"Unsettled" Chapter 10A

The Difference Between Safe and Secure

As we drove the Plymouth out to the property to help dig the well that Saturday in June 1970, Jimmy stood on the front bench seat between Mom and me. Sort of like the kid in this ad but without the "safety belt." Things were different then. The year 1965 was the first to see front seat belts as standard equipment in cars. Our '65 Plymouth Fury had them, but like most Americans we tucked those annoying straps and buckles deep down in the crack of the seat (where bobby pins and lost lifesavers and the grit of life collected).

We'd been hearing the song "Buckle up for Safety" on TV for years, but seat belts remained optional until fourteen years later when "Click it or Ticket" became law.

As for a car seat, Jim had outgrown his perch. It was about the size of a shoe box that loosely hooked over the backrest of the front seat. These child seats of the 50's and 60's were not protective in the least, but they did help millions of toddlers see over dashboards (so as not to be outdone by the kid stretched out on the "shelf" of the car's back window). Jimmy didn't mind standing. Like every other kid at the time, he knew he was "safe" because his Mom's hand slapped him in the chest at every sudden stop and sharp turn.

I include these thoughts not because they shed light on the well we were digging but because they help us remember the easily forgotten context of a different time, a time when an entire generation was blinded by both optimism and individual responsibility. Optimism in that they worried less about the "what ifs" of life. Responsibility in that they considered it their personal duty to be a safe as possible and not to blame others when accidents happened. It was a time when people did not always do the "smart thing," but they took responsibility for their own actions and were more likely to accept natural consequences of bad choices.

Today's generation not only passes the buck for their own stupidity... they try to make a buck (in law suits) by blaming the government or corporate America for not preventing life's mishaps and tragedies. Hence, McDonalds gets sued when a Stella Liebeck spills hot coffee in her lap; John Deere gets sued when a man loses his hand while he and his neighbor tried using his lawn mower to trim the top of the hedge between their yards; and Wal-Mart gets sued when thousands of individual human beings care less about the man they're stepping on than the fact that they're stepping up to flat-screen HD TV.

So the fact that my two-year-old brother stood legally beside me on the front seat as we drove to the property, as stupid as that then-common practice was, sums up the difference between being safe and feeling secure. Being loved by unselfish parents who put family ahead of personal bliss is about as secure as any kid could hope to feel.

For all the improvements in safety that have come in the decades since that Saturday in 1970, and for all the millions paid in tort cases, we still live in a fallen, broken world that is as unsafe as ever. As much as man thinks it can control everything from crabgrass to the climate itself, the truth is... theologically speaking, man is not in control at all, nor can it fix what is most broken about us since the fall. Now back to the story...

This photo was taken the fall after the well was finished, but I included it here to show sweet little Jimmy and the two-track entrance to the property that would someday be our home.

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Mom put her hand against Jimmy's chest as she stepped on the break to turn into the long winding two-track road that disappeared into our wooded property. Half way to the barn we saw the site of the well, surrounded by six 4-foot cement crocks and one crock that was half way into the earth. There was a pile of pea gravel about five feet from the half crock. Dad was standing inside it, and Paul and Dave stood on the outside with two five-gallon plastic buckets. Dave took the full bucket from Dad's hand while Paul handed him the empty one.

Mom beeped the horn as we idled past. Paul and Dave looked happy to see us but did not wave, a sign they were ready for a break. Dad's back was to us, he glanced over his shoulder, threw a half-wave in the air, and kept digging.

We continued up the bend in the drive to the open barn doors where Mom started setting the table for lunch. Funny thing about that table in the barn. I’ve written about it at length before. It was the Duncan Phyfe that Dad bought second-hand for Mom their first Christmas back in 1951.

They'd lugged that table with them to half a dozen homes, but they never did buy chairs for it, and in Roseville it ended up down in the basement where one day one of the “banana peel” legs snapped off and rather than try to fix the wobbly thing, Dad took it to the barn, pulled off the broken pedestal, and nailed four two-by-eights to the corners for legs. On Saturdays, it doubled as a work bench and a dinner table, but it finally had a family around it.

I ran from the barn to the well site to see how things were going. Dad was just climbing out of the crock when I got there.

“Let’s eat.” He announced. Dave and Paul hurried to the barn.

“How’s it going?” I asked, looking into the crock. “Did it take all morning to get this half in?”

“No. that took only an hour or so. First we had to survey to know exactly where to dig.”

“You mean to know where you’d find water?” I asked.

“No. To know make sure the well will be right under the stairway of the house.” He smiled.

I looked around. We were standing in a clearing we had made the winter before between the barn and a gradual hill. A chunk of that slope had been excavated with the tractor. I did not know it but this lower grade would someday be the basement of our house. In fact, we were standing on sandy soil that would someday be under Mom's laundry room. I still couldn't picture a house there, but Dad saw the whole thing, knew where everything was going to be, and it would all be built around this well.