When I was 15 I ended up buying a motorcycle off my buddy's dad, but I will include the necessary preamble:
Prior to owning my own bike, my friend and I ripped around on his little 250 Honda "chopper" which looked straight out of Easy Rider. Had the long raked front fork, sissy bars and big back support on the 2-up seat. We took it EVERYWHERE, which, in rural New Brunswick meant dirt, gravel, grass, hay. mud...etc. Wiped it out several times, but always at low speeds. I remember him jumping the dike with it one day and ending up in a stream and then we spent 45 minutes trying to get it running again.
His dad had a Suzuki GSX-400R that was sitting and my buddy wasn't allowed to ride.
His dad worked seasonally (forestry) and got in a hard spot where the rear diff in his van blew out and he couldn't afford to pay the mechanic to get it back, and if he didn't get it back, he couldn't get to work, and if he couldn't get to work, he was going to be fired. He knew I was interested in the bike and reached out hoping I could buy it from him. I was just a 15 year old kid at the time, no real job, just some cash from working a summer job back in Ontario. He started at $500, I told him I didn't have $500.00. We went back and forth until out of exasperation he said he needed $250 to get his vehicle back, and I did happen to have $250.00, so that's what I got the bike for.
Story 1: My buddy and I were ripping the 250 Honda down the road that ran across the ridge my parents lived on. We were FLYING, probably close to the max speed of the little chopper and came into the S-bend WAY too hot. Neither of us were wearing helmets or anything protective.. Driving like complete fools. Since we weren't going to make the S-bend, we went through the S-bend. In the ditch, trees flying by us at like 100Km/h (60Mph) then launched up the other ditch after shedding a bit of speed and then stopping in the middle of the road, our lives having just flashed before our eyes. Neither one of us said anything for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably only like 2 minutes.
Story 2: I was driving the Suzuki into school pretty regularly, even though I didn't have a license, as I'd just take the marsh tractor roads. I was taking auto mechanics as one of my courses, this would have been Grade 11 IIRC, and my mechanic teacher was a wild frenchman from Moncton who also drove a bike and had no problem with me bringing mine into the school shop to work on. First thing I did was fix the front brake, which was seized solid, and while I eventually put a new set of tires on it, as the OEM ones were bald and weather cracked, that wasn't until much later on.
So, another guy from school had a little Honda 100cc dirt bike and he meets up with me at my place and we drove the marsh road into town. I was, as a typical 15 year old moron, showing off, and he wound out that little 100 at around 80Km/h, and I blew by him at 140+, not thinking about how much of that I was going to need to shed coming into the very sharp turn that led into the covered bridge we had to go through.
I let off and realized that I was still going WAY too fast for the turn and got on the binders, favouring the rear brake so I didn't slide out and realizing quite quickly that this wasn't going to cut it. I grabbed the front brake and laid the bike down, staying on it, pushing hard up against the handle bars to keep my body off the gravel. The last 20ft or so, I couldn't hold myself up any longer and put my hands down, destroying my palms. I stopped only a couple feet from the guard rail, which was the only divider between the road and the huge rocks and the river on the other side. Had I hit that guard rail and landed on those rocks I would have most certainly have been killed.
My buddy finally caught up to me, my palms shredded, bike still running, and asks me if I'm OK. I tell him yes, and he just drives into town, so I drove home. During the drive, my hands healed to the handle bars, which made for a lot of fun when I got home. My dad immediately knew something was up and from that point on was always looking for an excuse to get rid of my bike and sold it on me when I was away at University.
So I go into school the next day, my hands bandaged up and my shop teacher turns to me and goes "dumped the bike eh?" and I was like, yep, how did you guess? And he responds "I've done pretty much the same thing, how bad is it?" at which point we unwrapped my hands and one was clearly getting infected already, so we doused them with peroxide, which seemed to clear it up.
I was getting chunks of gravel out of my hands for years, at random from that incident.