (And if they were that mean I didn't want to get on their bad side!)

But now I know that if children get hurt on your property, at least in this country their parents can sue you, even with the No Trespassing sign, if it is decided that the pond that a child drowned in or whatever it was that hurt them was inevitably too appealing to children. It's called an attractive nuisance. Since landowners might not be certain they know everything that could be considered by a court to be an attractive nuisance once someone was hurt, it would obviously make sense to try to discourage them from setting foot on the property to begin with.

 

[hopewrites]

I'm sorry, I didnt mean for it to come across that a No Trespassing sign was considered by me to be an arbitrary power play (re-reading my post I can see how easily it could be read to say just that.). No the rules I was referring to in that category are the one's along the lines of "I'm your [authority figure] and I said so!"

I dont have a problem with "no you may not have a bowl of icecream 20min before we sit down to dinner, you'll ruin your appetite, you can wait till after." or "Because you have to be up in 6hrs, that's why you have to go to bed now" or even "sneaking out into the back pasture means I dont know where to look for you when you get trampled by the cows that live there." what I have (had) a problem with is rules that dont apply to me. "Girls who call boys get pregnant" is only a valid rule if the girl calling the boy is desperate, the boy knows it, and is willing to take advantage of her desperation. Since most of my friends were boys, and I was not a desperate girl, the rule shouldnt have applied to me. "Dont run out into the street" is all well and good on busy roads or where inattentive children are playing. But I am not unaware of others trying to use the roads for the intended (and unintended) uses, so I can be trusted to cross streets without putting myself or others in danger.

I was never one of those children who found it unfair that adults lived by one set of rules and demanded that as a child I live by another. What the adults in my life swiftly learned was that I would clock the discrepancies between those rules and do my best to achieve the necessary maturity to elevate me from the child set of rules to the adult set.

Being a fully mature adult, I'm now qualified to eat icecream for dinner.

 

[Mr Orange]

The sign wouldn't have stopped me but it wouldn't make it more appealing

 

[Alexander2]

I would definitely go in. In the woods there's always a place to hide in case someone comes