Do you have a safe place?

 

Several days ago, I read a blog post by a writer show said that when she was stressed, she went for a drive on small country roads and found solace in familiar places. Easy enough for her to do—she lives in a small town in Maine. But for those of us who are city dwellers, such oases maybe hard to find. So, I close my eyes and go in my mind.

My longtime safe place is an outcrop about halfway up a tall dune in the Indiana States Dunes Park. When I was a child my family had a cabin at the top of that dune, up two very long flights of stairs from the beach. The cabin was primitive—no electricity, no running water. To the front of the living area, great windows looked out over Lake Michigan. The cabin was at the very foot of the lake, and I loved to watch storms roll down the lake and stir up the waters on our beach. My mom taught us to enjoy a storm, never to fear it, a habit I carry to this day (if there are no tornadoes). To the back of the house, windows looked out on a lovely, dense woods. The hitch was that the outhouse was down a small hill in those woods—a perilous journey in the night.

For refrigeration, we had a cold box on a pulley. Once a week, the iceman cometh—bringing a great block of ice which went down the hole first and then the box was lowered on top of it. Mom knew to put milk on the bottom shelf, closest to the ice. I can’t even remember what Mom cooked on before we got bottled gas. I do remember that she washed dishes in cistern water and then rinsed them in scalding water she’d boiled on some sort of stove. There was a pot-bellied stove in the living area for warmth. At night, we read by kerosene lamps, with Dad always warning us to turn the light down lest we burn the mantel. The dim light was hard to read by, and we went to bed early. I should also mention that the closest we could drive to the cabin was about a mile. We had to pack food and groceries in on our backs, often in old army duffle bags. You could go down the beach—and for the first trip when we arrived each summer, we sometimes had so much to carry we hired the park Jeep to drive that mile. But we preferred the woods—we parked at a shelter house, under a tree, and hiked in over a long bridge across the swamp and then up and down sandy paths. The woods were always cool.  That hike was also perilous at night, and at least once Dad stopped us while a skunk made its leisurely way across the path.

I usually took a friend with me when we went there. We thought it was heaven—days spent on the beach, hiking through the woods, playing Monopoly. Food tasted better there than anywhere else. We came back to Chicago tanned and healthy and happy.

My safe place, where I go now, was a crop-out on the path to friends’ cabin, below the second set of stairs. I can remember sitting there, staring out over the lake, my dog—a wild collie mix named Timmy—by my side. I could pull up a blade of dune grass and pull it through my teeth. There was usually at least a small breeze, though I always enjoyed the strong wind of a storm. I could angle my vision to the right and look across the lake at sunset to see Chicago with the setting sun behind it. The sun would be a bright orange globe, and the tall buildings of Chicago, not even toothpick size. Behind me, sometimes, my dad would be taking sunset pictures. When he died, he had a closet full of those old-fashioned slides, mostly sunsets or flowers from his gardens.

I have a new safe place, and it’s a fine one, though it doesn’t come with the same memories. My son Colin and his family live on either the smallest lake or biggest tank in Tomball, Texas. There is a patio, with benches and chairs looking out over the water and an arboretum overhead (that could easily drop bugs in your wine). We go there sometimes in the evening, with an after-dinner wine and sit in quiet peace.

So maybe it’s water that makes a safe place for me. I am not a swimmer, though I swam when young. Still I was never completely comfortable in the water. I’ve always said I do not want to be in it or on it, but I love to look at it.

How about your safe place?